When I was nine years old, I took a piece of blue construction paper and stapled it around some blank computer paper. I titled the book, Young Author. I didn't know what I was going to write in there, but I knew it was going to be good! I wanted to write mysteries. I read a whole lot of Nancy Drew at the time, everything in the local library and bought a few dozen more with my own money. (My daughter has them on her bookshelf as I write this--no way was I getting rid of those.) I attended a few workshops, dreamed, scribbled in notebooks, started a dozen stories, wrote a play (in fourth grade) and a scene I took to drama competition, took some Creative Writing classes in college. But it wasn't until nine years ago that I decided I was going to do it. I had read a book that contradicted the thought that I had to be wildly talented to get published (a popular belief that I held or held me back), I only had to work hard, gain experience, and learn skills. In roughly ten years, ...
So... if I'm looking at that correctly, that can be simplified to:
ReplyDeleteO*w*t*c*2/l
So... the more talented the writer, the less likely to be a NYTBS? ;)
More theoretically....
If the probability of being a NYTBS depends on O, w, t, c, l, then we want the conditional probability:
P(NYTBS|O,w,t,c,l) (ie: the probability of being of NYTBS, given O, w, t, c, l).
But that's a difficult quantity to obtain, because we can readily measure is the probability of O, w, t, c, and l given that you're a NYTBS. That is, how many original, talented, etc. books don't actually make it to the NYTBS list? We don't really know... but we /could/ go take a survey of the books that /have made/ the best seller list and examine at least the frequency of talent, weirdness, looking at submission dates to get a sense of timing, etc. So, what we can readily measure is:
P(O,w,t,c,l|NYBS).
Probability calculus to the rescue!
Because:
P(O,w,t,c,l,NYBS) = P(O,w,t,c,l|NYBS)*P(NYBS)
P(NYTBS,O,w,t,c,l) = P(O,w,t,c,l|NYTBS)*P(NYTBS)
Putting it all together with a bit of Bayes' rule/theorem:
P(NYTBS|O,w,t,c,l) = P(O,w,t,c,l|NYTBS)*P(NYTBS)/ P(O,w,t,c,l)
Which says:
the probability of being a NYTBS given O, w, t, c, l is the Probability of O, w, t, c, l given NYTBS times the "prior probability" of being a NYTBS, over the marginal probability of O, w, t, c, l.
We'll use some very simplifying assumptions here, and say that O, w, t, c, and l are independent (note that's probability not true... originality and weird factor are probably not perfectly independent, and talent is probably not independent of the other two, but it depends on what sort of talent we're talking about).
Then we have:
P(NYTBS|O,w,t,c,l) = P(O,w,t,c,l|NYTBS)*P(NYTBS)/ (P(O)*P(w)*P(t)*P(c)*P(l))
Cheers. :)
because figuring out the probability wasn't hard enough in the first place...
ReplyDeleteThere, Rob you could publish that as a novel.
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