The book industry is built on hunches. The problem with hunches is that they claim to be predictive. Studies show that they are not, and “even experts are terrible at prediction.”
Hunches can work in an environment that’s fairly stable and static. What worked before will work again, because the rules are roughly the same. In environments that are unstable, hunches lose their power.
Today’s book industry is churning, searching for a new equilibrium in the Shift to Digital. The rules have changed, and have touched almost every link in the value chain. From which author earns a contract, to book design and packaging, to distribution and marketing, down to which books get featured and discovered—decisions are all based largely on hunches.
What worked before will work again. This is repeated over and over again, accepted as an industry mantra. The archetype of the whole system is the rarefied Book Editor, relying on years of experience to curate only the best authors—a Gatekeeper to take care of you and protect you from bad content.
Here’s the problem. The Gatekeeper is Guessing. The guesses are less and less reliable in an environment that’s thrashing. Predictions are based on an environment that is in the past. Hunches don’t help much.
What’s the answer? Data. It doesn’t solve everything; there are lots of fallacies and biases around data and their interpretation. But done properly, data provide a much more accurate, real-time reading of the conditions of a changing environment.
The only data that are tracked with any consistency are sales data. It’s an important metric—ask any author. But sales data is an outcome, not a predictor. What might build or contribute to a sales curve? They don’t know. They guess.
You should go in with a hypothesis, and then test it with scientific rigor. You have to set the proper parameters to collect meaningful data, and then remove confirmation bias when reading the results. You have to accept what’s presented to you, and not try to hear what you want to hear.
Then iterate. An environment in flux is going to give you different readings. Set a baseline, and a process by which you can get consistent readings.
Can you be predictive now? The data is not going to tell you the whole story. But won’t you feel a lot better making an important business decision when you have the clarity of data layered on top of your hunches and experience?
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For more on the pitfalls of prediction and the “Four Villains of Decision Making,” check out Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip & Dan Heath (Crown Business, 2013). Aaron Morton offers a nice summary on The Confidence Lounge.
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This article was originally published on Libboo.com. For a collection of my articles on Libboo.com, please see: http://bit.ly/libboo-boezi.