Amazon Top 100 – Writers’ Major Subject Studied at University
In a blog from a short while ago, we talked to writer Helena
Puumala (Kati of Terra Series and Witches’ Stones series) about her opinion of
the value of the English Degree, as a preparation for writing the novel (her
B.A. was in English with a minor in History).
Her overall summary: “As degrees go, it’s as good as any and maybe
better than most.”
This raises the question of just what do most successful
writers do, to prepare for a writing career.
Well, we can’t answer that, but we can get a sense of what subjects the
writers in the Amazon Top 100 of 2013 and 2014 studied at university, for those
that took that route.
First, a couple of notes on the data:
The dataset was constructed from
publicly available data, using Amazon’s “Top 100 Books” of 2013 and 2014. Those are the top selling books that were
published in the respective years, as determined by Amazon’s algorithms. We don’t know the details of those
algorithms, but we have to assume that they correlate to some reasonable
measure of “most books sold”. This data
was supplemented by data on the Amazon Author Pages, the authors’ web sites or
google searches related to the authors.
Basically, though, it is all in the public domain.
There were 200 books in the
“Amazon Top 100” over the two years 2013 and 2014, written by 123 writers in
all (some writers had more than one book in the dataset). In the analyses that follow, I used books
rather than writers as my unit of analysis, so writers who had multiple
successful books are weighted higher than those with fewer books. That seems fair, since we are looking at
factors that correlate with writer success, so a more successful writer should
be given greater weight in the analysis.
1 – General Level of Educational Attainment
As we noted in an earlier blog, regarding the educational
status of writers in the Amazon Top 100, the majority did identify that they
had a university degree, though a substantial minority either identified no
degree or didn’t say in any public record that I could locate.
As the graph below shows, about 25% of
writers didn’t identify their educational status, while about 15% had some
level lower than university completion (since there are 200 books in the
dataset, divide the numbers on the top of the bar graphs to come up with a
percentage).
The 60% of writers that
were degree holders were almost equally split between bachelor’s and graduate
degrees.
Note that in a few cases, the
field of the degree holder couldn’t be identified (17), and conversely, in a
few cases the professional field of a non-degree holder could be identified
(10).
But, in the vast majority of
cases, the “subject studied” in the following graphs corresponds to a degree
holder’s major while at university.
2 – Major Subject Studied at University
For just under 60% of writers in the Amazon Top 100, it was
possible to determine their major subject of study. I have done a bit of aggregating of subjects
into groups that seemed to have common themes (e.g. English/Journalism/History
and Medicine/Nursing/Counselling, to reduce the number of categories to a
manageable size. Note that “Other” included: Religion,
Art, Engineering, Psychology, and Economics.
After “Unknown”, the biggest category was
“English/Journalism/History”, followed by Law.
So, for this group of writers, the English degree and its close cousins
Journalism and History were still the most common educational background. Those two groups accounted for 64% of all
writers whose subject of study was known.
3 – Major Subject of Study by Rank Quartile
By quartile, we refer to the ranks 1 to 25 as quartile 1,
ranks 26-50 as quartile 2, ranks 51-75 as quartile 3 and ranks 76 to 100 as quartile
4. Since this data includes both the
2013 and 2014 Amazon Top 100, each of those quartiles will each include 50
books (e.g. quartile 1 will include ranks 1 to 25 from both years, totalling 50
books). In the graph, the quartiles run
from left to right for each subject grouping.
Interestingly, though the “Unknowns” skew slightly to the
lower selling quartile 4 books, that effect is not particularly strong. Many of the books in the top half of the list
were written by authors whose major area of study is unknown.
For those books whose writers backgrounds were known, the
“English/Journalism/History” group tended to skew towards the quartile 1, top
ranked books. Similarly, books written
by writers with a background in Law skewed towards the top two quartiles. Writers with the other majors tended to skew
towards the back end of the list.
4 – Major Subject of Study by Gender
The most striking result here, is the much greater tendency
of female writers to be in the “Unknown” category, in terms of their major area
of study, than their male counterparts.
This is true of educational status in general, and correlates highly
with the tendency of Romance authors to not readily disclose this
information. Since Romance writers are
predominantly female, this leads to the gender differences seen in the chart.
After excluding unknowns, there was a tendency for male
writers to have a background in "English/Journalism/History", while
female writers were more likely to dominate the
"Medicine/Nursing/Counselling" group.
They also dominated "Business" and “Other”. Law was evenly split.
5 – Major Subject of Study by Age Range
The most notable result is distinct tendency of the
English/Journalism/History group to be in the 65 Plus age range. It is also of note that the “Unknown” group
tended to skew younger. The other
subject areas had no particularly strong age trends.
