This blog has a lot of (fascinating) content on writers and education, but I know some people like to cut to the chase, so I will print the summary here. But, you should read the entire blog if you want to gain deeper insight on the subject of popular writers and higher education, and the class issues that lurk just below the surface of the Indie vs Traditional publishing debate.
Summary
Summing up, when it comes to the educational attainment of
writers in the Amazon Top 100, we can say:
·
Nearly 60% had university degrees, with almost
as many having graduate degrees as bachelor’s degrees. That’s about double the level in the overall
population.
·
For
nearly a quarter of the writers in the Top 100, however, no information was
available on educational attainment.
Whether that signals a lack of degree or an unwillingness to share the
information was unclear. Since the
“unknowns” mostly wrote in the Romance genre, it may be accepted wisdom that it
is best if writers do not reveal too much on the subject. Both Trad and Indie Romance writers seemed
reluctant to disclose.
·
Female writers tended to be less educated than
male writers. That may be related to the
age of the most successful writers, which tends to skew to older age ranges,
when women were less likely to go to university than men. Given current university enrolment patterns,
we would expect women writers to eventually overtake male writers in this
regard.
·
There was some tendency for educational
attainment to be higher in older age ranges.
Again, this may be an artefact of genre (Romance writers tend to be
younger).
·
There was no strong tendency regarding the
relationship between sales rank and educational status. However, the writers in the top decile did
tend to be the most educated, and the writers in the bottom decile tended to
have the least formal education.
·
When looking at individual publishers, there was
no clear pattern, though it was interesting that Hachette skewed towards fairly
highly educated writers. Does this imply
that the Hachette/Amazon dispute has overtones of social class antagonism? It seems possible to me.
·
Overall,
Indies had somewhat lower levels of educational attainment than Trads, though
the difference was not large. However,
if we exclude “unknowns”, Trads were bimodal (many had no degree and many had
an advanced degree) compared to Indies (mostly bachelor’s degrees).
·
More highly educated writers tended to sell at
higher prince points than less educated
writers. Again, undertones of
social class distinctions seem to be present.
·
The “Other” genre had the most educated writers
(some non-fiction was in this category).
Next was Thriller/Suspense/Crime, which had quite a few writers with
advanced degrees, as did Literary Fiction, the next category. Romance followed - most of these writers
either had bachelor’s degrees or “unknown” status. Finally, Science Fiction and Fantasy came
last, though it was a relatively small category.
And now for the blog in it's entirety:
===================================================
In a series of recent blogs, I have performed some analyses on Amazon’s Top 100 Kindle eBooks of 2013. These blogs have looked at that data in various ways – specifically, the demographic and publishing characteristics of writers in the top 100, as well as their average Amazon ratings and imputed numbers of book sales and dollar revenues. Among the factors examined were:
1.
Gender (sex) of writer
2.
Age of writer.
3.
Relative position within the top 100 (by decile
and quartile)
4.
Publisher
5.
Indie vs Trad status
6.
Price Range
7.
Genre
Another item that is likely to be of great interest to
writers, publishers and readers is the educational status of writers in the
Amazon Top 100. So, we now add data on
this background characteristic to the
above list.
The reasons for analysing educational status in this context
are complicated, as is any discussion of educational status. That’s because educational status means a lot
of different things to different people.
Depending on the audience, it can be thought to signal:
·
The innate ability to learn and do complex
mental work. Obviously, these are
extremely useful attributes for a writer to possess, though the correlation
between these abilities and educational status is not complete. Many highly intelligent and creative people
don’t have degrees or even high school diplomas; conversely, not all people with advanced
credentials are necessarily all that intelligent or creative.
·
The determination to stick with a difficult task
(i.e. a course of higher education) and complete it. As we all know, this is also a very useful
attribute for a writer, who has to maintain discipline and focus during a
complicated, mentally taxing and time consuming activity. And, like most education, it is not very
handsomely remunerated during the doing of the work, though it can ultimately
pay off. As noted above, though, the
correlation is not exact. Many highly
motivated, disciplined people don’t attend or complete university for one
reason or another, while some graduates are not particularly diligent or
disciplined. Indeed, there is a feeling
among some creative people that too much formal training can inhibit
creativity, particularly in fiction.
