So what actually happened was that a moderately-popular fanfiction that had been read by a few thousand people was reported on in a way that misled publishers into thinking that it had millions of readers, when really, it just had an unusually large number of chapters.
Trying to prove that someone acted stupidly, when their allegedly dumb actions were followed by tremendous success, generally makes for a weak case, even if you're right. You take on the burden of showing how their success happened in spite of their stupid strategy.
You attempt to meet this burden here: "They put a major marketing campaign behind it. And since 40% of readers will finish anything, absolutely anything, that they have started reading, they sold millions of copies." But this logic is far from tight. You showed that "enough people finish reading whatever they start", but what you really need is "enough people buy whatever is heavily marketed."
Your argument that the publishers' strategy was stupid would be stronger if you found a similar case where the publishers bet big on the same strategy but lost.
As Eliezer once wrote, "I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong."
She replied,
The "millions" numbers I had were not public; I had them from screenshots from various writers...Ff.net tallies reads but doesn't--unlike Wattpad or AO3--make them public.
I don't understand what this means. How can she have screenshots of E.L. James's FF.net official view statistics, if FF.net does not make the numbers public? Did James hand them out freely to 'various writers'?
Or, do you/her mean 'I have FF.net statistics from various random other Twilight fanfic authors'? That's interesting, I suppose, but I'm not sure what to make of that.
Yes, maybe the way FF.net tracks page views implies that 1 million page views translates to perhaps 4k complete readers of that fic, and so if we assume 'Master of the Universe' had 1m page views in total and FF.net was the only source for it, then it had 4k complete readers before it was published as the book 50 Shades of Grey. OK, but why would we assume that? The whole point is that it was an amazingly popular breakout best-selling phenomenon practically without precedent, so why would we think its readership was just like the other relatively popular Twilight fanfics (none of which became NYT bestselling books)?
...That's the colloquial meaning. To do that with a real regular-expression operation you'd also want terms to match word boundaries; ignoring those to do something foft hof nofty side effects.
Interesting analysis, and somewhat surprising.
The number of people who finish a multi-chapter fan-fiction is, surprisingly, almost always 40-60% of the number who clicked on the first chapter, with the very best reaching 60%, and the misspelled, grammar-free, plot-free, alphabet-soup-vomit of ten-year-olds retaining about 40%.
Huh, that's unexpected.
perhaps 4,000 readers finished it.
I understand the calculation, but it seems very low, are you sure you haven't missed anything?
So what actually happened was that a moderately-popular fanfiction that had been read by a few thousand people was reported on in a way that misled publishers into thinking that it had millions of readers, when really, it just had an unusually large number of chapters.
If this was enough to get published, Worm would have been by now (not a fanfic, much better story, more readers, active online discussion and fanfic groups, large enough to be serialized into 10+ volumes). Yet from what I understand Wildbow has not had a single editor/publisher approach him yet.
I suspect that, while an inflated number of readers might bring a story to the attention of a decision maker in the publishing business, it is but one of many many factors going into a major decision like publishing a manuscript. 50SoG was simply lucky to get picked up, and lucky to do well. So the "self-fulfilling prophesy" bit is a big stretch.
I didn't really intend to discuss this any further (because it's not like I care in the least about Twilight or 50 Shades of Gray qua Twilight/50SoG), but a random link on Reddit turned out to be relevant and give some more of the backstory, which if accurate explains a lot: http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/2byz2l/many_women_do_not_agree_with_me_on_this_subject/cjaqvmi
......FSOG got a shitload of karma. Ask me how! Well, the short of it: Erika [Leonard James / E.L. James] is a marketing professional. The long of it:
- Erika made reposts of already-proven-popular content
- Erika posted short updates to the story very frequently, keeping it at the top of the story search list
- Since people could give 'karma' (reviews) for every single chapter/update, the more chapters a story had, the more karma it had
FSOG had 80 [edit: was actually 110] chapters. That means that a lot of people actually reviewed that fucking thing EIGHTY times. So even if she had only 100 super loyal readers, that's 8,000 [edit: actually 11,000] reviews (think upvotes). People see a story with 8,000 reviews and want to click it to see what all the fuss is about. I think it had something like 20,000 revi
This belongs in Discussion, not Main. It's barely connected to rationality at all. Is there some lesson we're supposed to take from this, besides booing or yaying various groups for their smartness or non-smartness?
Downvoted for being trivia on Main.
Just as they would have with almost any book they'd marketed as heavily.
Data point #2: Eragon, which is better known for having being written by a 15-year-old than for being an especially good book, but has gone on to sell lots of copies anyway. (According to what I've heard, it's good enough to be entertaining to young people who are new to reading epic fantasy, but it's no better than any of the other fantasy books out there.)
"The publishing giant Vintage Press saw that number and realized there was a huge, previously-unrealized demand for stories like this."
It's the "previously-unrealized demand" that I simply don't understand here. The numbers for romance novels took seconds to look up.
74.8 million people read at least one romance novel in 2008. (source: RWA Reader Survey) with an estimated $1.350 billion for 2013. If the author did indeed write 120 chapters, it shows that the author has the ability to produce for the publisher. Taken together with the above average number of online readers, I can't see how this was a case of pulling the wool over the publishers eyes so much as the publisher being particularly good at finding material for their readers.
To me, it seems the demand was being realized just fine.
This seems highly exploitable.
Anyone here want to try to use these bogus numbers to get a publisher to market their own fanfiction?
The analysis is fascinating but the conclusion (including the title) doesn't seem to follow. It would be a mistake to attribute a significant amount of the success to poor calculations by a few fanfic commentators when more standard explanations are possible.
