Quote:
Originally Posted by shalym
I'm confused...does Dataguy mention Scalzi's books explicitly? If not, how in the world does ONE data point have anything to do with a statistical analysis of the entire publishing industry?
Shari
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Because it's one of the few real data points we actually have. Models have to match reality to be useful. If they don't match reality, well then what's the point?
What they are trying to do is provide a model of book sales. When the model provides results that prove false in one case, then the model isn't likely to be a reliable guide to actual book sales in other cases. In theory, you can claim that that result was an outier, but you can only do that if you have a lot of other actual data that prove to be correct. There are very few authors or publishers who will publish their actual sales figures. If I see other authors who say that these models accurately estimated their sales figures, I'll reconsider my position. So far, I haven't seen that.