·
Specific skill sets relevant to a job or
profession. In this case, there is
probably a reasonable expectation that people with higher levels of education
have honed their writing and research skills, both of which are extremely
useful for writers. Again, though, the
correlation between these factors and educational attainment is inexact. Many graduates are not particularly good at
written communication, while many non-graduates are. This is especially true in fiction, where the
ability to create story and character is often more highly valued than the
ability to construct an elegant sentence.
·
Social status.
People from more advantaged backgrounds are more likely to attain higher
levels of education than people from less advantaged backgrounds, for a variety
of reasons. These include money,
parental “push”, familiarity with the norms of higher education and that whole
cluster of things that we think of when we consider the notion of social
class. Publishers, and to a more limited
extent readers, may have a bias towards writers (or would-be writers) who have
more advanced educational credential, based on conscious and unconscious biases. Publishers may simply be more comfortable
with people who have degrees, since publishers themselves normally have
degrees. At the highest levels, an “old
school” mentality may be at work –they may want people who they think “fit in” and are the “right kind of
people” to be granted the privilege of publication. Readers in certain genres may share this
bias. Conversely, readers in other
genres may shy away from people that they consider to be too highly educated,
believing that they may be “talked down to” by these writers, who don’t really
share their life experiences or world view.
First, a quick note on data sources and reliability. Some 77% of the books in the Amazon Top 100
for 2013 could be linked with the author’s educational status. The data generally came from Wiki, though in
some cases the Amazon author page or the Goodreads author page was the source. Occasionally, media articles based on google
searches provided some additional insight.
Note that the fact that the data was not available didn’t
necessarily mean that the writer was or wasn’t a post-secondary graduate. In some cases, there seemed to be a
reluctance to share this information, perhaps on the assumption that readers
might feel less of a sense of identification with the writer, if they knew the
writer’s educational status. For
example, in one case the writer did not note her educational background in her
bio, but revealed it in a blog entry, where she mentioned “having an accounting
degree, of all things”. So, some writers
might have simply thought it to be not worth the risk of revealing too much
information about this subject or they may have considered irrelevant to their
writing life.In the tables that follow, note the last column, headed “Avg Educ”. This is a numeric scale variable, constructed by weighting educational status. As you can see, it is based on recent (2010) U.S. census data, showing relative earnings by educational attainment level for the population as a whole. The idea was to use average earnings as a proxy for the implied value of different educational levels, with more highly remunerated levels receiving higher weightings. These weightings are shown in the index values at the top of the chart. This gives a quick way to quantify educational levels of writers in the Amazon Top 100 in the later breakout tables (for example, by gender).
|
Weighting Scheme
|
1-HS
|
2-Some
Univ
|
3-Bach
Deg
|
4-Grad
Deg
|
99-Unkown
|
|
1.00
|
1.13
|
1.59
|
2.43
|
1.24
|
|
|
from U.S. Census
|
|||||
|
Men
|
40000
|
46000
|
64000
|
99000
|
50000
|
|
Women
|
30000
|
33000
|
47000
|
71000
|
36667
|
|
Combined avg
|
35000
|
39500
|
55500
|
85000
|
43333
|
Overall Educational Attainment Distribution
First off, the table and graph below shows the overall
educational attainment distribution of writers in the Amazon Top 100 for the
year 2013. I should note that if a
particular writer had more than one book in the top 100, he or she will be
counted more than once in the data below.
That seems fair to me, since it effectively gives more successful
writers more weight in the data, and it makes the math easy (the counts also
happen to be percentages of the total, since there are 100 titles in the
dataset).|
Count of Writer
|
Writer Educational Attainment Level
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
1-HS
|
2-Some
Univ
|
3-Bach
Deg
|
4-Grad
Deg
|
99-Unkown
|
Grand
Total
|
Avg
Educ
|
|
Total
|
7
|
13
|
32
|
25
|
23
|
100
|
1.6
|
As we can see, the majority of writers had a Bachelor’s
Degree, usually a Bachelor of Arts in fact.
However a significant number of had a graduate degree (law degrees were
fairly prominent). The numeric score of
1.6 indicates that the overall average level of attainment is almost exactly
the same as the Bachelor’s degree.
Note that for about a quarter of the writers, I could find
no reference to their educational attainment .
