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Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Fifty Shades of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - Less Wrong Discussion
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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."
In the publishing industry, it is emphatically not the case that you can sell millions of books from a random unknown author with a major marketing campaign. It's nearly impossible to replicate that success even with an amazing book!
For all its flaws (and it has many), Fifty Shades had something that the market was ready for. Literary financial successes like this happen only a couple times a decade.
To my mind the counter is: if a big marketing campaign alone is enough to sell books, why bother with the rest of it? Couldn't you form a more competitive publisher by accepting scripts at random and not bothering with editing?
People could notice the pattern. "Oh, another novel by Random Script Publisher. No, thanks!"
You could keep changing the name of your company, though.
Well, even the best marketing campaign couldn't make a bestseller out of a book that was so low-quality that virtually everyone who read it would hate it and consider it total garbage. I think you underestimate how bad the typical manuscript really is.
Yeah, even if the publisher would know the numbers are misleading, it would still be a sensible strategy to pretend to believe them. It would be a bet that no one will be interested in the mathematical details, maybe except for when it will be already too late.