The Five Deadly Behavioural Sins for Writers and Self-Publishers (and Investors)

First a bit of disclosure – I got the idea for this from an article in the Globe and Mail Report on Business by Scott Barlow called “The five deadly behavioural sins for investors” (Aug 28, 2014).  It was pitched towards investors (especially those in the stock market) but most of the content seemed to be directly transferable to the writing and publishing game (especially self or small publishers, or as we usually say Indies).  Basically, these are psychological factors that cloud one’s judgement about any activity that can be considered an investment, whether that is money, time or opportunity cost.

It is also worth noting that the comments below refer mostly to writing/publishing decisions based on economic factors.  Naturally, other factors may come into play, such as artistic or personal motivations, to which these comments won’t necessarily apply.
 

Sin Number 1 – Herding

“Herding describes the tendency of investors to unthinkingly follow along with dominant market themes without regard to potential risk of capital loss.”

That’s how Scott Barlow describes it for investors.  For writers and self-publishers, this transfers pretty directly to the tendency to try to follow the latest and greatest thing.  Harry Potter made a billion?  Then it’s about time to jump on the wizards and magic bandwagon.  Fifty Shades of Gray?  Better write some bondage stuff and make sure to include a billionaire.  The Hunger Games cleaned up?  Get into the young adult dystopia market while it’s hot.

The problem here is that by the time something has proved itself to be the latest thing, all kinds of people are jumping on the bandwagon.  With investing, that means the price of the stock is driven up by purely psychological factors, without reference to underlying business fundamentals.  That’s called momentum investing, and you can get lucky if you are early into the game, but otherwise you will probably invest at the top of a market, a position from which it is hard to make any money but easy to lose lots.  With writing and publishing, it means that a whole lot of other people will be flooding the market with similar content, saturating the market.  There is also the risk that you might be investing your time and energy just as fickle readers are becoming fatigued of that subject and looking for something new. 

 

Sin Number 2 – Anchoring

“Anchoring is the term used to describe investment decisions based on the original price paid.  In truth, the market doesn’t care what an investor paid for a stock and the only thing that matters is whether conditions will get better or worse in the future.”

Suppose you buy into a stock at $50 per share.  It has been determined by experience and psychological research that investors tend to anchor the value of the stock at the price at which they purchased.  They think it is “worth” $50, regardless of what the market says. That makes it difficult to get out of a bad investment – one tends to want to wait until it has gotten back up to the anchor price, the price at which it was purchased.  But there is an old phrase – ‘sunk costs are no costs’ – if a stock’s outlook is bad, you are supposed to ignore the price that you paid for it and get out before you effectively sink more money into it by delaying.

In the writing game, that can take many forms.  You might have convinced yourself that a book is worth $5.99, because that’s the price you started selling it at, and therefore it should always be worth that much.  Readers might think otherwise.  Arguably, this is a large factor in the current dispute between Hachette and Amazon.  Traditional publishers think their books are worth $X.XX because they have always sold for $X.XX – Amazon thinks otherwise.

Another form this can take is sticking with a genre or a series well past the point at which there is reader acceptance.  You might have decided this story arc deserves a 5 book series, so you plug away even though it is clear that readers aren’t responding.  At that point, you might be better off re-directing your energies to a new book or series.  Granted, that risks alienating current readers who expect the series to be completed – it can be a difficult judgement call.

Sin Number 3 – Confirmation Bias

“Investors should always be suspicious when they find exactly what they were looking for while researching an investment.  Odds are, the research process involved discarding facts that didn’t fit the pre-existing thesis and overemphasizing the data that supported the original plan.”

 

Suppose you go into your stock-picking persuaded that energy stocks are due for significant growth.  The danger is that you can latch onto articles and stock trends that support your original supposition and ignore everything that says otherwise.  Conversely, after a stock has proved successful, you can cherry pick the reasons that you “know” that made it succeed.  Confirmation bias is very difficult to avoid.  Ideally you should list your hypothesis before investing, pick a few stocks that conform to that hypothesis, track them for a pre-determined time period, then look at the results to test whether your hypothesis worked out in the real world.

In the writing and Indie publishing world, you might find yourself scouring Amazon ranks and reviews, looking for patterns that you expected all along.  Perhaps you have it in mind that males hardly ever read books written by females, so you ignore all evidence to the contrary and miss out on a potentially lucrative readership.  Or, maybe you have published ten books, two of which outsell the others by a wide margin.  Looking at the covers, you might think you see a pattern, so you hire an artist to do all your covers in that style.  If that style happened to be your personal favorite all along, you might be letting confirmation bias guide your thinking, and you could end up spending a lot of time and money on new covers to no good effect.  I suppose that you could call this “leading yourself down the garden path”.

