Don't Judge a Book by its Title

In recent times, a large number of hit novels have the word “Girl” in their title. The Girl on the Train. Gone Girl. Razor Girl. Stieg Larsson’s series starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There are many others.

Emily St. John Mandel did a data analysis of this trend (apparently looking into the “girl” trend is a bit of a trend in itself!). The article has charts and everything else you’d expect when someone crunches the numbers! But the part that really caught my attention was these lines:

“Why are there so many of these books? Well, because publishing is an industry ruled by mystery and chance… Because there is a certain element of mystery to the whole thing, when a book does explode, there’s a natural tendency to try to copy elements of its success.”

So if the word “Girl” shows up disproportionately in the titles of hit books, no prizes for guessing what’s going to happen to the next set of books. Until this one stops “working”. Or they find the next pattern.

Don’t these people understand the basic point of statistics, that correlation is not causation? If that’s too maths-y for those publishing folks, perhaps they should refer to the verbal/textual version of a related idea from this famous lecture by Richard Feynman titled “Cargo Cult Science”:

“(This is) what I would like to call Cargo Cult Science.  In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people.  During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.  So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.  They’re doing everything right.  The form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn’t work.  No airplanes land.  So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”

Now I realize that it’s quite probable that publishers value the quality and theme of the story (far) more than the title. All they may be doing here is deciding that everything else being equal, a “Girl” in the title would increase the odds of success. If that’s all there is to all this, great. Just as long as they remember that sometimes we fall in love with trends we spot and theories we come up that we forget the other oft-quoted line from that same Feynman lecture:

“You must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”