(not sure where your 520 number is coming from).

10 slots on a list times 52 weeks in a year. While the other issues you mention are relevant, they are at least somewhat balanced by there being more than one best seller list in existence, many with a smaller pool of candidates than the NYT list.

Probably close to 1:1000 after you filter out most of the obvious crap that gets submitted. Maybe these are worthwhile odds for you, I don't know. If so, good luck, you'll need it.

Fiction vs. non-fiction makes a huge difference in luck vs. skill.

For non-fiction, the relevant skill of course is marketing, not writing. Where "marketing" includes such subskills as defining a topic and/or title that people will actually buy, and planning how to market the book before spending time on actually writing it. (Tim Ferriss, for example, determined the title of "The Four-Hour Workweek" by empirical testing using Google Adwords.)

Note too that professional authors do not simply write books and send them to publishers; they write proposals... which to be accepted generally require evidence of the aforementioned marketing work.

(All this being said, I have zero expertise in the fiction book business; it may be that there are more ways to convert luck to skill than I am aware of in that department as well. Certainly there are ways to manipulate sales there, build a brand, accumulate a following, etc.)

I already mentioned a fellow LWer who I expect to have another bestseller soon; I feel confident predicting it because I know his marketing skill, available endorsement sources, personal platform, and how hard he's been working the tour circuit while the book was still in pre-sales. I will be very surprised if the book doesn't attain "bestseller" status on at least one bestseller list soon.

(Do remember that "bestseller" does not automatically equal "cultural phenomenon". There are thousands of "bestsellers" in the US alone each year, and most of them are books you have never, ever heard of, and quite possibly never will.)

Anyway, one of the most relevant factors in determining an author's marketing strength is the size of their "platform", and it's relevant for both fiction and non-fiction. A platform is basically how many people the author can reach, as far as personal influence to purchase. The term comes from the notion of platform speaking, i.e., influence by getting up on stage and talking to people. So a person who is on a lecture circuit, or better yet has their own TV or radio show, or fan club, etc., has more built-in bestseller power than someone who does not. Email lists, podcast subscribers, forum followers... any number of such things count.

Platform size is relevant because really, this is the main group of people who will buy the book, i.e., people who have become fans of the author, even if they are fans for some reason unrelated to writing. Most books are scarcely advertised at all, and are thus almost entirely dependent on the author to create demand. (Which is why an existing platform and willingness to work the publicity circuit are part of publishers' acceptance criteria.)

So... if somebody doesn't know and take into consideration at least as much information about book sales as I have listed above, they would indeed require a great deal of luck to be successful. OTOH, somebody like Eliezer or the other LW author I mentioned (who have large platforms of fans who they can easily reach) can have bestsellers with a lot less luck required, assuming the topic is one that has appeal to their platform. Indeed, with a sufficiently large platform, one can have a bestseller on some lists (e.g. some of Amazon's lists) simply by co-ordinating the timing of fans' purchases.

the USA hits >300k new books a year and a global total of >2.2m new books a year

So, in any given market for books, there are a lot less than a million published each year. 300k/520 opportunities to be a bestseller = better than 1:1000 odds.

Note that an "international bestseller" doesn't mean a book is in the top worldwide, it means that it was a bestseller in more than one country. So nobody's trying to rank out of the 2.2m/year.

one in a million success rate

I'm not sure I know where you're getting this from. Aren't there a lot fewer than a million books published each year?

A lot depends on what the definition of "best seller" is. Are we talking about NYT best seller? How many weeks on the list? There are 52 weeks in the year and 10 slots on the list for each of fiction and nonfiction.

There's at least one LW member whose first nonfiction book was an international bestseller, and I'd say it's pretty likely that his second (released this month) will do the same.

I think that what your Twilight/Fifty Shades examples are referring to would be more accurately described as "cultural phenomena", rather than mere bestsellers. Bestsellers happen every week.

What sort of hours are you logging on your keyboard these days?

I spend all day at my computer, but not all of every day is spent typing. One or two days a week I program most of the day, and a few weeks ago I spent part of a week writing about 40 pages of raw text, and then editing and desktop-publishing it into a 50 page ebook.

could I impose on you to narrow down which books you found helpful, please?

I found the Egoscue Method (his 1993 book) to be most informative and motivational regarding the actual functional anatomy. Some of his newer works have shorter sequences of exercises to accomplish similar goals, but the total time difference isn't substantial -- a few minutes shaved off an hour's work. For whatever reason, I never found Pain-Free At Your PC very motivating to me personally to do the routines in it, though I did try some of the exercises.

As someone who has suffered considerable wrist pain in the past, I would suggest you check out the works of Pete Egoscue, whose exercise methods were a lifesaver for me.

If you are in as bad a shape as I was, you'll likely have to spend many hours a week to recover, but I've found maintenance to be much easier; many months I don't even spend an hour on it, even though I spend even more time on my keyboard than ever. (But the initial recovery process was hellish, I don't mind telling you. Mostly because I hated spending so much time on the exercises, but also because of the existing pain and fear of pain on my part.)

Even so, given the choice between even the best voice recognition and being able to type without pain, I choose the latter.

I think maybe you meant to link this, which is the page that has the actual disfluency discussion.

This is known as the halting problem, and we don’t know how to build any machine that could solve it.

Humans can't "solve" it either, in that sense. We can pattern-recognize that some programs will halt or not halt, but there exist huge spaces of programs in between where we would be just as helpless to give a yes or no answer as any computer program.

I'm not sure what this should be considered evidence of, but somehow it seems relevant. ;-)

The naive application of that is to go around thinking "I shouldn't be thinking about 'should' all the time! I should stop doing that! I'm not thinking like I should!".

I have not found that this actually helps.

As Jamie Zawinski might put it, "Now you have two problems."

my model of how people work has them understanding the difference between "ought" and "expected" most of the time

Understanding it and applying it are two different things, in the same way that knowing about a bias doesn't stop you from exhibiting it.

People tend to obsess over things that "shouldn't have" happened -- a mistake they made, an embarrassing situation, something infuriating that somebody else did, or some impending but inevitable life change. They fret and scheme and worry and just can't seem to get it out of their mind, even if they want to.

This behavior is generally caused by the alief that the thing "should not" have happened that way, or that the upcoming thing should not happen, or that they "should have done better", or some other "should" belief. Byron Katie's book is about a method of surfacing and questioning these aliefs, so as to stop fretting over what can't be changed, thus to focus on what can. As Quirrelmort put it:

"Amateur foolisshnesss."

"Pardon? " hissed Harry.

"You ssee misstake, think of undoing, ssetting time back to sstart. Yet not even with hourglasss can time be undone. Musst move forward insstead."

While Byron Katie and Quirrelmort would disagree on quite a few things, this is one thing they have in common.

(Interestingly, her book "I need your love; is that true?" is very Quirrelmortish in the sense of highlighting how much people's seeming goodness or altruism is driven by self-centeredness -- but it's a book about how to stop doing that yourself, not using other people's actions as a way to justify doing more of it. Indeed, it's about being able to have compassion for the misguided or self-centered actions of others, not contempt ala Quirrelmort. Hm. Actually, the more I think about it, the more she seems like a true opposite to Quirrelmort, in a way that neither Harry nor Dumbledore are. If she were in-world, she'd be sort of like a non-naive McGonagall crossed with a Dumbledore who could not be made to despair or blinded by grief or regret or vengeance.)