Fifty Shades of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

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)?

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.

Interesting approach, but I think this is a severe underestimate because you don't take into account censoring, the two alternate sources of readers she had before she published the book, and inferring readership from reviews gives a radically different conclusion.

To quote from one of your links:

I have a copy of it ['Master of the Universe'], but the original has been removed--so it is hard to reconstruct how the community responded to the book. It was released serially, and I believe it had over 37K reviews when it was taken down for its ffnet terms of service violations (they don't allow explicit content, although this rule is widely violated and unenforced). It then moved on to the author's own website. But reviews represent only a fraction in readership--it varies, but maybe only 1 in 10 readers review--but that was spread out over 100 chapters, and people tend to review regularly. Authors themselves can see all these stats, but readers can't.

Master of the Universe also had a post on Twilighted, another big fanfiction site. This site is by application only, and it features lots of interaction with authors. So, the reality is, we'll likely never know for sure how many readers it had--but certainly tens if not hundreds of thousands. It was a huge story.

So there's some problems here: the FF.net data is severely censored by the takedown; the FF.net review data seems to be inconsistent with your estimated total readership (every single reader would have to leave 2 reviews to make 16k readers match 37k reviews!); and it was 1 of 3 sources of traffic.

Actually, the 37k review figure itself seems to be a severe underestimate; http://twilightcupcake.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/fanfic-friday-master-of-the-universe/ is a post from when 'Master of the Universe' was still available on FF.net, and the author comments:

This story has over 40,000 reviews!...Happy reading, it’s on chapter 70 and worth every minute of it.

So, if the story had >100 chapters and it had >40k reviews by chapter 70, then on chapter 100 its review count would look more like >57k than >37k. At 120 chapters, it'd be >69k. (EDIT: apparently it was actually 110 chapters? Close enough, I'm not going to revise all the numbers.)

(It's hard to be more precise as it seems all the relevant sites have been censored from the Internet Archive, and the people with copies apparently didn't bother to dump the raw FF.net pages such as all the reviews.)

How many readers does >69k reviews translate into?

Now, as it happens, I earlier did some FF.net review analysis for MoR; the median user who ever left a review on MoR did so only once (which is consistent with your estimated attrition of ~50% completers) and the mean of reviews per user is 2.7. So that lets me estimate how many reviewers there we, given the total # of reviews, which gives me an estimated number of reviewers being >25.3k (divide by 3).

The rule of thumb seems to be that <10% of readers will ever leave a review (you could probably get a better number with Fimfiction.net analytics but I don't know how well that would compare to Twilight fics on FF.net, especially if, as you say, the more awful the story the more people complete it), so to get total readers I multiply by 10 to get >253k.

Then for complete readers, following your estimated 50% attrition, that's >127k readers - on FF.net.

If the reads on her site and then 'Twilighted' were comparable (and remember, the FF.net figures are heavily right-censored due to the takedown, and it didn't have as much chance to benefit from developing buzz & word of mouth), then multiply by 3 to get >381k complete readers.

And >381k completers is very different from your estimated >4k; it does not tell the story you tell. Given all this, it seems like the title is unwarranted and this does not demonstrate the irrationality and randomness of media markets the same way as experiments like the 2006 study "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market" and Salganik & Watts 2009 do.

(A good try overall, but you probably should've read your sources more carefully and done a little more homework before trying to use it as a case study of such claims.)

EDIT: see also the comments by a Twilight fanficer excerpted in http://lesswrong.com/lw/kl3/fifty_shades_of_selffulfilling_prophecy/b61d ; particularly note the higher estimate of how many millions of page views top-tier Twilight fics got, the calculated marketing by the author and reuse of the original fans to boost the book, and what the auction revenues imply about number of fans.

for i in `ls hpmor*`; do
    echo $i;
    perl -pi -e "s#<a href='/u/\d+/.+?'>(.+?)</a>.+#\nQZW USER=\$1#" $i;
    grep "^QZW USER" $i >> u;
done;
sort -u u > u.uniq; wc u*

The title's a lot funnier if you s/as/of/.

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.

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 time by picking a random manuscript and advertising heavily. It "Just" isn't possible to achieve such extreme results with 'almost any book'.

Moreover, the most important part of marketing is understanding what product the market will be easily persuaded that it wants. In this case they chose a story that takes a particular kind of wish fulfillment power fantasy had by a huge audience and expresses it in a pure and blatant form. This is not something that the publishers were not familiar with.

+1 for excellence in interesting original research!

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 ultimately affected (some of which have never actually read the story, like myself). I live in Australia and from my perspective the book was never marketed as "read by millions online first as a fan fiction and now published as a big, rock-hard book".

It was the content of the story and how that resonated within society which ultimately lead to it being so huge. The X-Factor, you see it in all facets of the entertainment industry niches (I know I work in the industry). You may even find that if 50 shades of gray were released 10 years ago that it would never have gained such acclaim at all because we as a society may not have been so engaged with it's content.

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.

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?