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Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
- codazoda 4y agoI dunno, seems that the “spirit” of these comments is correct. I’ve self-published half a dozen small books that have only low double digit sales. The comment that goes through the data is also really interesting.
- lovingCranberry 4y agoPretty long post for "I know that I know nothing". However, there is gold in the comment section: Kristen McLean actually throws some numbers at us [1]. "66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks". Well, uh, that's what I thought. Interesting nonetheless. [1] https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen/comment/8883524 https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...
- thomascgalvin 4y agoI know that I know nothing is a very important realization, though, and if a lot of words helps someone else realize that they know nothing, too, it's probably worth it.
- imwillofficial 4y agoSure as hell isn’t for me.
- kortilla 4y agoSure, but don’t click the publish button. There is already so much noise out there that we shouldn’t actively drown out people who actually do know something.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoSo many people think they know something wrongly. It’s a breath of fresh air when someone doesn’t pretend they do.
- Entinel 4y agoCompletely disagree. There is value in someone laying out the facts and saying "What does this mean? No idea!" Second, these post are usually a vehicle for someone who actually knows something as seen in the comments of this article. Finally, it's their slice of the internet and they're free to publish whatever they feel.
- adfm 4y agoAgreed! Now I have that Operation Ivy ear worm stuck in my head. https://youtu.be/hOqvWiDKv_w https://youtu.be/hOqvWiDKv_w Listen at your own risk.
- cityzen 4y agoyou da real MVP
- HiIAmIlNano 4y agoGreat quote. Huge band!
- lukeschwartz 4y agoThe comment should have been the post. And this is the unsurprising TLDR: "The long and short of it is publishing is very much a gambler's game, and I think that has been clear from the testimony in the DOJ case. It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year."
- fancyfredbot 4y agoMaybe this is splitting hairs but this didn't make publishing seem like gambling to me. It sounds like if I can publish enough titles at a low enough cost per title I'm guaranteed to make money.
- lukeschwartz 4y agoYou're guaranteed to make little money, yes. The big publishers make most of their revenue from a small number of titles that make publishing any other title viable.
- dalai 4y agoActually I think the post highlights that even the statistic you quoted means less than one thinks it means. For example, some of the books included may have been only a few weeks on the market. Some titles may be niche books with the expected lower sales volume calculated in the price. BookScan only covers a certain percentage of print sales in the US, the total sales could be more than double that.
- tlarkworthy 4y agoNo it's a very good stat, I think they mean measure after 52 weeks, and note they exclude self published books, it's the crème and still suffers from huge Pareto (as expected)
- Retric 4y ago“data showing at least 1 unit sale over the last 52 weeks coming from publishers of all sizes, including individuals.” “Collectively, 45,571 unique ISBNs appear for these publishers in our frontlist sales data for the last 52 weeks (thru week ending 8-24-2022).“ Both descriptions mean books sold for 1 of the 52 weeks would be included. You would need to see how quickly sales spike and fall off to see how much those statistics underestimate sales over a books first year. Similarly they cover 16,000 retailers, however it could be some of these books like say textbooks are primarily sold outside of these channels.
- lake_vincent 4y agoI used to work for a big name scientific publisher, and we published a lot of super-niche research monographs that didn't sell many copies. What a lot of people don't understand was that our bread and butter came from university libraries. We published a lot of books not because they sold individually, but libraries wanted them. They like collections!
- evandwight 4y ago>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more >>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies >>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies >>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies >>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies >>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies >>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies >>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies - Kristen McLean from NPD BookScan
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago> Because this is clearly a slice, and most likely provided by one of the parties to the suit, I decided to limit my data to the frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in the U.S. Trade market. My ISBN list is a little smaller than the one quoted in the DOJ, but the principals will be the same. > The data below includes frontlist titles from Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley. The figures below only include books published by these publishers themselves, not pubishers they distribute.