They put a major marketing campaign behind it. And since 40% of readers will finish anything, absolutely anything, that they have started reading, they sold millions of copies. Just as they would have with almost any book they'd marketed as heavily.
You don't create the fastest selling book of all t...
I see a major flaw here that I have to point out.
The pitch to the publishers was absolutely a fabrication of true readership of the fan fiction, that is fair call. But to say that any book with the same amount of marketing would reach the same level of appeal is short sighted.
Simply, the book had the X-factor. The story was provocative, sensual, shocking and ultimately all elements contributed to it's appeal. People talked after it was published, people talked about how it effected them and that raised awareness with the millions of people who were u...
The number of people who finish a multi-chapter fan-fiction is, surprisingly, almost always 40-60% of the number who clicked on the first chapter, with the very best reaching 60%, and the misspelled, grammar-free, plot-free, alphabet-soup-vomit of ten-year-olds retaining about 40%.
That means that if you want to write a successful nonfiction book, you don't have to optimize for getting a reader to finish the book but have to optimize for the reader telling other potential readers about the book so that they also start reading.
My vague impression is that Fifty Shades of Grey is popular beyond what you would expect just given a big marketing push by a major publisher.
My vague impression is that Fifty Shades of Grey is popular beyond what you would expect just given a big marketing push by a major publisher.
It's the first BDSM soft porn book that was given a big marketing push by a major publisher. That made it "OK to read" for a large number of people who are interested in what they think of as "kinky sex" but do not allow themselves to actually go and read obvious porn.
Very interesting. I'll think about writing fan-fiction and milking the dying cash cow that was traditional publishing but probably won't because my conscience holds me back from decieving them.
What does it mean for people to be looking for bad stories? Isn't the most obvious metric for quality how much it satisfies people's desires? Does your metric depend on the author's state of mind (e.g. if people enjoy a book, but for reasons other than what the author intended, that makes it a "bad" book)? Are you appealing to some abstract Form of what literature Should Be?
The official story: "Fifty Shades of Grey" was a Twilight fan-fiction that had over two million downloads online. The publishing giant Vintage Press saw that number and realized there was a huge, previously-unrealized demand for stories like this. They filed off the Twilight serial numbers, put it in print, marketed it like hell, and now it's sold 60 million copies.
The reality is quite different.
I spoke by email to Anne Jamison, author of "fic: Why Fan-Fiction is Taking Over the World", and the person who originally reported the "over two million hits" that has been widely reported as "over two million downloads". The number two million was much too large to be possible given the size of the fandom, so I asked her about it. She replied,
The "millions" numbers I had were not public; I had them from screenshots from various writers. The counts were from fanfiction.net which, for the Twilight fandom, remained the biggest hub--most if not all stories that were also posted at Twilighted.net and TWCS were also posted on ff.net. Ff.net tallies reads but doesn't--unlike Wattpad or AO3--make them public.
But for all the sites, read or hit counts are for every time someone clicks on the story--so if they click through the front page to get to chapter 37, that's 2 reads.
Fan-fiction is published one chapter at a time. "Fifty Shades of Grey" has 26 chapters, but when it was originally published on fanfiction.net as "Master of the Universe", it had over 100 chapters. Let's say 120.
The number of hits a person generates while reading is determined by how they read it. fanfiction.net adds 1 hit every time any page of the story is reloaded. If you go to chapter 1 and read all the way through to chapter 120 in one sitting, that's 120 hits. If you log in, see it updated, go to chapter 1, and then go from there to the new chapter, that's at least 239 hits to read the book. If you refresh the page, that's another hit. (I just verified this myself by refreshing one chapter of one story of mine 3 times on fanfiction.net, checking the stats before and after.) If you read half of one chapter one day, and log in again and finish it the next, that's at least 2 hits. If you leave it in an open tab on your computer, that's 1 hit every time you open your browser. If you reread the story, the hits double. If you click on the story each day to see if it's updated, hits go way up.
The number of people who finish a multi-chapter fan-fiction is, surprisingly, almost always 40-60% of the number who clicked on the first chapter, with the very best reaching 60%, and the misspelled, grammar-free, plot-free, alphabet-soup-vomit of ten-year-olds retaining about 40%. I've checked this on a large number of stories on fimfiction.net, which records readers per chapter based on username and so avoids double-counting. The quality of a story has very little impact on whether someone who started reading it will finish or not.1
So two million hits on a 120-chapter story means a theoretical maximum of 2000000 / 121 = 16,529 readers finished it, assuming half of all readers quit after chapter 1. More likely, given re-readings, users who always go in through chapter 1, users who quit halfway through, browser refreshes, etc., perhaps 4,000 readers finished it. That would be about as many as finished a pretty popular story on fimfiction.net. The Twilight fandom had a larger fan base, so I don't find that number at all impressive.
So what actually happened was that a moderately-popular fanfiction that had been read by a few thousand people was reported on in a way that misled publishers into thinking that it had millions of readers, when really, it just had an unusually large number of chapters. They put a major marketing campaign behind it. And since 40% of readers will finish anything, absolutely anything, that they have started reading, they sold millions of copies. Just as they would have with almost any book they'd marketed as heavily.
1. This percentage range applies only to stories found by fans through the site itself. The exceptions are not exceptionally good stories, but astonishingly bad stories--89% of readers finished this piece of crap. I think this is because people aren't looking for good stories, they're looking for the sort of thing they want to read. Some people want to read very bad stories, and such stories are easily identified from their descriptions.