The Frequency Illusion and Biases in Publishing

Why it feels like everyone is successful except you.

Like any other writer, I’m no stranger to the devastating sentiment of feeling left behind in the industry. The jealousy-free perception that everyone else is moving forward with literary agents and book deals while you’re drowning in rejections.

Allow me to rationalize why you feel this way and why, statistically, you’re not the odd one for not being where you want to be—yet.

The Actual Statistic

Agent acceptance rate lands between 0.01% and 4%. The percentage fluctuates between newer agents who may sign 20 clients a year compared to more senior agents who add no more than 1 or 2 authors to their longer list of clients.

Publishers offer a deal to approximately 2% of the books they receive. Together with the previous statistic, that means there’s roughly a 0.0002% to 0.08% chance of you publishing your book.

You’ll be wondering how it's possible, then, that you’ve seen so many writers post book deals online and announce they signed with an agent. Let’s talk about it!

Frequency Illusion

The frequency illusion (also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon) is a cognitive bias in which a person notices a specific concept, word, or product more frequently after recently becoming aware of it.

The frequency illusion dictates that your interest in a certain topic makes you more perceptive to this type of content. Because you’re aware of the process and outcome of querying and being on submission, you notice these posts. The algorithm knows this, too, and will push it to your page. That’s when you begin to think “everyone is getting agented or published”, and every new success post will feed your confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs, values, or decisions.

Once you’ve told yourself that “everyone is successful but me”, every new post will serve as ‘proof’ of your conviction. That’s what we call confirmation bias.

You’ve totally heard this before, I know. That doesn’t really explain why, factually, your moots on any given social media are all getting agented and selling books. If the percentage is so low, why are so many people in your immediate circle part of that low percentage?

Well, that brings us to the next bias.

Selection Bias

Selection bias is the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups, or data for analysis in such a way that the association between exposure and outcome among those selected for analysis differs from the association among those eligible.

The likelihood of publishing a book is low, yes, but among the 100% who try, there are many different people. Among them, there’s John in Chicago, who wrote a book, didn’t edit, and blindly sent it to agents; there’s also sixteen-year-old Emily in Brighton with a 250,000-word rom-com.

Chances are, the people you’re surrounded by are part of a different type of writer, people who have researched the process extensively, who are drafting their fifth books, and have been querying for longer periods of time. They’re writers who have put in the effort in their craft, tested what resonates with the industry, and persisted.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re among them. Every time you draft a better query letter and improve your pitch, your chances of landing that agent improve.

It makes sense that these people you’re mutuals with, who have put so much time and effort into this, are the ones finding success in publishing. You’re just not seeing everyone who falls behind.

Survivorship Bias

Survivorship bias, or survivor bias, is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.

People don’t post the failures. You’ll rarely see the repeated times people have shelved their books, faced a harsh rejection, or quit altogether from querying. Those posts get fewer likes and traction, and many writers are afraid of portraying themselves online as failures. The bias is amplified in the way social media pushes the wins.

This is especially true for agented authors. Being on submission can be very disheartening. Agents need to play into the hype of their new books when they submit to editors; if the author spends weeks announcing online that their book is on sub but no editor has picked it up yet, it creates a sense of “it wasn’t that good, then”. People have their books die on sub, they change agents, write another book, and try again.

Success isn’t always linear.

Not posting about this process is strategic. There’s a lot of rejection you will never see because agents strive to position their clients in the best light.

Unlike with landing an agent, you also won’t see a breakdown of how many rejections they receive and the final acceptance rate. A book deal is exclusively about the win. If there was an auction, pre-empt, or big deal, you’ll see those too, but they won’t tell you whether they sent it to 100 editors or 10.

There are also no posts about who was left behind. The people around you are what’s left. The ones who kept at it, held onto their motivation, and worked on improving. The group is made up of survivors. These survivors cluster together, provide feedback, and share advice. That’s why the likelihood of success tends to shift and creates the selection bias I’ve mentioned before.

The more you advance in the pipeline of traditional publishing, the fewer failures you’ll see.

Essentially, because you see 100% of the success but perhaps only 5% of the failures, you assume 20% or 50% of people who try are making it.

Where does success come from then?

Persistence is the biggest key factor. I don’t mean persistence as in sending the same thing over and over again. You learn to revise more, you create a group of people who provide invaluable feedback before you query, you query for longer than average while others give up along the way, and you submerge yourself in every bit of information about industry trends.

You’re only seeing success because you’ve become one of the persistent survivors surrounded by other survivors. Their efforts are finally paying off; yours will too.