At some point you become wise enough to be able to judge for yourself. If somebody tells you the Earth is flat, do you immediately believe them if they have some scientific degree? Most people won't. They will make a judgement based on what they know so far. Others will believe, and will have their (various) reasons. People are different and very, very complicated. Even scientists are not quite sure why we make one decision or another. But life is made of decisions. Writing included. There are some proposals at the moment, that children should learn in school how to decide what is fake news and how to be able to pick the right sources. Maybe wait till the textbooks come out . Or, try to hone those same skills, just like many others do, getting wiser so to say. People do it, it's possible .
I want to believe this is true, but I'm not sure it is. And it isn't just talent. I think people can be led astray. I have definitely beta read one or two novels written by people who had eight complete books out over 10+ years, and the writing wasn't any different than someone's second short story ever as posted to the workshop. It doesn't seem like better ways of going about learning to write are self evident, and not everyone improves just by reading tastefully written books. Writing reminds me a lot of martial arts. Cage fighting went into the mainstream something like 25 years ago, and to this day, new videos get posted of bullshido martial arts masters challenging FIGHTERS because the BS artist ended up believing their own misunderstanding. People can train for decades in an environment drowning in videos of boxing, grappling, MMA, and real life altercations, and still end up doing all the wrong stuff in all the wrong ways. They might even be physically talented, and still suffer from this. Classical music doesn't have this problem. There are standard ways to learn instruments, lots of schools with various levels of prestige, camps where serious students compete, and a well defined set of skills that someone has to master at audition. You can look at a teachers credentials, or see if their students got into conservatory. There is no question. Martial arts isn't like that. There is no gate keeper. Anyone can rent an empty room and when you walk in, you are trusting them to tell you the truth. Every day you spend learning bullshit makes you more invested, and if you are ever lucky enough to put your skills to the test in an environment where you won't be badly hurt, you will be forced to decide if you were wrong all along, or if you need to double down on the ideology to protect your ego/culture/whatever. Worse, people in martial arts are in a rush to become respected masters. That's the whole point of belts--external validation that can be dangled and released at an appropriate time. Outside of maybe Judo and Brazilian Jujitsu, there isn't much in the way of gate keepers, so the people giving out the belts have not been screened. Still, people desire them, and they will turn a blind eyes to all kinds of failures in order to be in the front and receive respect. I think creative writing has a lot of this same kind of phenomenon. Teachers not vetted by gate keepers. Experts / masters of the craft teaching what they think, instead of what they know and do, and being wrong. Journeymen in an anxious rush to become respected authors Anti-intellectualism and a hostility toward the idea of good taste ***because of all that, individuals are at the mercy of their IQs, relationships, naturally arising taste, humility, and so on to improve, because there are so many forces trying to lead people astray. The only way to be certain you are avoiding this is to pay for a good school with a teacher who has been successful in your style, or in producing students of a style, quality, and level of success you find acceptable. Another way is to enter the gauntlet of professional rejection, constantly trying to refine the craft in a way that is acceptable to editors. Otherwise, we are all pretty adrift.
We were talking about The Last Jedi, as an example, and you said "Ticket sales over time, exit polling, and home video sales suggest that it's a well liked movie overall although divisive in the core fan base." Then: "Staying power at the box office (or a best seller list, for products in other mediums) indicates that word of mouth is good and that you might very well be having repeat sales to already satisfied customers." So here's the box office: Week 1: $296,602,356 Week 18: $8,632 So do these figures suggest it doesn't have staying power? I agree about Metacritic. But Youtube does not require reviews to show if people agree with the review. I was gauging the likes.
18 weeks sounds like a lot of weeks—that’s over four months. I’d need to know what’s a good, bad, or indifferent number of weeks.
So are you a successful writer? Do you earn a decent living from it and did that happen for free? I'd like to know how you could buy a book that hasn't been advertised. Any example? You're confusing 'being smart' with being human. Everyone is influenced by advertising. It's subconscious effects have been studied, tried and tested over many years.
I don't understand the question. It's all the weeks of the box office. $168,095,872 $84,264,374 $31,311,982 $17,443,892 $8,823,345 $5,574,959 $3,319,499 $1,986,498 $952,941 $487,918 $354,095 $398,886 $249,192 $165,094 $100,118 $41,729 $8,632
I have a feeling I'm doing a lot better than you given that I am actually a writer and not someone who just wants to complain about things that actually have very little to do with writing. I'm done with this argument.
I'd call 18 weeks of box office returns pretty solid. Like I said, if you compare the total likes and dislikes to the total views, there's a substantial gap. That's the way it is on pretty much every video on the platform. We can't be sure what most of the viewers thought of the review itself. Of course, none of this even touches on the issue issues involved with looking at YouTube reviews and trying to extrapolate to the entire audience at large. It's not a representative sample.
I don't think that's accurate - self-publishers are PUBLISHERS, so if they pay for ads, that's the publisher paying for ads. And a lot of the most successful self-pubbed authors I'm aware of have very active social media presences. Can you think of a self-published author who hit the NYT list who DOESN'T have a big social media presence and DIDN'T pay for ads?