6 – Major Subject of Study by Publisher Type
As the graph shows, writers of books published by both traditional
(Trad) and independent (Indie) publishers, sometimes had “Unknown” major
subject of study backgrounds, though the Indie group had a higher proportion of
these. After accounting for unknowns,
the Trad group predominantly came from backgrounds in English/Journalism/History
or Law. The Indies were fairly evenly
split, with no strong tendency. Smaller
Trad publishers (BPH-S) were less dominated by English/Journalism/History backgrounds
than were the big Trad publishing houses (BPH).
7 – Major Subject of Study by Price Range
As the graph shows, writers of the lower priced books were
more likely to have “Unknown” major study backgrounds. However, a substantial number of books in the
higher price ranges also were written by writers with unknown educational
backgrounds.
Leaving aside the unknowns, it is striking how the
English/Journalism/History background writers tended to have the higher priced
books. Conversely, the
Medicine/Nursing/Counselling background writers tended to have books in the
lower price ranges. The other categories
of educational background showed no clear pattern.
8 – Major Subject of Study by Genre
As noted earlier, Romance writers make up the vast majority
of the “Unknowns”, in terms of educational background. Being non-disclosive on this subject seems to
be a norm of the genre, perhaps because emotional intelligence is such a
significant contributor to success in this genre, and that is not well captured
by educational background. Indeed,
Romance readers might be somewhat chary of reading books by writers who make a
point of mentioning their academic credentials and major area of study.
The other finding that really stands out is the tendency for
writers with backgrounds in the English/Journalism/History subject areas to
write in the Thriller/Suspense/Crime genre.
The same is true, not surprisingly for writers with a background in
Law. The other educational backgrounds
tend to write predominantly in the Romance category.
It is interesting that the Literary Fiction genre had more
writers in the “Unknown” subject area background than in
English/Journalism/History. The same was
true for Science Fiction/Fantasy.
Summary
Briefly summarizing:
·
The educational attainment of writers in the
Amazon Top 100 (2013 and 2014) was known for about 75% of the group. About 60% of writers had a university degree,
fairly evenly split between Bachelor’s and graduate degrees.
·
For about 60% of writers, it was possible to
determine what subjects they studied at university. Though the “English/Journalism/History”
background was the most common, over half of these writers had some other major
while at university, with Law placing second.
·
The writers in the English/Journalism/History
and Law groups tended to dominate the highest selling quartiles of the list.
·
Female writers were far more likely to have
“Unknown” educational backgrounds than males.
For those whose background was known, males tended to be a higher
proportion of the English/Journalism/History group, while females tended to
predominate in the Medicine/Nursing/Counselling group.
·
The “Unknown” group had a higher proportion of
younger writers. The
English/Journalism/History group tended to skew to the older age groups.
·
The “Unknown” group was disproportionately from
the Indie publisher world, though a substantial number of Trads also had
unknown educational backgrounds. In the
big publishing houses, over half of the writers whose backgrounds were known,
had an English/Journalism/History credential.
Indies and smaller Trads did not show any strong patterns, as far as
those writers with known backgrounds were concerned.
·
The highest priced top sellers tended to be
written by authors with English/Journalism/History and Law backgrounds. Almost undoubtedly, then, these were the
highest paid writers in the Amazon Top 100 (highest ranking and highest priced
books).
·
The majority of writers who had unknown
educational backgrounds wrote in the Romance genre. Writers with backgrounds in
English/Journalism/History and Law tended to write primarily in the
Thriller/Suspense/Crime genre. The other
educational backgrounds skewed slightly towards Romance.
The overall sense that one gets from the data is that the old
guard of the highest ranks of traditional publishing were primarily drawn from
the ranks of the English/Journalism/History majors, with Law also being
significant. These writers tend to be
older and are more likely male. They
still sell well, and command high prices.
They tend to write in the Thriller/Suspense/ Crime genre.
Conversely, the Indie ranks are dominated by writers with
unknown educational backgrounds, perhaps because they write primarily in the
Romance genre. Romance writers seem to
be coy about educational status, for the most part. The remaining Indies have varied educational
backgrounds, with no particular subject predominating.
Basically, Indie publishing appears to be effectively opening
the door to people with non-standard backgrounds, in many ways. It would seem that big publishing developed a
norm of preferring the “English major”, which is perhaps not surprising. Intuitively, it seems like the educational
background most suitable for a successful writer. But as the Indie world is showing, that may
have been circular reasoning on the part of the traditional publishing
industry. Successful Indies seem to be
coming from a great variety of backgrounds, and to be a successful Indie means,
above all, to be accepted by readers, the ultimate judges of the profession.
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