From: maggie_bo_at_comcast.net
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2013 15:39:36 +0000 (UTC)

Thank you for this thoughtful and interesting response. You raise many vali d points worth discussing here, and I will only address one: that is, when writers/ publishers/ marketers/ etc. attempt to create, publish, promote di versity literature, but make mistakes in the process. There are so many pos sible mistakes, and some of them truly are hurtful. Charles is right: many people are honestly and legitimately terrified to try because they are afra id of the mistakes they might make, and/or of the criticisms that will be h urled their way if they do. As a librarian, I teach my kids that mistakes a re inevitable when we take risks and try new things, and that's okay. Peopl e/organizations who are eager to learn about diversity literature but are s till on the the learning curve's slippery slope (and that's probably most o f us!) are going to mess up, sometimes royally. Is it possible to "reward" attempts and encourage growth and development while still pointing out erro rs and drawing attention to what needs
 to be improved? What more can be don e to create an environment where writers, publishers, and marketers (and I' d argue librarians are a kind of marketer!), feel "safe" to try to create a nd promote diversity literature, but the needs of children are still protec ted?


----- Original Message -----

From: "Charles Bayless" To: ccbc-net_at_lists.wisc.edu Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2013 8:09:01 AM Subject:
 Diversity and reading demand

Apologies for the atrocious formatting in the last email. Hopefully this co mes through in proper form.

* * *

It seems like every couple of years we have some variant of this conversati on. It goes something like this. Problem: Group X is underrepresented (in n umber of authors, in titles published, awards received, etc.). Consequences of problem: Children of Group X are disadvantaged by not seeing themselves better reflected in books. Cause of problem: Institutional, structural or unconscious bias/discrimination by the publishing industry and/or trade gro ups of the industry and/or awards committees. Solution to the problem: Requ ire publishers to publish more Group X; Create more awards for Group X; Adv ocate librarians to buy more Group X; Raise awareness of Group X literature . This summary misses huge nuances and variances in opinion but I think thi s is basically the broad template we follow. We say a lot, there are some g ood insights, a couple of interesting facts emerge, and then the conversati on peters out without any real conclusion.

It seems to me that we are missing the forest for the trees. I am skeptical that the issue is some defect in the structure of the publishing industry and suspect that trying to solve that problem is a red herring. I suspect, for reasons I explain below, that we are misdiagnosing the problem and ther efore are pursuing solutions that won’t yield the results we desire . In addition to being a bookseller, my career is in management consulting, focusing on diverse team decision-making. For any who are interested in de cision-making in complex human systems under conditions of uncertainty, I h ave appended a bibliography at the end. This is interesting and consequenti al.

The first reason the conversations peter out is that I think we are often s peaking at cross purposes because we do not share common terms and mean dif ferent things by different terms. So when we talk about diversity related b ooks we often don’t distinguish between important subgenres. When w e speak of diversity, are we addressing diversity among readers or writers? When we speak of diversity and people of color, are we drawing a distincti on between native born authors and international authors? Are we drawing a distinction between global diversity and intra-national diversity? When we speak of diversity, what form of diversity are we most concerned about? The re is racial diversity, ethnic diversity, religious diversity, gender diver sity, cultural diversity, class diversity, orientation diversity, body shap e diversity, linguistic diversity, etc. The list could go on; what is the G roup X we want to focus and how many Groups can be accommodated when the av erage reader reads fewer than five books
 a year? What is the baseline of di versity against which we are comparing? Is it the globe, the nation, the st ate, the town or county, or the community? Whose interests are we serving? Children, authors, publishers, society, our culture, our self, etc.? Withou t clarity on these definitions, we are speaking at cross purposes without p roductive progress. The librarian who purchases a hundred books of South Am erican, Asian and African folktales may legitimately feel like they have in creased the diversity of their collection but if we are defining diversity as intra-national diversity rather than international diversity, then, even though they have many more people-of-color books, they will still have fai led by our definition. Even within intra-national diversity, we lack clarit y with some members simply seeking greater POC diversity regardless of sour ce and others seeking, for lack of a better term, what might be called conf ormity literature – where the target audience of Group X, reads abo ut a
 protagonist sharing the key Group X marker, in a book written by a mem ber of Group X. In other words, audience, protagonist and author all confor m around some attribute, generally an attribute historically attracting der ision or discrimination.