- AlbertCory 4y agoWhen you limit your data to those published by (fairly) large publishers, you've already skewed the data irreparably. Most of them won't even look at a book unless an agent brings it to them, and most agents won't represent most would-be authors. On the other hand, some technical books don't require agents, and O'Reilly has to be a very large publisher in terms of books sold. Some other categories don't, either -- I know someone who publishes "cozy mysteries" through a real publisher (not a giant one), and she doesn't have an agent.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago> On the other hand, some technical books don't require agents, and O'Reilly has to be a very large publisher in terms of books sold. I think you are drastically over-estimating the share of developers that read software development related books. Out of the 150+ software engineers I worked with on a daily basis throughout my career so far, I can guarantee you not even 5% have ever read programming books (and I work at a FAANG, not your average mom and pop shop). It's a niche market.
- swatcoder 4y agoTLDR; author doesn't find the numbers shared in some Twitter gossip as plausible, but has no better data than their own gut feeling from being in the industry. There doesn't seem to be much to take home here, other than that the original tweet isn't clear about its own denotation or veracity.
- phantom_of_cato 4y agoI really don't like "fact-checking" articles like this which don't contain many useful facts, only pedantry. The first comment (by Kristen McLean from NPD BookScan) is much more interesting than the article itself: >>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more >>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies >>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies >>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies >>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies >>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies >>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies >>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies So, ~66.1% or 2/3 of books in their dataset sell under a thousand copies.
- II2II 4y agoThe pedantry was intended to point out that there is plenty of room for publishers to mislead when they don't detail how the data is collected. When you don't have access to the data, it is usually the best one can do. Even the comment by Kristen McLean has limits, though they are much more forthcoming about what the data includes. That said, I think they summed it up best when they said publishing is a gambler's game. That being said, whether the outcome is good or bad for a gambler depends upon how much they invested and the return across all of those bets. Their data does not venture into financial aspects. At best, it gives us an idea of the minimum number of units sold in a particular subset of the market.
- Cyberdog 4y agoI think those data points work together with the "let's think this through for a bit" approach of the article. Particularly, note that the stats that you quoted in your comment are for a 52-week period and include everything that could be considered a "book." I think it's quite logical that 2007's Farmer's Almanac would sell less than 12 copies in the last year, or some vanity-published, typo-laden sci-fi novel of the type my family would sometimes get for me for Christmas (because if it's sold by the Amazon dot Com then it can't be that bad, right?).
- yieldcrv 4y agoI was just about to comment this as well, I think that 66% selling under 1,000 is just as damning as the "less than 12 copies" thing making the rounds from the DOJ interpretation Books ain't it!
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoThus my self-publishing goal - to sell more than 12 copies. Well 14. Don't want to be superstitious !
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoI bet friends and family can help achieve such an ambitious goal, unless you are a really unlikeable person.
- ghaff 4y agoIn my experience friends and family often tend to want to be given copies—which they may or may not read.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoThat only means that sales aren't your forté. Good friends and family members can be sold many copies each — which they may or may not read.
- ghaff 4y agoI guess not. I don’t really want to push friends and family to buy things from me they don’t really want.
- _tom_ 4y agoMy goal is to sell one to someone I don't know. Friends don't count.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoWho has 14 friends and family? I have like one friend and two family.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoAha - the sub-clause that drags down my lofty ambition ...
- ZiiS 4y ago"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"
- memling 4y ago> "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" There's a good book on this called "Damned Lies and Statistics" that I recommend to people.[1,2] [1]: https://archive.org/details/damnedliesstatis00best https://archive.org/details/damnedliesstatis00best [2]: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520274709/damned-lies-and-statistics https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520274709/damned-lies-and-s...
- fortran77 4y agoThere's also a much earlier "How to Lie with Statistics" (published in 1954). I read it in high school (45 years ago) https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff-ebook/dp/B00351DSX2/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=How+to+lie+with+statistics&qid=1662863585&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff-ebook...
- therealdrag0 4y agoI read it like 2 years ago and was very impressed how relevant it was. 10/10 required reading.