In these cases, I assigned them a numeric weighting mid-way between High
School Diploma and Bachelor’s degree. We
will see later that there is a definite pattern to the “Unknowns” – they are
more likely to be in the Romance genre than others, for example, and more
likely to be female than male. 
Educational Attainment by Gender
As the table below shows, females tended to have attained
somewhat lower levels of education than males, in this group. They primarily had Bachelor’s degrees, while
males were fairly evenly split between Bachelor and Graduate degrees. This is reinforced by the value of the scale
variable for females (1.5, a bit less than the 1.59 value of Bachelor’s
degrees) versus 1.9 for males (midway between 1.59 for Bachelors and 2.3 for
grad degrees). Female writers were also more likely to have not gone to university or not completed university. When looking at author bios, this seemed to be a legacy of earlier educational attainment differences between the sexes – for example, some older female writers married early in life, straight out of high school and took up writing later.
There is also a much greater tendency for female writers in this group to not reveal their educational status. As we will see later, this tended to be the case with Romance writers, who are mostly women. Whether this is a reflection of lower levels of attainment or a reluctance to disclose is unclear.
|
Count
of Writer
|
Writer Educational Attainment Level
|
|
|
||||
|
Writer Sex
|
1-HS
|
2-Some
Univ
|
3-Bach
Deg
|
4-Grad
Deg
|
99-Unkown
|
Grand
Total
|
Avg
Educ
|
|
Male
|
0
|
5
|
10
|
13
|
2
|
30
|
1.9
|
|
Female
|
7
|
8
|
22
|
12
|
21
|
70
|
1.5
|
|
Grand Total
|
7
|
13
|
32
|
25
|
23
|
100
|
1.6
|
Educational Attainment by Age Range
The line graph shows a general tendency for educational
status to increase by age range, plateauing at about 1.6 or 1.7 (Bachelor’s
level) after age 45. The younger age
groups had more of the “unknowns”, but also fewer people with high school or
incomplete university studies. The older
age groups had more graduate degree holders, but also more people without
formal credentials (a bimodal distribution).
The middle age group was dominated by Bachelor’s degree holders.
As with the gender results, this is partly related to the
genre of writers. Romance writers tend
to be younger and they are less inclined to share educational background
information. Conversely, Thriller
writers tend to be in the older age groups, and they often have advanced
degrees (especially law degrees).
|
Count of Writer
|
Writer Educational Attainment Level
|
|
|
||||
|
Writer Age Range
|
1-HS
|
2-Some
Univ
|
3-Bach
Deg
|
4-Grad
Deg
|
99-
Unkown
|
Grand
Total
|
Avg
Educ
|
|
34 or Less
|
|
|
|
|
3
|
3
|
1.2
|
|
35-44
|
|
2
|
8
|
2
|
9
|
21
|
1.5
|
|
45-54
|
1
|
1
|
18
|
8
|
8
|
36
|
1.7
|
|
55 - 64
|
4
|
3
|
4
|
6
|
1
|
18
|
1.6
|
|
65 Plus
|
2
|
7
|
2
|
9
|
2
|
22
|
1.7
|
|
Grand Total
|
7
|
13
|
32
|
25
|
23
|
100
|
1.6
|
Educational Attainment by Sales Decile and Quartile
First, a refresher on what these terms mean. A decile is one tenth of the dataset, while a
quartile is one quarter of the dataset.
So, Decile 1 is the group whose sales ranked first to tenth, Decile 2 is
the group in 11th to 20th, and so on. Similarly, Quartile 1 is the group whose
sales ranked first to twenty-fifth, and so on.
Note that because there are 100 books in the dataset, the math is easy.
As the graph below shows, there was a tendency for the
educational attainment of writers in the top quartile to be higher than the
others (somewhat above Bachelor’s level), and in the top quartile to be lower
than the others (somewhat below Bachelor’s).
The middle two quartiles came in at about the Bachelor’s degree
level (recall that corresponds to a
value of 1.59). A similar but weaker trend can be seen in the
decile chart (though it is clear that the top decile is higher than the
others).
Educational Attainment by Publisher
The table below shows the educational attainment of writers,
by publisher, sorted by education level.
The Big 6 (now Big 5 after the merger of Random House and Penguin) are
shown in orange and Indies are shown in yellow.