As an aside, as a bookseller, I see white buyers and middle class buyers of any race, more interested in international stories than in domestic confor mity literature – interpret that as you wish. The barrier is clearl y not the issue of color per se or of differences in culture.

A second reason that I think that we fail to move the conversation forward is that there is no agreement on goals, on the problem definition, on the c onsequences of the problem, or the causes of the problem. This is related t o the above issue of definitions. Are we really focusing on improving the r eading experience of children and their life outcomes or are we simply advo cating for greater authorial recognition. What is the goal on which people can agree?

A third reason I think we fail to progress is that our discussion is primar ily a matter of assertions with a lack of factual information to support th e assertions. The assertions might or might not be true but in the absence of credible evidence then it is simply a set of anecdotes and opinions. Arg uments without data tend to end up going to those with the most money and p ower behind their opinion. Evidence is crucial to support assertions. In th is case, using the simplified argument summarized in the first paragraph 1) there is almost never any empirical evidence offered that Group X (whateve r the X is) is actually underrepresented. There are anecdotes and assertion s but no data. (See in particular Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise for the importance of discerning real issues versus perceived is sues). 2) There is no evidence of which I am aware that conformity literatu re has a measurable impact on the reading experience of children, particula rly in terms of life outcomes (and there
 is lots of counter-evidence indica ting that good life outcomes have nothing to do with conformity literature) . If there are no measurable consequences, then in a world of scarce resour ces, the issue won’t get attention. 3) There is no empirical, objec tive evidence that there are unique industry structural issues that are cre ating biases and discrimination. 4) There is no evidence that any of the pr oposed solutions would actually generate measurable benefit to reading chil dren. Why would people and institutions cough up money and time to pursue a ctions that won’t lead to an improvement in the agreed problem?

A fourth reason is that I think there is a degree of insularity within the community, particularly regarding maths, economics and business. The challe nges and issues of the book industry are by no means unique. They are share d by numerous other industries. In order to judge what are likely root caus es of perceived problems, we have to understand the business circumstances as well as basic economics. The attributes of the industry include highly f ragmented and voluminous suppliers (authors) of highly variable product (in terms of quality, pertinence, and popularity) distributed through multiple , consolidating and changing channels (Amazon, B&N, Walmart, surviving inde pendents, etc.) to a fragmented, disparate, fickle, consumer base where the re are marked fissures between who buys (parents, schools, librarians) and who consumes (children) and which is prone to exogenous and unpredictable f ads. As in the consumer products industry, the ratio between failed (non-pr ofitable) product introductions (new ti tles) and that of each profitable in troduction is quite high. For books that do make money there is a pareto di stribution at play (common throughout business) where 80% of the profit is derived from 20% of the titles sold. There is a virtually complete incapaci ty to predict which titles will actually succeed and endure versus which on es will fail.

I would be interested to hear from publishers in this regard. The fragmente d data which I have seen and anecdotal conversations would lead me to belie ve that something like 80% of new books fail to break-even and that of thos e that do break-even or better, 80% of the profits derive from 20% of the t itles. That would imply that 80% of the industry profits are driven by less than 5% of the titles published. Does that sound right from your experienc e?

