All things being equal, no two things really are equal, are they? That strange little fact, along with a rule thought up by an Italian economist, could improve your fiction writing, or at least allow you to manage your fiction-writing time and other resources better.
Vilfredo Pareto came up with a principle now named for him—the Pareto Principle. It’s also called the “80-20 Rule” and the “Law of the Vital Few.” Pareto noted the following inequalities, or uneven distributions: only 20% of the Italian people owned 80% of the land, and in his garden, 20% of the peapods contained 80% of the peas.
It’s surprising how often this rule applies in everyday life, and it could even apply to your writing. Let’s say you’ve written ten stories and had them published, and over a given period, here were the number of sales:
| Title | Sales |
| The Wind-Sphere Ship | 12 |
| Within Victorian Mists | 40 |
| Alexander’s Odyssey | 8 |
| Leonardo’s Lion | 4 |
| A Steampunk Carol | 9 |
| The Six Hundred Dollar Man | 6 |
| A Tale More True | 1 |
| Rallying Cry / Last Vessel of Atlantis | 2 |
| To Be First/Wheels of Heaven | 1 |
| Time’s Deforméd Hand | 4 |
If I sort the data in order from most to least, make a bar chart, and add a line representing the cumulative percentage, I get a Pareto Chart, like this:
If these really were my sales numbers, I’d note it’s not quite true that 20% of my stories were getting 80% of the sales, but this graph still illustrates the concept of the vital few.
Seeing this data, you might be tempted to shift all your marketing efforts to the three or four books currently selling well. Not a bad idea, but I’d caution you to continue monitoring the books out at the ‘tail’ of the curve. Watch for a book that’s trending leftward and increasing in popularity.
If you had enough data on your (and others’) writing efforts, you might find:
- 80% of your writing time is spent on 20% of your writing product. Thanks to Bob Parnell for this one, and the next two.
- 20% of all writers achieve 80% of the sales income.
- 20% of writers are sending 80% of the submissions to publishers.
- 20% of your science fiction world-building will be enough to satisfy 80% of your story’s needs. Thanks to Veronica Sicoe for that.
- 80% of your sales come from 20% of your marketing efforts.
- 20% of your blog posts get 80% of the hits.
- 80% of all fiction book sales occur in 20% of the genres.
I’d caution you not to take a strict interpretation of the Pareto Principle. It’s just a guide to show you the outputs of your efforts are not uniform, and give you ideas about where to focus. There’s a good critique of the Pareto Principle written in a guest post by author Debbi Mack.
For now, I think we’d all agree that 80% of the best fiction out there is written by 20% of the authors, especially that one who calls himself—
Poseidon’s Scribe