- dredmorbius 4y agoHTLwS was written as tobacco-lobby propaganda. <https://www.refsmmat.com/articles/smoking-statistics.html https://www.refsmmat.com/articles/smoking-statistics.html>
- Waterluvian 4y agoI forget if there’s a term for this, but I once read (and subsequently discovered) that a large portion of disagreements are simply because people are working with different definitions for things. This seems like an example of that: depending on how you define “book” these claims are accurate or not.
- mihaic 4y agoYes, I've also struggled to pause many disagreements just to clarify terms, ironically because the other person didn't get what I was doing since there is no common word for this sort of disagreement. If anyone has a good one, please chime in.
- Waterluvian 4y agoSemantic mismatch? Miscontextualization?
- mihaic 4y agoI like the suggestions, I do think it need to be a bit shorter to be viral. Riffing on this, how does "we've misdefined this" sound?
- therealdrag0 4y agoWhy not just “let’s define ours terms so we don’t talk passed each other? What do you mean by X?”
- ajhurliman 4y ago#letsdefineourtermssowedonttalkpassedeachother?whatdoyoumeanbyx? is sorta hard to type out, a shorthand term may lend itself to a common understanding of the situation. Like "a picture of yourself" got coined as a selfie, it seems obvious now through constant use, but there was a time when the phenomenon existed and we had a lexical gap in describing it.
- keyle 4y agoThe whole 2% makes 95% of all revenues doesn't just apply to books... it certainly is true for the video game industry, and I suspect, most of the industries being sold online.
- nemo44x 4y agoYeah power law distributions are everywhere nowadays. Nassim Taleb talks about this a lot and uses book sales as a reference, which is cheeky since he’s doing it in his own best seller books.
- Gigachad 4y agoOn video game sales, I find it interesting how successful games can be while being 90% the same as an existing established game. I’m not coming at this from some kind of ethics/copyright perspective, I think it’s totally fine to rehash the same idea. I’m just surprised they sell so well when I look and think “why would I buy this, I basically already have it”. The particular example I’m thinking of is a series called Overcooked which is a co op time management game and right now one of the hot sellers on steam is called Plate Up which seems to be basically the same thing at a similar level of polish. The real learning I guess is to not be discouraged by existing products, because they don’t seem to prevent you from succeeding even when you can’t quite define why yours is better than the rest.
- lillecarl 4y agoOfc this depends on the industry, people in infrastructure for example prefer battle tested tools so breaking into the market is harder and requires a significant investment. Same with game engines, people don't write them these days.
- xmprt 4y ago> The real learning I guess is to not be discouraged by existing products This applies to the real world a lot too. If you have a lot of competitors in your space, it's a good sign because the market has already been validated. It's obviously best to be the first in a good market but it's hard to predict whether the market is good when you're the only one playing. In games I think the principle applies even more because gamers often want to play more of the same and once they finish all the Overcooked content another game that fills that need will work. Plate Up has also gotten popularized by many streamers and YouTubers playing it.
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoThis “fact-checker” headline template is quite tired by now.
- quickthrower2 4y agoBecause people have friends?
- phantom_of_cato 4y agoAnd because public libraries sometimes buy uninteresting books to fill their quotas.
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- kazinator 4y agoI would expect that most people who try to write a book and sell it will sell exactly zero copies. They will successfully give a few copies to their friends, and Mom, and that's about it.
- marcodiego 4y agoA histogram of how many books sold a determined amount last year would be better to explain what the article means.
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago> It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year. Sadly, this is why books by celebrities or with a TV or movie tie in are the first to be published and have the most marketing spend.
- paulpauper 4y agoAnother misleading statement is that most books sell a thousand or fewer copies. This makes no delineation between fiction, which is generally intended for a large, broad audience, compared to non-fiction, which is more specific and more books are published as non fiction. Technical, reference books are expected to sell far fewer copies compared to teen fiction.
- mayankvikash 4y agoI was shocked after reading that link, most books sell fewer than 5000 copies.
- dragonwriter 4y agoThe thing about that dozen copies quote that everyone seems to gloss over is “trade titles”; every time I've seen that phrase anywhere else in a publishing context it's been distinguishing, in paperbacks, from mass market titles.