An example of such insularity that has come up in the conversation is the p rocess of estimating a market size. The one exercise that was conducted in this discussion involved a steep discounting of the barrier of freedom of c hoice and constraints of resources; specifically people have to be convince d to buy and they have limited money to spend. The fact that there are 2,50 0 classrooms in Chicago doesn’t make an automatic market for a prod uct, just a potential market. The gap between potential markets and actual markets is always huge. Because Americans eat 40 billion hamburgers a year (a huge potential market), it doesn’t necessarily follow that there is a place for my brand of hamburgers. The actual market for my burgers is the number of people I can convince to change their hamburger eating habit s and buy more of mine. Likewise, the 2,500 classrooms that might potential ly buy books has to be reduced by the number with a budget to buy books thi s year, and then reduced again by the number
 among them who will take the c hance on a new title displacing a title that is already known to be well lo ved. If Chicago is like most cities, money is tight and perhaps only 10% of teachers are buying books for classrooms (if that). Being risk adverse lik e most people, perhaps only 10% of those are willing to try something new. And most likely they will buy only a single copy in the series to first see whether it will be read. So, all of a sudden, we have gone, by the same pr ocess of rough and ready playing with speculative numbers, from a claimed p otential market of 15,000 books to a more realistic estimate of 25 books. N ow let’s say you are a publisher being asked to ante up $10,000 (or whatever the embedded costs of launching a new book might be). How confide nt are you in the prospects of a new title whose market might be somewhere between 25 and 15,000? Particularly knowing that the failure rate for new t itles is on the order of 60-80%. And that’s only the revenue side o f the equati on. We also have to take into account costs. In order to sell t hose 25 books, we have to expend the time (at $10-30 an hour of fully loade d labor rate) to register with the school district as a supplier, be approv ed, get the message out, probably do some presentations, etc. Say that is o nly 10 hours of work - $100 of out of pocket expenses to close a sale on 25 volumes? The economic viability of the classroom sales has suddenly gone t hrough the floor by simply taking in to account a marginal degree of realit y-based estimation.

I don’t think we hear near enough from publishers on the list regar ding the factual realities to which they have to respond (though I see that Cheryl Klein has just done that – Thanks). Everyone keeps reportin g that publishers say that they don’t see demand for diversity prod uct and then simply dismiss that representation. Is it true or not? If it i s an excuse, then let’s address that with empirical evidence and mo ve on. If it is true, then that is the problem that needs fixing. Publisher s seem to have been cast as villains in the plot and I suspect that is a fa lse diagnosis. It seems to me that much of what we are discussing has to do with basic supply and demand which in turn are driven by simple incentives . If you want more of something, reward it more, make it cheaper, make it e asier to acquire/use. If you want less, make it harder, more expensive or l ess rewarding. Align your incentives to support the desired outcome.

We sometimes seem our own worst enemies for ignoring these basic principles . Some say that we want more diversity literature but then half the convers ations seem to be about tearing down an offering because the author is not conformed to the topic or even if they are, they are in some way deemed ina uthentic, or the complaint is that the lack of success is due to a discrimi natory distribution of marketing dollars. Critical, constructive opinion is one thing but if a well-intentioned publisher brings out a diversity orien ted book and then is criticized for not spending enough on the marketing or is criticized for the legitimacy of the author or is criticized because th e author does not conform to the issue, or is criticized because the Group X is not depicted authentically, then you have just created an incentive (o r many incentives) for them to not repeat the experience.

A fifth reason is that we seem willing to sacrifice the good for the best. CBC seems to have launched some well intended diversity initiative and we s eem to be investing effort in criticizing its shortfalls from some putative ideal. Reward what you want more of, don’t punish it.

A sixth reason is that we also fail to agree on the definition of what cons titutes a good book. Without that it is extraordinarily difficult to predic t which books might be deemed “good” and therefore close to impossible to predict which books will succeed.

The criteria for deeming a book successful are ill-defined and substantiall y subjective. Likely we might all agree that a good book is one that is 1) good in literary terms (very difficult to objectively measure), 2) pertinen t or of interest to readers (still pretty hard to measure), and 3) popular (easy to define but still surprisingly hard to track). So if we accept thes e as the three constituent components of a “good” book, how would we measure progress and which areas might we influence.

The data for identifying what is happening and why is very hard to find and use. What might we measure as a proxy of “good”. Maybe awa rds and positive critical reviews in literary magazines. Highly subjective and prone to marketing effects. What would be a proxy for pertinence? Durab ility over time perhaps. What about popularity? That one is much easier в Ђ“ number of books sold and number circulated from libraries. Easy as i t is to identify the appropriate measure, it is very hard to collect reliab le data. There is an alternative approach which has the advantage of isolat ing the effect of fads and the distortions of marketing budgets and that is to look at long term durability. The operating assumption is that in order to survive multi-decades, a book must have some minimum level of literary goodness, pertinence and popularity.

