Why I’m Not More Popular

Recently, when I was a guest on a podcast, the host asked me why my book wasn’t increasingly popular. She thought it belonged in the same matriculation as mega-bestsellers like Atomic Habits or Deep Work, and was surprised it wasn’t in the same league for popularity.

While it’s tightly flattering to be told your work is underrated, I think some people’s surprise that a moderately-popular thing isn’t super popular stems from a cognitive illusion.

Why Bestsellers Seem Common

Try to imagine every typesetting you’ve overly read, seen or heard about. How many books would that be?

Maybe 1000?

It’s probably not increasingly than 10,000 unless you’re an voracious savant(e) or work in publishing.

Now try to guess how many books are unquestionably written. For published books, estimates range from 500,000 to one million books are published every year. Including self-published books, and it’s closer to four million. The Library of Congress has 32 million cataloged books, which is an undercount of every typesetting overly written.

That ways every typesetting you’ve heard about, let vacated read, makes up less than 0.00003% of all the books that exist!

Furthermore, the books you’ve heard well-nigh are not a randomly-selected sample. the likelihood you’ve heard of a typesetting corresponds fairly closely with its popularity in the unstipulated marketplace. The stereotype traditionally-published typesetting typically sells a few thousand copies in its lifetime. In contrast, mega-bestsellers sell tens of millions.

Thus the picture the stereotype reader gets of the market looks like this:

But the reality of publishing is unquestionably this:

The handful of people who (ever-so-kindly) think I’m underrated are probably thinking of a dozen or so popular books of the same genre. Owing to the biases mentioned above, these examples are unduly drawn from the pool of enormously successful books. They notice that my typesetting is less successful than that peerage cohort and find it surprising.

These people are missing the hundreds of thousands of books similar to mine in quality (or better!) that they’ve never heard of considering they aren’t bestsellers!

This wringer applies to any kind of creative work. We watch famous YouTubers with millions of subscribers and ignore the vast majority who have less than a thousand. We hear well-nigh research washed-up by peerage scientists from Harvard and MIT, but not work by ordinary academics. Music, movies, journalism, athletics and myriad other fields suffer from the same distortion.

I’m intensely grateful to have achieved a place where people buy my typesetting and I get invited to be on podcasts. Most people don’t get this much, plane those whose work deserves it.

What Well-nigh Quality? Don’t Largest Books Sell More?

Of course, books that wilt bestsellers aren’t entirely random. I’ve been envious of James Clear’s writing worthiness since surpassing he wrote Atomic Habits, so it wasn’t surprising to me when his typesetting became a major hit. He’s a thoughtful and engaging writer.

While there are snobs who oppose that a book’s popularity is a sign of low quality, I think this take reflects particular tastes rather than describing a unstipulated full-length of the mass market.¹

However, plane if you try to oppose that popularity is perfectly correlated with underlying writing quality, the two scales differ by orders of magnitude.

If writing quality exists on a scale from 1 to 100, typesetting sales range from zero to tens of millions.²Thus, plane in a world where writing quality perfectly predicts sales, it is still unfair. Those who are ever-so-slightly largest can reap hundreds or thousands of times the rewards.

Almost no one believes that a book’s quality is perfectly predictive of its success. Books succeed in part considering of quality, but moreover considering of random factors that neither the tragedian nor an outside observer could hands predict. Those who wilt phenomenal bestsellers are often just as surprised as anyone that their typesetting has taken off.

What Level of Success Should You Expect?

At its heart, this suggests a rather pessimistic downgrading of our worthiness to succeed in fields like typesetting publishing. If we’re profoundly exaggerating the proportion of books that wilt bestsellers, we’re implicitly overestimating our odds of success.

I think there is some truth to this.

Success at an lattermost level is usually the overlap of many competing factors, only some of which are in your control. If your personal definition of success or happiness depends on stuff in a rarefied elite,this wringer should chasten you to the reality of that goal.

Even if you’re pursuing increasingly modest success, however, thinking this way can help you do better. When success is much rarer than you think, you need to pay tropical sustentation to what works, work nonflexible to master the fundamental skills of your craft, and ensure you’re single-minded to making it work.

Having achieved modest popularity, I’m thankful for everyone who enjoys my work. Whether you think my work is underrated or overrated, I’m unremittingly grateful for the opportunity to write well-nigh things I find interesting for a living.

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