- erwincoumans 4y agoSomeone may write a technical book for a niche community. The book may help others, build a portfolio etc. It doesn't need to earn lots of sales to be satisfying or useful.
- ghaff 4y agoA fair number of books in this vein are also published electronically in some form free of charge. There may also be a physical book because why not. I’ve done that myself.
- perlgeek 4y agoI agree. I've published three books with a publisher, and the one I'm most proud of and which got the best reviews (19 ratings on Amazon, all 5 stars) is the most niche, and got the lowest sales numbers. https://smile.amazon.com/Parsing-Perl-Regexes-Grammars-Recursive-ebook/dp/B0785L6WR6/ https://smile.amazon.com/Parsing-Perl-Regexes-Grammars-Recur... if anybody is interested.
- gverrilla 4y agoMy car broken, so I had to take a long intercity bus trip, for the first time in 15 years. After a short stop in a station, the driver ignited the bus again, but he forgot to turn the internal lights system on - so I couldn't read. I waited a few minutes, but he didn't turn it on, so I had to get up to ask him in the cabin. Coming back, that's when I realized mine was the one and only light on: none of the other 100 passengers had it, so they couldn't possibly be reading, unless electronically. 15 years before, I did remember, it would be at least 3 lights on most of the times, tops 5, but being the only one made me feel lonely.
- spoonjim 4y agoReading on a bus would make me barf in 5 minutes
- ungamedplayer 4y agoThat bites. I can read on rough seas.
- szundi 4y agoThat’s easier. Problem is when the word you are reading is constantly tossed back and forth. Following that makes your head hurt. On the sea is low frequency noise it is much easier.
- obruchez 4y agoThe overwhelming majority of e-readers nowadays have a backlight, right? And reading "electronically" is still reading. But I guess I see your point: reading "traditionally" isn't something that many people do. Just like sitting to listen to an album from start to finish, which is something I did a lot when a was a teenager.
- gverrilla 4y agoSeeing e-readers is very rare here in Brazil, and the only people I've seen using them were law students/professionals (to avoid the weight of paperback). Reading books didn't attract much people ever around here, at least from what I know from life experience, but it was more common in the past for sure. I've been to the US/Europe for comparison. In the early 2000's there were big pro-reading campaigns here, but from what I've seen it fostered mostly religious, self-help and harry potter. Personally, what I don't like is the poverty of imagination, and also the false experts all around, citing authors and works they didn't read most of the times (wikipedia is so much easier and faster, you know?) - I call these people wikiexperts or plainly fraudsters.
- wheresmycraisin 4y agoMy father wrote technical books through the 80's and 90's. I remember him being very happy about a book that sold in the low tens of thousands of copies (I'm guessing 20k or so). I know some of them flopped. Even as a child I knew that it did not make sense financially... stay up til 4am writing for a solid year or more (he had a regular job as well), so that you can get maybe 5-10% royalty on something that likely will sell only a few thousand copies on average. The ephemeral natural of computer books makes it even worse.
- cfeduke 4y agoIt's like any hobby. Sometimes people are able to take their hobby full time after a massive success. Most of the time it's a hobby that provides satisfaction.
- spjwebster 4y agoHaving written a bunch of books on Flash and PHP back in the early 2000s, my experience is very much aligned with this. For a relatively young guy the income was welcome, and after the first book did well I got a pretty decent advance for the subsequent books. They all sold enough to pay back that advance and so I got quarterly royalties on top too, but given the amount of toil it required - and quick turnaround times with new Flash releases, meaning many late nights - I would have been better compensated doing pretty much anything else. That said, money isn't the only, or even necessarily the most important or fulfilling, reward on offer. I got the writing gig because I was spending a lot of my free time on various Flash-related forums answering questions and helping people with their projects. I did that for the sheer joy of helping others along in their learning journey, and saw writing books as a massive extension of that. It very much mirrors my experience of the public school system in the UK: teachers are chronically overworked and underpaid, but do it anyway because it's something of a calling. In fact, that probably applies to a bunch of other public sector roles too, not least the NHS primary care roles.
