Moneybook

At Small Potatoes* Paul Bloom speculates on how to repeat in the book business the Moneyball baseball trick (which basically means paying close attention to statistics and making decisions based on that analysis) and concludes that you can’t. Book numbers are fuzzy numbers. He ends up suggesting that there’s really only one (OK, two) royal roads to financial success for a book writer: “Be the sort of person who gets invited to go on Oprah”, or “Write something people really like to read”. Moneyball-style statistical analysis works because every baseball game is essentially the same as every other baseball game — obviously individual success or failure varies, but the structure is the same, everyone does the same things. This makes comparisons potentially useful. In book publishing every book is different — OK people open them and read words, but that’s not quite the same thing as three strikes and you’re out. A baseball team has one product — baseball, and is governed by a rule book…