FiveThirtyEight Guy Sells Two Books With Two Pages?

Late last week, the NY Observer reported that FiveThirtyEight.com founder Nate Silver had sold the Penguin Group two books, “one about the art of prediction and the other a Freakonomics-style guide to the mechanics of electoral politics,” for something like $700,000. Yesterday, at FishbowlNY, Glynnis MacNicol shared some details about Silver’s sales pitch: “We heard the two book deal Silver made with Penguin was based solely on two pages of bullet-pointed ideas,” she revealed, “and some printouts of blog entries.”

MacNicol also shared some additional details with us behind the scenes, which jibe neatly with the Observer item: “First book called Electrometrics, a fun-with-statistics kind of book: Do polls influence voter behavior? Does Get Out The Vote Work? etc.,” she emailed. “Second book: The Alpha Geek Chronicles: About the new diviners/modern-day prophets, using their laptops to forecast the future. It will be broader than just politics, though, looking at everything from global warming to hurricane prediction to financial market stuff.”

The general consensus, by the way, appears to be that if anybody deserves to walk into an editor’s office with an executive summary and walk out with $700K, it would be Silver—who managed to singlehandedly turn the political polling establishment on its ear this election, becoming a must-read columnist for political junkies of all persuasions in the process.

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