"Our analysis of 1.8m reviews suggests that writer’s block does afflict follow-up books" More likely it's regression toward the mean[1]. The quality of a novel

"Our analysis of 1.8m reviews suggests that writer’s block does afflict follow-up books" More likely it's regression toward the mean[1]. The quality of a novel is partially based on random chance. Any selection of authors you make will be biased towards those who were initially lucky enough to get noticed by the study, and can be expected to have average luck for their subsequent works. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean