Outliers and Anecdotes: Why epublishing articles drive me crazy

When The Appendix podcast (which I run, along with Sarah Eden and Marion Jensen) did its first episode about ebooks, I declared that I was sick of hearing about them. It seems that another dozen articles pop up every day, and very few of them have anything meaningful to say. (Note: since I initially said that on the podcast, just about every episode mentions ebooks in one way or another. So I'm a hypocrite.)

I'm skeptical about epublishing, for lots and lots of reasons. I'm not saying that no one should dive into it, but rather just saying that a healthy dose of realism is in order.

I don't intend this blog to be comprehensive, and it's certainly not a Should-I-or-Shouldn't-I? guide to epublishing. Instead, I just want to make a couple of points that ought to be obvious:

Without further ado:

Let's define a couple of statistical terms, and a couple of logical fallacies, and then talk about how they knock down 90% of epublishing arguments.

• Outlier: an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. In our present situation, I think we can call Amanda Hocking and JA Konrath outliers. We can also call JK Rowling, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown outliers. They are data points that are significantly different from the vast majority of other data points.
• Availability heuristic: the idea that because you can think of an example of something, it must be significant. For example, "There are three new thai places near my house--it's got to be fastest growing trend in restaurants" or "That guy on the news was attacked by a bear, so bear attacks on humans must be commonplace" or "An author turned down a huge advance to epublish instead, so epublishing must be really better than traditional publishing."
• Anecdotal evidence: evidence, which may or may not be verifiable, which is used to support a conclusion that does not follow from it. "I didn't get a job until January. The American economy must be better this year." or "I stopped getting asthma attacks after I stopped eating Chex Mix. Chex Mix must cause asthma" or "I'd buy five times as many books as I currently do if they only cost $2.99. Therefore, lowering the price will significantly increase volume sold across the country."

If you can't guess my point, it's this: statistical conclusions cannot be based on outliers or anecdotal evidence. It may be 100% true that Chex Mix causes asthma, but the FDA shouldn't ban Chex Mix because of a single point of data. Likewise, it may be true that Hocking's success is replicable, but you shouldn't go into epublishing just because you heard her story. That makes as much sense as going into computer science because you expect to get Bill Gates' salary, or taking up basketball because you really want a mansion like Kobe Bryant's.

Notice: I'm not saying "you shouldn't pursue great success." What I'm saying is this: don't expect the outlier. Expect the trend.

So, in epublishing, what's the trend? I'm not asking what the hype is--I'm asking what the hard numbers are. How many epublished authors are making decent money? The answer is... who knows? A few? Some? Lots? Not sure?

What does that mean? The market is changing, and while great successes has occurred (Hocking and Konrath, for example), if we're being honest we really have no idea what the trend will be. We can make hypotheses about it. We make assumptions about success based on pricing and distribution models. But what we cannot say is "there is evidence to show that epublishing is better for authors than traditional publishing". So stop it, internet.

This all leads into my long-standing worry about epublishing, which is not that epublishing is bad or wrong, but that people are getting into it for the wrong reasons. Publishing is really hard, but epublishing looks so easy--no wonder aspiring authors are excited about it! But desperation is the WRONG reason to epublish. Rejection letters are the WRONG reason to epublish. Hopes for Hocking-style paychecks are the WRONG reason to get into epublishing.

What's the right reason? Because you've sat down and worked out a business plan, with realistic expectations, and you've fully weighed all your options.

Wait--a business plan!? But I'm an author!

Remember back before everyone freaked out about epublishing, how you used to see article after article warning people about the perils of self-publishing? Well, epublishing is self-publishing. Sure, you have a better distribution method, fewer startup costs (but not NO startup costs), and maybe a little less stigma, but it's still the same beast. When you go self-pub or e-pub, you're effectively starting your own micropublishing company. All the pitfalls that seemed so daunting for decades--managing your own marketing, editing, accounting, graphic design, etc--now seem to be glossed over in a wave of hype.

I guess my conclusion is this: if you want to epublish, then do it. But be skeptical of the hype (because 98% of it talks about outliers, not trends), get into it for the right reasons, and have a solid business plan before you do it.