If you are an artist, a writer, a creator, you must accept that your world is extremistan, where change is not incremental.
David Kadavy
Kindle Reports
Anyone who has read the book The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb is familiar with the fanciful, fictitious Extremistan and Mediocristan. Simply put, in the latter differences are statistically limited - the difference between the worlds shortest and tallest human is mere feet. There is no thousand-foot dude walking around somewhere.
In Extremistan - differences can be extreme, unpredictably so. It is possible, for example, to make a billion dollars in a year, or lose a billion dollars in a day. Or, more.
What does this have to do with me, you ask. Well…
One of the collateral concepts Taleb discusses is directly related to being a writer. It doesn’t mean we get rich. It means that we are disconnected from hourly rates. Mostly. That is, as an indie that produces a novel every 18 months or so, I’m not paid by the hour. I’m paid in two ways.
First, people buy the product. A few weeks ago, for example, someone purchased one printed copy of four different books. That seems to happen more often than sales of the e-book versions. My guess is that people prefer having the book to read (Something Unusual in a Past Ritual) to staring at a screen. I’m happy that, for someone now self-publishing, this is an option.
The other is for someone who has an Amazon membership of one kind or another to read a “free” Kindle version, or listen to a “free” audible. Each page (in either medium) is recorded and I get a whopping fraction of a cent each. If a person reads an entire book, I get the same amount as if they’d purchased it. If they read two pages (eg)…
If you’ve made it this far, you might be asking yourself - “What the hell does this have to do with Extremistan, or whatever?” Simple. The number of pages that can be read among the seven novels I’ve written isn’t infinite, but it is the next best thing. It takes similar amounts of effort (that’s where the trick is, actually) to have one person read four hundred pages, or for hundreds to read many thousands. Amazon’s capacity to fulfill the orders is, for the most part, not connected to having inventory. Even the print copies is an on-demand operation.
Which means that one person can read four hundred pages, or a hundred can read…well, the math only matters at the end of the month. That’s when Extremistan matters. The sky is the limit, and all I have to do is keep telling people the books are out there and leave the rest to fate.