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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
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He makes a good point about Amazon's ability to identify hot new (self-published) authors *before* they become hot; between customer reviews, sales data, and customer purchase profiles they can identify *who* a specific book might appeal to, what kind of reader. And since they know how many of their customers fall in a given taste-group they can easily calculate a ceiling for a specific title and decide whether their resources can boost its sales enough to be worth their involvement. That is pretty much the same decision old-school publishers make except Amazon has more data to base their investment on, which makes it less risky.
Reminds me a bit of the scouting vs stats-based player evaluation divide in pro baseball. You really need a mix of both approaches to maximize the influx of talent but teams that stick to the old-school approach are handicapping themselves needlessly.
It'll be interesting to track 47th North titles over the next few years.
I suspect they won't necessarilly be much better than the traditionals at identifying monster talents, but I do think they'll do a lot better in finding grade A and A- talents while avoiding the "three chapter wiz'es".
