Outlier

"Diamonds in the rough, though, remain the outliers. “For every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there’s two that should have been published,” said Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, who said she had been inundated by requests from self-published authors to sell their books."
["Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab", by Motoko Rich, NY Times, January 27, 2009*]

NOUN: 1. One whose domicile lies at an appreciable distance from his or her place of business. 2. A value far from most others in a set of data: “Outliers make statistical analyses difficult” (Harvey Motulsky, GraphPad Insight (from website) Number 12, Spring 1997 ). 3. Geology A portion of stratified rock separated from a main formation by erosion.
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