- _tom_ 4y agoYou don't write tech books for the royalties, you write them for the consulting opportunities they lead to.
- okaleniuk 4y agoMy first self-published book sold maybe half a dozen copies, and there even was one refund. The reason is simple. It is a bad book. The next one sold none. Which is expected since I made it openly available from my site. It hit about half a million downloads in the first year. Alas, most of them were from one IP somewhere in Czechia so I guess someone's spider got stuck in the web. But real people downloaded it too, about 12 000 copies. I even got a positive review from John D. Cook of which I'm extremely proud https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2020/04/24/programming-languages/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2020/04/24/programming-langua... I'm now working on Geometry for Programming book for Manning https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers. This would be my first collaboration with a publisher and so far it looks like it will become a moderate success. The early access sales are good, the reviews are encouraging. Even though, I would expect first year sales to be in thousands, maybe even low tens if we're lucky but no more. Definitely not enough to live of. So while the post doesn't reveal any specific statistics, it does agree with my experience. Most books might indeed sell in very low numbers but they are not really published and maybe not even really books. If you're working with a well established publisher, you will get some moderate sales numbers guaranteed, and a even small chance to go big.
- cultofmetatron 4y agointeresting. does your book cover geohashing. I've been curious how points and polygons get converted to geohashes and how the search using these work. I currently postgis as a black box but I haven't been able to find any books or articles that really explain in depth how they work.
- zlurker 4y agoThere's a great blog written by someone who wrote a very efficient geohashing algorithm in go/assembly that may help a little bit with understanding it. https://mmcloughlin.com/posts/geohash-assembly https://mmcloughlin.com/posts/geohash-assembly The simplified TLDR is: 1. Convert lat and long to something that's represented by bits. 2. Interleave these bits such that lat and long bits alternate in the sequence. 3. Optionally, but seems to be the standard, encode the bits into the custom base32 character set.
- raverbashing 4y agoOoooffff This started well but it seems like a crap take at tweetsplaining > When people reference book sales, they’re typically talking using NPD Group’s BookScan numbers The guy is an author and this is the meaning of sales he pulls first? really? Number of sales is what your publisher will tell you. Because they owe you money for every sale done. Because a sale is how many times people clicked the 'buy' button (be it digital, Amazon, or went into a bookstore). "BookScan numbers" LOL > there are dramatic differences between 1) lifetime sales, 2) sales in the first 12 months after publication, and 3) sales in any random calendar year. By the context it's obvious what they mean FFS. This guy can't interpret a tweet and came up with this clickbait crap?
- jspash 4y agoI was very confused by the title. I read it a few times just thinking it was poor English. Had to click through to the article to find out why. Why was the leading "No" removed?
- somecommit 4y agoWriting a book in 2022 is like opening a DVD renting shop...
- aabreu 4y agoThomas had never seen such garbage before.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoGood article and then a data-rich comment from Kristen McLean. This article makes me feel better as an author. 30 years ago, the first 2 books I wrote for the scientific publisher Springer-Verlag didn’t sell many copies, although I have received a lot of nice feedback about the first book over the years. After writing 10 books for traditional publishers, all fairly niche technical books, I switched to self publishing and my readership has gone up dramatically (I think). When my publisher returned book rights to me, I released the second edition of my Java AI book under a Creative Commons license. For the 5 years that I tracked downloads from my web site (https://markwatson.com https://markwatson.com) I averaged 300 downloads a day over 5 years, and the book PDF was also downloadable from many other sites. I imagine that most people downloading a free PDF only read a small part of my open content books, but I have no data on that. Currently I distribute on the leanpub.com platform (which I recommend!!) and I get about 50 free downloads for each time a person decides to voluntarily pay for one of my open content books. The exception is my Common Lisp book for which about 1 in 20 people choose to pay for it. Writing is a lot of fun and it has opened the door to meeting and sometimes becoming friends with some amazing people.