Sin Number 4 – Ego Depletion

“Studies have shown that the brain has limited decision-making resources and the quality of decisions declines with each one made.  (A New York Times profile described the phenomenon as “decision fatigue.”)”

For investors, this means making fewer investment decisions and not second guessing yourself too much.  That is also useful for minimizing transaction costs (each trade costs some money) and stress (obsessing about your money).

When it comes to writing and publishing, I would see this primarily as a warning about excessive re-writing.  Although a reasonable amount of reviewing, proofing and re-thinking is good, too much can be harmful.  Continual self-critique is likely to lead to self-doubt, which can be crippling for creativity. In that sense, “Ego Depletion” seems like a very astute label.  Also, it can lead to a loss of spontaneity in the writing, which can seem like it has been fussed over too much.  The same can be said about the others aspects of publishing, especially covers and blurbs.

In visual arts this is called “overworking your canvas” – when you revise a scene so much that the canvas loses its “bite” and doesn’t take the new paint well.  In data analysis (my day job) we sometimes call this “over-analysing your data” – examining a dataset to the point where you see patterns you should be doubting and doubt patterns you should be seeing.

 
Sin Number 5 – Illusion of Control

“While most people are aware that correctly guessing heads of tails for a coin toss doesn’t make them a genius, investors have trouble distinguishing luck versus skill where their portfolios are concerned.  The short-term path of the market is almost entirely random…”

For investors, this means you shouldn’t take the gyrations of the market too seriously over short time periods.  It takes a while for real patterns to make themselves known.

For writers and publishers, we all recognize the place that luck (or alternatively, random chance) holds in the activity.  Why do good books often tank and not-so-good books sometimes succeed.  Well, part of that is the market – people may simply prefer not-so-good books to literary gems.  But part of that can be luck.

Suppose that a book catches a few lucky breaks early after its release, by randomly attracting a few influential readers who spread the message, either through word of mouth or via the internet.  Suddenly, it has some momentum and that momentum can build on itself.  Before you know it, that book is selling well, perhaps even a best-seller.  It is hard for anyone to chalk up their success to luck, so we naturally attribute the book’s success to its innate qualities.  The writer feels vindicated, perhaps even a bit of hubris comes into the picture.  Competing writers feel downcast about their relative lack of success.  But it might all be due to some lucky breaks at the start.

We can attempt to model this with a simple application of the binomial theorem.  Suppose there are 100 new books in a certain genre that come onto the Amazon market on a given day.  Suppose that each of these new books randomly gets 100 views that first day, and the probability of a sale resulting from any of those random views is 1 percent.  Then, we can calculate from the binomial theorem (excel function binom.dist) that:

·         37 books will have 0 sales that first day.

·         37 books will have 1 sale that first day.

·         18 books will have 2 sales that first day.

·         6 books will have 3 sales that first day.

·         2 books will have 4 or more sales that first day.

So, a couple of those books will have a small advantage over the others.  Big deal, you say.  But what can happen next, with a little bit of extra luck, is something called an information cascade. That basically means that new prospective purchasers, with nothing else to go on, will see the ranking lead that those two books have and be inclined to purchase them.  After all, the crowd must know something.  That adds to the momentum of those one or two lucky books, and a bandwagon effect starts.  If the lucky books are acceptably good, and nothing interferes with the information cascade (i.e. no bad reviews) the momentum can continue to build, eventually leading to a best-seller.  And it was all due to a little bit of luck at the beginning.

The Summer Cottage Mystery - A Children's Story, now on Amazon

The short story "The Summer Cottage Mystery - A Children's Story" by Helena Puumala is now available on Amazon.  From Thursday to Monday it will be available as a free promotion, otherwise it is 99 cents.
It's a nice gentle story about four kids and their detective sleuthing, in their efforts to find a lost kitten at the lake.  Here's the blurb:

Here's a nice children's story by Science Fiction and Romance writer Helena Puumala. Yes, she does kid's stories too. Read it to a younger child (pre-school, elementary or junior-high), or read it yourself to bring back memories of those long, lazy childhood days at the lake, during summer vacation, when your biggest worry in life was a lost kitten.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N0B4TYY 

The cover art is by our artist Leona Olausen: 

 http://albertasocietyofartists.com/mary-leona-olausen/

Amazon Top 100 Kindle Books – Analysis of Educational Status of Writers in the Top 100

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 11^th to 20^th, 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.