A seventh reason is that we are terrible at predicting which books will suc ceed. How accurate are our prize awarding committees in identifying books t hat have enduring appeal? Very hard to determine. A few years ago, I did a rough and ready review of the expiration of books receiving children†™s book awards going back to the first Newbery in 1922. What I wanted to know was how many books receiving awards would fall out of print (indicatin g an absence of enduring appeal) AND, for any given year of publication, ho w many books for that year were still in print and what was the ratio of th ose to award winners. I don’t have the numbers to hand but basicall y about 30% of award winners were out of print within five years. 50% were out of print within ten years. Only 20% or so survived for twenty-five year s or more. So a pretty high failure rate in terms of “experts†ќ identifying which books would have enduring appeal. Likewise, for any g iven year of publication, the ratio of non-award winning books still in pri nt to award winning books was pretty high. For example, if there were fifty children’s books that received some critical recognition in 1960, by 2010 about 10 were still in print. At the same time, there were some six ty other, non-award winning, titles from 1960 that were still in print. So experts were wrong about 80% of their award winners and they missed 86% of the books that did last.

Finally, an eighth reason is that we seem unwilling to accept that there is always disparate impact on any chosen attribute and that many if not most times, the imbalance of impact has nothing to do with bias or discriminatio n and everything to do with choices and cultural orientations. If you look at any field of endeavor you will find a disparate number of two or three g roups overrepresented among the lead practitioners and other groups underre presented: football, teaching, medicine, basketball, engineering, law, math ematics, nursing, chess, technology, fashion design, accounting, finance, e tc. In some few cases, there are either institutional barriers or active di scrimination but in the overwhelming majority of cases, the disparate impac t is simply a contextual artifact or consequence of personal and cultural o rientations.

If these barriers to constructive resolution in a discussion are accurate, what are the implications?

America is a nation that functions as federal system. Power is pushed down to the individual and local level ensuring that there is extensive heteroge neity in virtually every field of endeavor. It is marked by extreme levels of freedom where the consequences of aggregated individual decisions may be entirely legal and understandable but may be deemed undesirable by some pa rty or another. As an example, people are entitled by law and are able by c hoice to live virtually anywhere in the nation. And they do. That said, the re is a clear tendency among virtually all groups of sufficient numbers to self-segregate by age, income, ethnicity, religion, orientation. We may dep lore that outcome or admire it but it is a relatively fixed feature and cle arly a function of individual choices rather than systemic discrimination. And it is a fairly intractable feature of most western countries. A study w as done a few years ago on housing segregation by class in Manchester UK. T hey identified that since the 1850s ther e had been both philanthropic and g overnment initiatives to moderate the high degree of class segregation. In 150 years, despite continued and concerted efforts to change that pattern, Manchester was as segregated (by class) in 2000 as it was in 1850. Given al l that, how much can we expect of librarians to be part of the solution giv en that their primary mission has to be serving their local community and t hey have very limited resources with which to do that and an ever widening range of demands on their time and focus.

The market is efficient. People want to make money and it is rare for there to exist a profitable niche whose needs are not being met. Everyone seems to concur that publishers place a premium on the importance of being able t o make money from a title. Certainly there are claims by individuals who ar e not publishers that publishers don’t know how to make money, whic h may be true but seems improbable. There are many anecdotes to support tha t publishers are risk averse (as any successful business has to be) and ane cdotes supporting that most publishers wish to publish that which they know will sell profitably. There is also plenty of evidence that there are mult iple publishers who are intensely committed to the success of diversity lit erature and have put their money where their mouth is in terms of trying to succeed in that market.

Writing and publishing are close to perfect competition. There are no real barriers to entry for an author – anyone can write. There are ever fewer barriers to entry for publishers. Between technology, globalization a nd outsourcing, virtually anyone can set up as a publisher with very little capital. The opportunities to be published are greater than ever and there are indeed far greater numbers of titles published each year. In 1910, app roximately 10,000 titles were published in the USA. In 2010, there were 320 ,000. And those are only the official books through major publishing houses . An additional 2,800,000 titles (according to Bowker) were published via s elf-publishing or on-demand. Just about anyone can write just about anythin g and get it published somehow. The constraining factor is being able to ma ke money doing so.