As you can see, there is a substantial spread in the data – some of the “small Trads” and
Big 6 head the list, but they also are in the trailing positions.
Perhaps the most interesting result is the relatively high
placement of Hachette. They are the
publisher that is currently in the forefront of the negotiations/dispute with
Amazon. The notion that they see themselves
as “guardians of literary culture” against Amazon and the Indies may be a
reflection of the implied social status differences demonstrated in the table.
It is also worth noting that the traditional publishers are
hardly monolithic in this regard. In
fact, the educational status of Indie writers is the same as Penguin and Simon
and Shuster, and higher than Harper Collins.
So, the meme that the Big 5 are holding the literary fort against less
educated Indie barbarians is an oversimplification.
|
Publisher2
|
1-HS
|
2-Some
Univ
|
3-Bach
Deg
|
4-Grad
Deg
|
99-Unkown
|
Grand
Total
|
Avg Educ
|
|
Doubleday
|
|
|
|
1
|
|
1
|
2.4
|
|
MacMillan
|
|
|
|
1
|
|
1
|
2.4
|
|
William Morrow
|
|
1
|
1
|
2.4
|
|||
|
Hachette
|
|
2
|
6
|
8
|
3
|
19
|
1.8
|
|
Random House
|
1
|
4
|
3
|
6
|
1
|
15
|
1.7
|
|
Simon & Schuster
|
1
|
|
8
|
1
|
3
|
13
|
1.5
|
|
Penguin
|
5
|
3
|
3
|
5
|
4
|
20
|
1.5
|
|
Indie
|
|
3
|
9
|
2
|
10
|
24
|
1.5
|
|
Harlequin
|
|
1
|
1
|
2
|
1.4
|
||
|
Harper Collins
|
|
|
2
|
|
2
|
4
|
1.4
|
|
Grand Total
|
7
|
13
|
32
|
25
|
23
|
100
|
1.6
|
Educational Attainment by Indie vs Trad Status
A quick definition is in order. Indie books are those that were
self-published or published by very small publishers, while Trad books were
published by one of the (usually larger) publishing corporations, such as Penguin
or Random House (see above for a list).
This comparison is always interesting. As we see in the table below, Indies tend to
have somewhat lower levels of educational attainment, though the difference is
not very large. Furthermore, it is
primarily the greater tendency of Indies
to have “unknown” educational status that makes up the difference in
status. If we set aside “unknowns”,
Trads have a more bimodal distribution - more people are at the extremes (no
degree or advanced degree), while Indies tend to be dominated by Bachelor degree
holders.
|
Count of Writer
|
Writer Educational Attainment Level
|
|
|
||||
|
Pub3
|
1-HS
|
2-Some
Univ
|
3-Bach
Deg
|
4-Grad
Deg
|
99-Unkown
|
Grand
Total
|
Avg
Educ
|
|
Trad
|
7
|
10
|
23
|
23
|
13
|
76
|
1.7
|
|
Indie
|
|
3
|
9
|
2
|
10
|
24
|
1.5
|
|
Grand Total
|
7
|
13
|
32
|
25
|
23
|
100
|
1.6
|
Educational Status by Price Range of Book
Again, a definition is needed to put this data into
context. Low priced books are defined
as being under $4.00, moderately priced books are between $4.00 and $7.99 and
high priced books are $8.00 and up.
When we look at the data, we see that there is a clear
tendency for educational attainment and the price range of books to be related
- lower priced books are more likely to be written by people with Bachelor’s
degrees or unknown education, while higher priced books are more likely to be
written by people with advanced degrees.
So, there appears to be a fairly close correlation between the writer’s
social status (as determined by education) and the price that the writer (or
the publisher) charges for their books.
