23 - The Minimum Viability Threshold: Why Some Books Don't Sell (w/ Dr. Kerry Spencer Pray

Publishing Rodeo: The Good, The Bad, and the Bloody Ugly

In 2008, Dr. Kerry Spencer Pray watched her book die on submission after the financial crash halted publishing acquisitions. She then decided to do a PhD, focusing her research on what makes books sell. After studying hundreds of factors, Dr. Kerry Pray zeroed in on a handful that seemed correlated with book sales in some way. All of them were marketing related, and often linked to a book’s advance (which is itself often representative of the support a novel gets). Let's dig in!

• Dr. Pray talks to us about the data she collected, the methods she used, and the research she produced in pursuit of this project, focusing primarily on the YA market
• End result: she developed an algorithm that could predict the success or failure of a given novel, with about 75% accuracy
• Her other big find: the minimum marketing viability threshold (ie, the point at which a book has a shot at selling well, which is defined in this case as selling within expectations relative to its advance)
• Books can be assigned a marketing viability score, and books which fall below that threshold have zero chance of success (that she has studied so far)
• Most well-marketed books still don’t succeed, but they have a significantly better chance of doing so, and when they do succeed, they sell extremely well
• We discuss various factors and angles of this data / research
• Dr. Pray lays out the eight factors correlated with book sale success
• We discuss outliers, or apparent outliers, and the “myth” of self made success that accompanies very good-selling books
• Sunyi’s theory on why high concept books might thrive better in this kind of environment, and also her metaphor for books as rocket launches (the concept of trying to get into orbit)
• Scott’s speculation on whether publishers run these algorithms themselves, and why or why not they might do so
• The surprising importance of Twitter, and the irrelevance of star ratings
• General chatter, and where you can find Dr. Pray to get in touch