So how can there be all these committed, experienced, financially hungry pu blishers in a highly competitive, low barrier to entry market, all seeking to make money and yet there exist an underserved profitable market? Ockham ’s Razor kicks in with the suggestion that that is an improbable sc enario and that there is an alternative more likely root issue. I would arg ue that there are no real constraints on the supply side of the equation an d that by focusing on supply we are solving a problem that has already been solved.

320,000 new titles and 2.8 million non-traditional titles say there is an i mmensity of supply. The incapacity of booksellers to sustain a profitable e xistence (independents, Borders, now B&N) speaks to the challenge of profit ably matching readers to titles.

All of the above leads me to conclude that the real root cause of problems is that book demand is too low, publishing risk is too high, quality is too variable, and that there is a structural challenge regarding matching exis ting readers (who have highly variable and dynamic demands) with the huge v olume of existing and new inventory of titles. And of these, I would priori tize low demand as the forest that we refuse to see. The 117 million Americ an households spend less than $50 a year on books, 0.1% of their income. 10 % of the population is responsible for 80% of the reading. 50% of the popul ation do not electively read any books in a year. Solve that problem and wh atever your Group X is, the results will be better. Providing more product to a market that is not buying just won’t do anyone any good.

Getting to the root causes of those four problems (demand, risk, quality, a nd mismatch) will be challenging but much more likely to be successful than focusing on increasing supply in an already over-supplied market.

So I pose these seven questions to the community.

What are the actions above and beyond what is already being done to create more of a reading culture (and therefore demand) among families and communi ties?

What are the actions that can be taken to reduce the risk to publishers whe n introducing new authors and new books?

What can be done to improve the quality of books being brought to market so that there is a greater likelihood of being bought?

What actions can be taken above and beyond what is already being done to be tter match enthusiastic readers to new and existing titles so that there is an improved reader experience?

What actions can be taken to make it easier to read, more rewarding to read , and cheaper to read?

What are the structural impediments that can be removed which make it harde r to read, more expensive (time and money), and less rewarding?

How can advocacy for more and better reading be shifted from rhetoric to ar guments based on evidence?

Regards

Charles

Bibliography of books related to decision-making in diverse and uncertain e nvironments.

What The Numbers Say by Derrick Niederman and David Boyum – Using f actual analysis as the basis for insight and decision-making

Statistical Analysis for Decision Making by Morris Hamburg - Using rigorous statistical tools in individual and group decision-making.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some D on’t by Nate Silver – How do we distinguish new knowledge t hat is real from simple noise and how do we become better at making accurat e predictions?

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has An Expiration Date by Sa muel Arbesman – How new knowledge evolves and why experts are so of ten wrong.

Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear by Dan Gardner – Perceived r isk versus quantified risk and their respective roles in individual and gro up decision-making.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein †“ Using risk in forecasting and decision-making.

Reckoning With Risk by Gerd Gigerenzer – The role of risk and uncer tainty in decision-making.

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter – Decision-m aking in the context of complexity, risk and sustainability.

The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse by Gregg Easterbrook – Well-being, progress and measurement.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright – Complex coop erative group decision-making.

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means fo r Business, Science, and Everyday Life by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi - Complex cooperative group decision-making.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – The intersection of in dividual and organizational decision-making.

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyam a – The role of trust in group decision-making.

It Ain’t Necessarily So by David Murray, Joel Schwartz, and S. Robe rt Lichter – How common knowledge is often wrong and undermines eff ective decision-making.

Being Wrong: Adventures In the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz – Explores overconfidence in undermining effective decision-making and the va luable role of acknowledging error as an impetus to improvement.

Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics by Paul Ormerod – The critical role of knowledge evolution on improved decision-mak ing.

Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design by Henry Petroski – Using forecasting to create success by averting failure.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford – The importance of adaptive trial and error driven from the ground up rather tha n from the top down.
Received on Sun 17 Feb 2013 03:39:36 PM CST