Transcript
I have a question. How is every author the New York bestselling author? Hey, Lisa, let's talk cognitive science. Plus a cool study that analyzed the New York Times bestseller list. So first, there are two main cognitive biases that are at work here. Those are like shortcuts your brain takes when thinking that probably give you a survival advantage but you don't have time to think, but can mislead you in others. I love talking about them because I'm a huge nerd for brain hacking. The first one is called sampling bias. It's when your brain thinks that what you see is a good representative sample of all the other things like it. you see a TikTok trend and it seems like it's doing really well because you see all these videos with crazy views. So you make a new video using the same trend and it completely flops. Oh, maybe not for you, but it does for the rest of us. Well, it could be that for every thousand videos that people make with the trend, only one makes it to the for you page. But you see those. Now imagine that the TikTok algorithm is like a bookstore display case. Every year there are roughly 100,000 books published in the US, but only around 500 make the New York Times bestseller list. Across all the lists. But it could easily be that those viral books end up being one in four of the books that you see at the bookstore, especially if you don't go into the back, which you should because it's way more fun. Anyway, that brings us to the next bias called the availability heuristic, where you think something is way more common just because examples of it come easily to mind. When you made that video, you probably thought about the New York Times bestseller list, which then brought to mind all the books that you've seen that mention it. But thinking about it doesn't bring to mind all the many more books that you've seen in your life that don't mention the bestseller list. I bet if you got up and looked at your bookshelf right now, York Times bestsellers. Which brings us to the final trick that marketers use. Because most books that you see mentioning the list aren't actually bestsellers themselves, they say, buy a New York Times bestselling author. And the initial editions of books obviously can't mention the fact that they're bestsellers because they don't know that yet. This study analyzed eight years of data from the New York Times bestseller list. And they found that fiction authors with a New York Times bestseller typically published around 10 books in that period, with some crazy outliers like James Patterson who published over 90. But only roughly half of those 10 make the list. And the nonfiction, are way more likely to have the one book and be done, but probably have multiple printings of it. There's a lot more cool statistics in this study, but we can cover them in another video if you guys want.
Additional notes
#stitch with @Ellysa Yagho🐦 why there arent as many New York, best selling books and authors as there seem to be #Science #Authors #booktok #newyorktimes
References
- EPJ Data Science study analyzing the New York Times Best Seller list. DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0135-y.
- Wikipedia background link from source draft.