If writing was possible to be learned from scratch, then there would have been a proportional increase in quality works published in the recent decades, after the many books, forums, blogs etc advice places started popping up like mushrooms in the age of computers and internet. But it's not happening. The amount of able writers is kind of the same. Pynchon? Also, every successful author in China
Here are the amazon ratings of a handful of his most recognized work. It - 4 1/2 stars, 4K+ reviews The Stand - 4 1/2 stars, 3500+ reviews Pet Sematary - 4 1/2 stars, 4K+ reviews Carrie - 4 1/2 stars, 900+ reviews The Shining - 4 1/2 stars, 4K+ reviews The Green Mile - 5 stars, 1300+ reviews The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - 4 1/2 stars, 16k+ reviews Misery - 4 1/2 stars, 700+ reviews King is nearly always in the top five of every greatest horror author list you can find. The public loves him. It's undeniable.
I find that advise is like an asshole. Everyone has it, and sometimes it stinks. No matter the success of the one giving the advise, I listen. If it makes sense then I'll try it and if it doesnt then I leave it there. I've gotten terrible advise from people like King and wonderful advise from my coworkers who I don't think have any formal writing experience. Likewise some of the stuff that King says resonates and I try and integrate it into my writing where it makes sense. I found that Brandon Sanderson (wrote the last three Wheel of Time books after Robert Jordan passed) has videos of his BYU lectures on YouTube and it has been immensely helpful in getting me to understand basic principles of writing. I'm not the kind of person who can read a how-to book on writing and learn much. I learn from listening and doing. My favorite writers are Lovecraft, Clancy, Crichton and the group of author who continue to write Games Workshop's Horus Heresy series (Graham McNeil, Dan Abnett, Ben Counter, Ect.). Some of their work is considered bestselling, some isn't. Just because it's on a list compiled by people who get paid to create it doesnt make them any less great that any other, it's all personal opinion. That's one man's opinion.
I'm not sure what the gap, or absence of likes/dislikes, shows. To me, it's irrelevant. The proportion of likes to dislikes is what matters, surely. It may not be representative, but that doesn't mean it's completely wrong. It does, however, support the negative reaction according to Metacritic users. That seems to me better than box-office (which could include any number of disappointed people), Disc buyers (which could include any number of gift buyers, and people who haven't seen it yet), people who pay per view, etc.
When you pick 'his most recognized works', what you're doing is cherry-picking. You've probably ignored 20 of his failures. What people so often do is confuse the word biggest/greatest/best with most liked. And very often they are just using sales to gauge. My whole argument is that being a bestseller does not mean you are a really good writer. And the irony is that the 2nd item that comes up when I google "greatest horror writers" is this: http://booklaunch.io/bestsellers/best-horror-authors And it shows King at the #1 spot. And then at the #7 sport is Ramsey Campbell, and the irony is that the editor of the page says: "My favorite writer. Hands down. Now shut up and read him before disagreeing." This is exactly how people think. They can't help saying King is the best, even when their personal opinion is that he isn't. It's like people are too frightened to admit it or something.
It's extremely relevant. You're assuming the ratio of likes to dislikes would hold steady if you tracked down everyone in the review's audience and forced them to choose an option. It is completely wrong to try applying the review to anything beyond Plinkett's audience. And saying it supports the Metacritic score is like saying most West Virginians support the President. Yeah, so? It means nothing on the whole. I can point to exit polling that shows audiences agree with the professional critics. If even close to half the consuming audience disliked the movie--which would be required for your statements about popular consensus to be true--you would've seen a far more precipitous drop in box office returns than the stats show. The box office and home video sales are as close as you can get to encompassing the entire fanbase; that will always make it more useful than the like:dislike ratio on one review.
I'm not assuming anything about all the other viewers of the video. I'm using a sample to represent the population in general, which is how polls and voting works. And facts are established by looking at different evidence and seeing if they support each other. That's actually how science works. Exit polling, as already mentioned, is a tiny sample compared to the 74,000 size of likes/dislikes on that review. Then there's this review: which also trashes the movie and has 81% likes. And this one which trashes it and has 84% likes and this one with 83% likes And I've pointed out that you have no idea what people thought of the movie, except from the small exit polls. And why would there be a more precipitous box office? Marketing influences what people think of the movie before they've seen it.
