On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile | Page 4

identify what it was that caused the producer to choose our future star
for a part in his film rather than one of the 399 other candidates; and we
would be likely to find, Taleb avers, that the producer's choice had
nothing to do with 'talent', however defined. Or, to put it another way,
we would find that many of the rejected applicants had just as much
talent as the future star.
An example: Harry Potter
Just in case you don't know the much-told story, it is worth recording

that the first Harry Potter book was rejected by every major publisher
in London (some sources say as many as 20); and when it was
eventually bought by Bloomsbury, the one publisher who showed the
smallest degree of interest, they paid but a small sum of money for it
(sources say between £2,000 and £3,000). Clearly, none of the 'experts'
who read the book in manuscript, and rejected it, had the slightest
inkling of the massive money-making machine which they held in their
hands.
Implications
The Harry Potter case is an all-too-typical example of the failure to
identify a black swan at an early stage. And yet it is highly desirable to
identify them, if possible, because of their massive power to generate
income. The black swans dominate their competitors in a way which
distorts the rewards available: they are part of, and may be the cause of,
a winner-take-all mechanism.
In the book world, what this means is that bestsellers tend to become
massive, while sales of 'ordinary' books are minuscule. It is not that
bestsellers sell twice as many copies as the average novel: they sell
hundreds of times as many.
This circumstance is observable in most of the arts: in other words, you
are either overwhelmingly successful, in terms of money, fame, and
reputation, or you are nothing.
Interestingly, the same clustering effect can be found in other contexts,
outside the arts: similar concentrations can be found in the
academic-citation system, and it doesn't matter whether the academic
field is physics or social science.
It is also important to note that the concentration effect becomes more
marked, not less, as the size of the pool of works on offer increases.
The more product that is available, the more the big hits dominate and
stand out.
How black swans come about

The appearance of a black swan is influenced by, among other factors,
the 'tipping-point mechanism'. Contagious diseases spread furiously
above a certain minimum level (the tipping point), but die down below
that level.
In the arts, the mechanisms of contagion are accelerated by the media,
and, of course, by word-of-mouth recommendation. Thomas Gilbert
and his colleagues at the University of California have used some
statistical methods which are normally applied to phenomena such as
the spread of diseases, or earthquake aftershocks, in order to analyse
the spread of information about books. They distinguish between
exonogous (external) and endogonous (internal) stimuli. Publishers use
exonogous methods of generating awareness of a book when they give
it a large advertising budget; endogonous shock is what occurs through
one person recommending the book to another.
Both exonogous and endogonous stimuli play a part in turning ugly
ducklings into black swans. A large advertising budget may generate
some initial awareness of the product, but it does not inevitably create a
black swan; it may evoke nothing more than yawns. Endogonous
effects, by contrast, are absolutely essential to the emergence of a black
swan, whether it has a large publicity budget or not, and they cannot
always be created, no matter how much money is spent; they either
occur spontaneously, or they don't.
Taleb's principal conclusion about the black-swan phenomenon in the
arts is that the process is 'far less fair than it seems to participants'. The
randomness of the system is greatly underestimated. Furthermore,
people involved in the arts tend to suffer from overconfidence, and
overestimate the chances of their own success. This, believe me, is
particularly dangerous for writers, but it can also be catastrophic for
publishers who commit massive resources to books which flop.
Example: the Dorling Kindersley collapse which occurred as a result of
overprinting Star Warsbooks. Two observers reaching the same
conclusion One of the reasons why I find Taleb's paper on black swans
in the arts so intriguing is that it echoes, with added scientific and
intellectual underpinning, my own conclusions, reached earlier and

independently. My views on the 'secret of success' for writers were set
out in Chapter 9 of The Truth about Writing: there I argued that success
for writers is determined by circumstance.
Circumstance, I said, is a factor which some might call chance, fate,
luck, serendipity, or karma. But the true definition of circumstance, for
my purposes, iseverything that you cannot control, or even influence.
Here is