4 ms·

from a comment under the article: > I think the real story is that roughly 66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 we

from a comment under the article: > I think the real story is that roughly 66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks. > And less than 2% sold more than 50,000 copies.

LeifCarrotson 2y ago
That was super interesting to me as well. The full set of values is here: > The data below includes frontlist titles from [top ten publishers]... 45,571 unique ISBNs ... for the last 52 weeks (thru week ending 8-24-2022). > In this dataset: >>>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 Source: Kristen McLean, lead industry analyst from NPD BookScan, at 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-.... Now I'm curious how unique the many books on my shelf are!
- bradley13 2y ago
  So, just doodling on a virtual napkin with some round numbers: - If you're not writing to a formula, writing a book will take 1000 hours - You net $2 per sale - You want a salary of at least $20/hour = You need to sell at least 10,000 copies of your book, in order to make a living. Which 6.7% of the books achieved. Rather: 93.3% of the books did not achieve this. Note also: These are figures from professional publishers. Self-published books have (afaik) far less success. Conclusion: writing, like any other art form, is unlikely to be a way to make a living. Better to keep it as a hobby, while working a job that pays the bills.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    Some may spend 1000 hours on a novel, but many will write far faster. The stories of authors who looks themselves in an office for a week or two to write another novel is so "common" as to be a trope (Simenon is one example of someone who'd spent a week or two on his novels during his most productive period). I've written two. The second one took me about 33 hours of writing, and a couple of tens of hours more of editing. But yes, you're not going to make a lot of money unless you're both talented and hardworking and lucky. In the UK the average full-time author earns below minimum wage - but the average full-time author lives in a household earning well above average; in other words, being a full-time author is, for most people who do it, an indulgence made possible by a two-income, usually reasonable well off, household.. Far more common is doing it alongside another job, and that's true even for a lot of very successful writers - even a few relatively speaking big successes are often not enough to live off unless you write fast and consistently.
    - wnissen 2y ago
      Even a short novel is 50,000 words, that's 100 hours at a brisk pace of 500 words per hour. The NaNoWriMo folks famously challenge writers to do that in a month. So I don't doubt that some people can do it (10x writers?) but even typing 50K words at 70 wpm would take 12 hours. Famous writers tend to produce a few hundred to a few thousand words per day. Lets say 300-3000, so between 17 and 170 days to write a short novel.
      - vidarh 2y ago
        The thing is "10x writers" (in terms of volume, at least) aren't uncommon at all. My best day while writing my second novel I wrote ~11k words. That was <6 hours of writing. My biggest challenge was 1) maintaining focus, 2) I have other things to do. Most writers can write quite fast if they really have to, but given the income distribution it rarely seems worth it: If you make little, it becomes a labour of love and you're more interested in producing something you can be proud of; if you make a lot, the pressure to churn it out at high speed lessens. And while there are some in-between who need to churn things out fast because they depend on the income, they are few (incidentally there seems to be only poor correlation between rate of writing and income per book). And so the speed people write at seems to often depend more on whether people choose to because they see it as a job to get done vs art/a personal project.
  - Karellen 2y ago
    That reminds me of the time that Folding Ideas' Dan Olsen wrote a book on an arbitrary subject to see how the economics of a passive income audiobook grift worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw&t=2052s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw&t=2052s
- philomath_mn 2y ago
  Yeah I'd love to have metrics around that -- wish this data was public
pier25 2y ago
Same thing with music. It's an exponential distribution. Less than 1% of artists on streaming platforms generate more than 1M streams per year. For reference, 1M streams gets you something around $3-4k depending on the country. Not even close to be able to make a living out of it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
feoren 2y ago
That doesn't address the frontlist/backlist question. A very successful book could easily sell less than 1,000 copies in the 52 weeks that occur 25 years after its initial publication.

LeifCarrotson 2y ago

That was super interesting to me as well. The full set of values is here: > The data below includes frontlist titles from [top ten publishers]... 45,571 unique ISBNs ... for the last 52 weeks (thru week ending 8-24-2022). > In this dataset: >>>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 Source: Kristen McLean, lead industry analyst from NPD BookScan, at 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-.... Now I'm curious how unique the many books on my shelf are!

bradley13 2y ago
So, just doodling on a virtual napkin with some round numbers: - If you're not writing to a formula, writing a book will take 1000 hours - You net $2 per sale - You want a salary of at least $20/hour = You need to sell at least 10,000 copies of your book, in order to make a living. Which 6.7% of the books achieved. Rather: 93.3% of the books did not achieve this. Note also: These are figures from professional publishers. Self-published books have (afaik) far less success. Conclusion: writing, like any other art form, is unlikely to be a way to make a living. Better to keep it as a hobby, while working a job that pays the bills.
- vidarh 2y ago
  Some may spend 1000 hours on a novel, but many will write far faster. The stories of authors who looks themselves in an office for a week or two to write another novel is so "common" as to be a trope (Simenon is one example of someone who'd spent a week or two on his novels during his most productive period). I've written two. The second one took me about 33 hours of writing, and a couple of tens of hours more of editing. But yes, you're not going to make a lot of money unless you're both talented and hardworking and lucky. In the UK the average full-time author earns below minimum wage - but the average full-time author lives in a household earning well above average; in other words, being a full-time author is, for most people who do it, an indulgence made possible by a two-income, usually reasonable well off, household.. Far more common is doing it alongside another job, and that's true even for a lot of very successful writers - even a few relatively speaking big successes are often not enough to live off unless you write fast and consistently.
  - wnissen 2y ago
    Even a short novel is 50,000 words, that's 100 hours at a brisk pace of 500 words per hour. The NaNoWriMo folks famously challenge writers to do that in a month. So I don't doubt that some people can do it (10x writers?) but even typing 50K words at 70 wpm would take 12 hours. Famous writers tend to produce a few hundred to a few thousand words per day. Lets say 300-3000, so between 17 and 170 days to write a short novel.
    - vidarh 2y ago
      The thing is "10x writers" (in terms of volume, at least) aren't uncommon at all. My best day while writing my second novel I wrote ~11k words. That was <6 hours of writing. My biggest challenge was 1) maintaining focus, 2) I have other things to do. Most writers can write quite fast if they really have to, but given the income distribution it rarely seems worth it: If you make little, it becomes a labour of love and you're more interested in producing something you can be proud of; if you make a lot, the pressure to churn it out at high speed lessens. And while there are some in-between who need to churn things out fast because they depend on the income, they are few (incidentally there seems to be only poor correlation between rate of writing and income per book). And so the speed people write at seems to often depend more on whether people choose to because they see it as a job to get done vs art/a personal project.
- Karellen 2y ago
  That reminds me of the time that Folding Ideas' Dan Olsen wrote a book on an arbitrary subject to see how the economics of a passive income audiobook grift worked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw&t=2052s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw&t=2052s
philomath_mn 2y ago
Yeah I'd love to have metrics around that -- wish this data was public

pier25 2y ago

Same thing with music. It's an exponential distribution. Less than 1% of artists on streaming platforms generate more than 1M streams per year. For reference, 1M streams gets you something around $3-4k depending on the country. Not even close to be able to make a living out of it.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

feoren 2y ago

That doesn't address the frontlist/backlist question. A very successful book could easily sell less than 1,000 copies in the 52 weeks that occur 25 years after its initial publication.