Oxfam, John Wayne and The Da Vinci Code - statistically wonderful or rubbish?

Author: Julian Champkin

Who is the best – and who is the worst - writer in the world? One way to measure the best is by sales: the writer who sells most copies must be good. One way to measure the worst is by the reverse of sales: by copies that readers throw or give away. If you have read the thing (or read the first three pages and given up in disgust) and don’t want it cluttering up your shelves any more it can’t be that good; any decent book you would surely want to keep and re-read some day.

So whose books are most often given to charity shops? Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. So Dan Brown must be the worst modern writer in the world.

The statistic about Brown being the most-disposed-of author comes from Oxfam, whose third annual Bookfest has released its annual top ten of most donated authors. The survey of Oxfam’s 685 shops and bookshops found that Dan Brown was the most donated author for the third year in a row. Our conclusion that Brown is an eminently-disposable author seems sound.

Hang on a bit. Let’s return to our first question. Who sells most copies of his books? Dan Brown, dammit. The first-edition print run for his da Vinci Code follow-up was 5.6 million, a world record for an adult hard-cover novel. And So Brown is simultaneously the best modern author and the worst. Confusing, convincing or what?

And even Oxfam’s figures back that up. They show that Brown’s books are not only given to their charity shops in huge volume, those donated copies are also bought from the charity shops in equally-huge volume. (Which is fortunate, or the shops would soon be overflowing with pile upon pile of Da Vinci Code-books.)

Which just goes to show that if you are measuring anything by numbers, make sure that your original premise is not false. Ours was that sales are a measure of good writing, and that returns are a measure of bad writing. Neither assumption is remotely true.

All too often, even in peer-reviewed science (and today’s little exercise was nothing like that) what the researcher wishes to prove somehow gets proved. I have to admit a personal dislike of Dan Brown’s books; and that dislike has coloured all of my analysis above. I would love to prove that he is a lousy writer. I almost did it; but my analysis was flawed. The same thing happens in peer-reviewed science and it even has a name: it is called White Hat bias. (It comes from cowboy films, where the good guys wear the big white hats and end up winning.)

Big John Wayne, king of the White Hat cowboys.

White Hat research tends to prove what the researcher wants to prove, or (which is often the same thing) what the people paying for it want to have proved. An example from last year was a survey which ‘proved’ that elective Caesarean births in third-world Asian countries were more dangerous than normal births. It was paid for by a UN organisation which was politically heavily biased against unnecessary medical interventions. When its numbers were looked at by anyone who was at all impartial, the figures showed very obviously the exact reverse.

(Personally I still think Brown’s books are laughably awful. But Terry Pratchett’s Discworld are wonderful – and he is number four on the Oxfam list. Shall we indulge in a little more White Hat research and prove, from his sales, that he is the best of modern writers – and conveniently forget to do the equivalent bit of research on his returns? But probably statistics cannot really judge the literary quality of a book.)

Oxfam’s annual nationwide book festival, Bookfest, runs from 2 to 17 July, with book-related events, author readings and book signings across Oxfam’s nationwide network of shops and specialist bookshops.