I've seen this type of analysis show up in a couple places, and I think it usually misses one critical factor:
The vast majority of books frankly suck.
I say this as an aspiring writer and as someone who (as part of that) has critiqued a bunch of books and parts of books. Even published books can be mediocre or bad. And this is even more true now in the days of self-publishing, where there's basically no barrier to pressing "go" before you're ready.
What I see in the central table in the post (a couple paragraphs down from the top) is a power law distribution: at each successive level, roughly 10-30x more titles are able to get there. Sure, some percentage of those successes are due to a pre-existing platform. But how many writers are truly writing at the level of quality of the best-selling authors? I know, for my part, that after doing half a dozen or so major passes on my book, I still get critiqued for a variety of issues, some of which are embarrassingly basic.
Look, I'm not saying writing is a great way to make money if that's your primary goal. But I do think there's more correlation here between quality of writing and sales than most people give credit for. It takes a lot of work to get there, so most people just don't. But that's not to say that the opportunity doesn't exist.
I do appreciate the thoughts on alternative platforms though. Just because the journey is hard doesn't mean I shouldn't be trying to maximize the money I can make along the way. :-)
To be clear, when I say quality, I don't just mean this in the narrow sense of following the rules that writing teachers say you should. Harry Potter and Twilight both became popular because of some essence that they had---in my opinion, probably related to the world building and a certain difficult-to-describe experience of reading. Both of those books had "flaws" that were widely criticized. But they really hit home with their respective audiences.
Why did the first Harry Potter succeed, before J.K. Rowling had made a name for herself? In my opinion, it's because readers loved it so much that they went out and told their friends to read it. That's what I'm talking about when I mean quality---the irresistible quality that makes me fall in love with everything the author is doing.
Most books I see, even traditionally published ones, just don't have that.
It's interesting because reading is so subjective. I think I've only ever liked a "best selling" book once or twice, because I like things that are severely strange and that is not to commercial tastes. So it's hard to judge "quality" collectively. It's hard enough to judge "quality" individually!
The vast majority of books frankly suck.
I say this as an aspiring writer and as someone who (as part of that) has critiqued a bunch of books and parts of books. Even published books can be mediocre or bad. And this is even more true now in the days of self-publishing, where there's basically no barrier to pressing "go" before you're ready.
What I see in the central table in the post (a couple paragraphs down from the top) is a power law distribution: at each successive level, roughly 10-30x more titles are able to get there. Sure, some percentage of those successes are due to a pre-existing platform. But how many writers are truly writing at the level of quality of the best-selling authors? I know, for my part, that after doing half a dozen or so major passes on my book, I still get critiqued for a variety of issues, some of which are embarrassingly basic.
Look, I'm not saying writing is a great way to make money if that's your primary goal. But I do think there's more correlation here between quality of writing and sales than most people give credit for. It takes a lot of work to get there, so most people just don't. But that's not to say that the opportunity doesn't exist.
I do appreciate the thoughts on alternative platforms though. Just because the journey is hard doesn't mean I shouldn't be trying to maximize the money I can make along the way. :-)