How to Woo Cumulative Advantage

This post is a bit of an outlier, although it does have some relevance to productivity and prolificacy.

I read Advantage: Harnessing Cumulative Advantage In The Winner Takes All Publishing Market in one sitting.

It’s dense. It has charts and graphs and footnotes. It is not prescriptive (you have to deconstruct it carefully to figure out what to do) — but that’s for a reason (it’s about crafting your own brand/approach).

I’ve been looking for an indie-publishing how-to that creates a model of the indie marketplace for years now.  This one explains the marketplace in a way that makes sense. You get to see why some authors “inexplicably” crash the top 100 despite crappy covers, bad writing and thin story. It’s a bit of luck and a lot more of other factors that no one else is talking about — this “cumulative advantage” that Solari describes.

And that isn’t a phrase he coined as a marketing thing. It’s a real scientific/economic principle.

How does a book about the economics of indie publishing relate to prolificacy?

Solari doesn’t say so explicitly, but the logic is inherent. With every book you release, if you release it in the right way, you are adding to your cumulative advantage, to increase your sales, reputation and brand, and also improving the engagement of your email list and increasing the loyalty of your readers.

It makes sense that the more books you can put out there, the greater that advantage grows.

This has been the most eye-opening how-to book I’ve read this year.

Give it a try.

t.

Scroll to Top