Which is how polls work IF THEY'RE SCIENTIFIC. You've done nothing to control this little example, a basic part of any experiment. As multiple people have explained, your sample is biased from the start. Sample size doesn't matter if its composition isn't representative of the whole. Your 74000 sample size from a Plinkett review is equivalent to only sampling 74000 Republicans about whether they like the President. Unlike your sample, the samples taken by exit polling companies are carefully calibrated to be representative. http://www.denofgeek.com/us/255294/cinemascore-and-exit-polling-in-hollywood-what-is-it Further, your simple like:dislike sample doesn't let us know why viewers clicked what they did. Maybe somebody who liked the movie liked the video because they respected the opinion given. Maybe someone else who hated the movie disliked the video because of the way it presented its opinions. You'll never be able to tell without tracking down each individual, because like/dislike is a binary that gives no further information. These other reviews prove nothing. They tap into the same niche as Plinkett. To continue the political analogy, your use of them is like citing the President's approval in states such as West Virginia, North Dakota, and Oklahoma and acting like that is representative of the nation as a whole. Exit polling has proven more reliable than cherrypicking reviews on the Internet. You get so hung up on marketing that you forget word of mouth about the final product becomes a factor once that product is released. Maybe Joe is planning on going to see a movie. Maybe his best friend goes and sees the movie first. Suppose that friend says the movie was garbage. Joe has the same entertainment tastes as his friend, so he ends up opting not to see the movie and spends his money on something else. This sort of thing on a wider scale would cause a precipitous drop in earnings if over half the fanbase regarded TLJ as an absolutely awful movie. It's certainly happened to other movies. But there wasn't that sort of sharp drop in earnings with TLJ. Edit: And look what I found on TLJ's blu-Ray numbers: http://screencrush.com/blu-ray-sales-2018-star-wars-last-jedi/ Highest selling blu ray so far this year in a shrinking home video market.
When did I say Youtube likes are science? I agree each sample is inaccurate. But many samples, including Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, support each other. If sample size doesn't matter when not representative, I guess voting in an election doesn't work then. Thank you for your link. It says: "Six hundred ballots from five cinemas is still a relatively low sample size" Explain how exit polls are more reliable. Explain how they are representative. All your maybes are unconvincing. Liking a review which trashes your beloved movie is silly. How on earth do you know all these reviews are tapping into the same niche as Plinkett? Are you using magic? Are you seriously suggesting word of mouth can spread so quickly. The box office went down week after week. Does that sound like word of mouth is spreading a positive message?
You seem more interested in making us see your point than listening to ours. Entertainment is subjective, I personally liked the Last Jedi, esp what they did with Kylo and Rey. You didn't I'm guessing, okay fair we have different opinions. That is the beauty of being humans, we're individuals and not some mass hivemind!
You said it in the first paragraph of the post I quoted. And it doesn't matter if those inaccurate samples support each other, precisely because they're inaccurate. See my popular opinion analogy. *Facepalm*. That's not a remotely equivalent comparison. Voting in an election is more like going to see a movie. It's not like liking a review. Why are they more reliable? Because they tap into the different demographics of the audience, cutting along race, age, and gender lines along with varying levels of fan type. This is why they're more representative. I'll also point out that other exit polling companies use bigger samples than CinemaScores does. With Star Wars, Plinkett taps into the OT purist part of the fanbase; that doesn't account for new fans brought in by the sequels or milder fans who don't idolize the OT. And as mentioned before, somebody who likes the movie probably isn't going to watch this review, or any other like it, and thus won't be pressing that dislike button. It doesn't matter if it's silly. It's a possibility you cannot discount because the like/dislike binary gives you no info about why that button was pressed. This is what I meant about your experiment not being controlled. You can look at both the arguments made and the comment sections and see they're drawing on the same group of people. You'll see this in the corners of the Internet that are more positive about the movie too. Remember my popular opinion poll in various states analogy? Some lean one way, some the other. Sections of the Internet are much the same. We do live in the age of the Internet and other electronic communications, remember. But word of mouth doesn't need to spread very far to mess with a work's profits. Remember my example with Joe? Scale that up. Half the fanbase or more who bought tickets, a copy of the game, a copy of the book, etc. at launch detest it. Then they voice that opinion to friends and family. People who might have been interested in consuming that media. Now they're more skeptical about the work, and because humans are risk averse many will shy away and consume media they're more certain they'll like. Box office returns almost always go down week after week. Most people who really want to see a movie usually do so within the first week. I can't recall a movie that did better in Week 2 than Week 1. The issue, as I've already said, is rate of decline. If over half the fanbase didn't like the movie--which is your claim--we'd expect box office returns to sink like a rock. We don't see that. Instead, TLJ held the #1 spot for somewhere around a month. Now let's turn to blu-ray sales. I'm not surprised you didn't respond to that link; it really doesn't help your point. Highest selling blu-ray so far this year, over three million copies, and it only came out in April. It's beating out movies that were far less divisive in their own fanbases, such as Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther. Black Panther actually out earned TLJ at the box office, but currently lags about 400k copies back. And remember, this is just physical blu-rays. These figures don't include digital sales through various platforms. You wouldn't see three million copies sold so far if over half the audience didn't like the movie. It certainly wouldn't be leading sales so far this year. Both MCU movies I previously mentioned would've crushed it if that were the case. You want a movie that does have popular consensus against it, you can look at Justice League puttering along back there. Honestly, it feels like you regard your opinions as objective fact and are determined to make everyone else share your beliefs. That results in contradictory positions like: "Steven King isn't a good writer no matter how popular he is" And "Popular consensus is very much against The Last Jedi, therefore it's a bad movie" I don't care how you feel about any individual creator or piece of work; we're all entitled to our own opinions, especially with something as subjective as art. But you're not entitled to your own facts.