This is partially mediated by publisher type, as noted above in the
Indie vs Trad section.
|
Count of Writer
|
Writer Educational Attainment Level
|
|
|
||||
|
Price2
|
1-HS
|
2-Some
Univ
|
3-Bach
Deg
|
4-Grad
Deg
|
99-Unkown
|
Grand
Total
|
Avg
Educ
|
|
1-Low
|
1
|
4
|
13
|
2
|
10
|
30
|
1.4
|
|
2-Mod
|
4
|
6
|
13
|
16
|
13
|
52
|
1.7
|
|
3-High
|
2
|
3
|
6
|
7
|
18
|
1.8
|
|
|
Grand Total
|
7
|
13
|
32
|
25
|
23
|
100
|
1.6
|
Educational Attainment by Genre
The genre categories are fairly standard breakdowns , as
shown in the table below. The “Other”
category had the most highly educated writers, though it is a small
miscellaneous category. Next was the
Thriller/Suspense/Crime category, which had a lot of writers with Law degrees
or master’s degrees in Journalism or English.
Literary Fiction also had several writers with advanced degrees, as
might be expected.
After that was
Romance - almost all of the “unknown” education writers were in that
category. It is not clear whether this
is because Romance writing is a niche that is particularly welcoming to people
without degrees or whether there is a reluctance to disclose credentials on the
part of writers. Reading the bios, I got the sense that “bragging” about
educational credentials might be considered bad form in that genre. It is worth noting that both Indies and Trads
in that genre had a lot of “unknowns”.
Finally, Science Fiction and Fantasy had the lowest average educational
attainment, which is a bit of a surprise.
However, there weren’t that many SFF books in the Amazon Top 100 in
2003, so this might just be an odd random effect, as can happen when a part of
a dataset has small Ns.
|
Count of Writer
|
Writer Educational Attainment Level
|
|
|
||||
|
Genre2
|
1-HS
|
2-Some
Univ
|
3-Bach
Deg
|
4-Grad
Deg
|
99-Unkown
|
Grand
Total
|
Avg
Educ
|
|
Other
|
|
|
2
|
3
|
2
|
7
|
1.85
|
|
Thriller/Susp/Crime
|
3
|
5
|
7
|
13
|
28
|
1.83
|
|
|
LitFic
|
|
2
|
5
|
4
|
11
|
1.81
|
|
|
Romance
|
3
|
2
|
17
|
5
|
20
|
47
|
1.47
|
|
SFF
|
1
|
4
|
1
|
1
|
7
|
1.19
|
|
|
Grand Total
|
7
|
13
|
32
|
25
|
23
|
100
|
1.6
|
Summary
Summing up, when it comes to the educational attainment of
writers in the Amazon Top 100, we can say:
·
Nearly 60% had university degrees, with almost
as many having graduate degrees as bachelor’s degrees. That’s about double the level in the overall
population.
·
For
nearly a quarter of the writers in the Top 100, however, no information was
available on educational attainment.
Whether that signals a lack of degree or an unwillingness to share the
information was unclear. Since the
“unknowns” mostly wrote in the Romance genre, it may be accepted wisdom that it
is best if writers do not reveal too much on the subject. Both Trad and Indie Romance writers seemed
reluctant to disclose.
·
Female writers tended to be less educated than
male writers. That may be related to the
age of the most successful writers, which tends to skew to older age ranges,
when women were less likely to go to university than men. Given current university enrolment patterns,
we would expect women writers to eventually overtake male writers in this
regard.
·
There was some tendency for educational
attainment to be higher in older age ranges.
Again, this may be an artefact of genre (Romance writers tend to be
younger).
·
There was no strong tendency regarding the
relationship between sales rank and educational status. However, the writers in the top decile did
tend to be the most educated, and the writers in the bottom decile tended to
have the least formal education.
·
When looking at individual publishers, there was
no clear pattern, though it was interesting that Hachette skewed towards fairly
highly educated writers. Does this imply
that the Hachette/Amazon dispute has overtones of social class antagonism? It seems possible to me.
·
Overall,
Indies had somewhat lower levels of educational attainment than Trads, though
the difference was not large. However,
if we exclude “unknowns”, Trads were bimodal (many had no degree and many had
an advanced degree) compared to Indies (mostly bachelor’s degrees).
·
More highly educated writers tended to sell at
higher prince points than less educated
writers. Again, undertones of
social class distinctions seem to be present.
·
The “Other” genre had the most educated writers
(some non-fiction was in this category).
Next was Thriller/Suspense/Crime, which had quite a few writers with
advanced degrees, as did Literary Fiction, the next category. Romance followed - most of these writers
either had bachelor’s degrees or “unknown” status. Finally, Science Fiction and Fantasy came
last, though it was a relatively small category.
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