14 ms·
My Amazon bestseller made me nothing
- pmtarantino 14y agoYou made 12.000 and you sold 4.000 copies. I don't see the problem with that.
- lukev 14y agoI think the biggest problem here is the word 'bestseller'. 4000 is not a number I would associate with that word, prior to knowing what algorithms are used to determine those lists. My guess is that 'bestseller' lists are far more a marketing tool than any reflection of how books are selling. I've published technical books that sold in that rough ballpark, and I can tell you they never came near any bestseller list (nor should they have).
- arbuge 14y agoSeconded. In a sufficiently sub-categorized market, achieving bestseller status doesn't mean much. I was born in a tiny country with a small population. Makes me think of how easy it was for me to become under-18 chess champion back there in my high school days. Doesn't mean I was really that good at chess...
- busterarm 14y agoYou don't even know the half of it. Some authors actually PAY MONEY to have their book put on the bestseller list. Basically the publishers have all these deals for shelf space with all those little airport and train station bookstores, endcaps in major bookstores, etc. These are guaranteed sales of whatever book the publisher decides to send these stores and the publishers then pass this cost on to authors who want the publicity.
- bennesvig 14y agoThose authors make money from doing speaking or consulting gigs where they can then call themselves a "best selling" author.
- znowi 14y agoYes. I was all sympathetic with a poor famous author who made pathetic $12k on his bestseller until I hit the number of copies sold: 4000... Huh? Suddenly, $12k sounds like a pretty good deal. I should note though that when I hear about authors of tech books (O'Reilly and the like), I do tend to imagine a Jaguar in their garage :) But also a lot more copies sold. And also, 8 months delay on sales you made July last year, that's just not right. I thought if you're indie the turnaround is much faster with better pay. Apparently not.
- coldtea 14y ago>I should note though that when I hear about authors of tech books (O'Reilly and the like), I do tend to imagine a Jaguar in their garage :) But also a lot more copies sold. You'd be surprised on both counts. Actual rundowns I've read from technical authors can be even worse than the 4000/$12,000 mentioned here -- except if we talk about something like "The C programming language" or "Learning Perl". Also: remember that 30% cut that Apple/Google etc takes of off your apps and e-books? Well, traditional publishers take something like 90%.
- olefoo 14y agoYour math is a bit wonky and you are missing some aspects of the traditional publishing contract. The traditional publishing deal involves the author getting an advance (cash up front) which they do not have to pay back unless they fail to deliver the manuscript. So the publisher takes on the risk that the book won't cover it's advance. The publisher also manages book production and distribution and publicity, to do those things the publisher keeps staff on hand in some fairly expensive office space ( publishing happens in Manhattan, or used to ). All of which add up to a pretty good deal for authors whose work is salable. With Amazon or Apple, the author takes on the risk, and all the costs of production ( poorly edited ebook only editions aren't going to sell as well as actual books ) and all the costs of marketing and promoting their work. The only thing that's taken care of is distribution; for which they give up 30%, not the actual cost of distribution. So the new deal is riskier and less certain ( if you pay an editor, a book designer, a publicist etc. ) you might wind up losing money.
- coldtea 14y ago>I think the biggest problem here is the word 'bestseller'. 4000 is not a number I would associate with that word, prior to knowing what algorithms are used to determine those lists. That. I'm for a pretty poor, and small sized, european country, with hardly a very reading population, and still a best-seller can sell even ten times that -- and make a popular writer something in the region of $30,000 a year or more.
- steveklabnik 14y agoThey said "plus or minus 4000" copies, not that they sold 4000 copies. This caught me by surprise at first, too, until I re-parsed the sentence. Now, upon reading it a third time, I'm not so sure. It is certainly confusingly worded.
- re 14y ago"Plus or minus" is most likely used here to mean "more or less" or "approximately".
- tehwebguy 14y agoThe point seems to be that many people associate such lists with much more success than they actually represent. Also that the list is not the springboard to further success that some thought it was. (Right now it only takes about 8k album sales in a week to break the Billboard top 50)
- jmduke 14y agoThis is a catchy title, but a more accurate one would be: > My book on Amazon sold 4,000 copies and made me $12,000.
- helipad 14y agoIndeed. 4,000 books gets you on a bestseller list these days? Methinks the algorithm writers need to get their pencils out.
- petercooper 14y agohttp://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/56284-how-many-copies-does-it-take-to-be-an-amazon-bestseller.html http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bo... So it seems you can hit the top 5 on Amazon with 300 sales a day.
- manojlds 14y agoIsn't that what the author is trying to say. Eventhough it's a bestseller, he is embarrassed to give out the numbers.
- notatoad 14y agoHe seems to be trying to say he made an an embarrassingly small amount of money, and that it is somehow unreasonable to have made only $12000 by selling 4000 books. At least that's how I read this piece.
- dsmithn 14y agoNo, he's saying everyone else expected him to make more than that because traditionally authors don't speak publicly on the amount of money they make and the number of books sold.
- HoochTHX 14y agoAt $3 profit per book sold, $15 retail, I can see why he is mad at the value suck industry(publishers/distributors).
- BigBalli 14y ago...now let's all be nice, appreciate the hard work (of riding PR waves) and buy his book http://amzn.to/12Z6uDs http://amzn.to/12Z6uDs
- RyanZAG 14y agoAs an interesting point, there is probably more to having a hit book than just 'bestseller'. Compare the number of reviews - I assume number of reviews correlates well to number of sales. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621050203 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621050203 http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Shades-Grey-Book-Trilogy/dp/0345803485/ref=zg_bs_books_9 http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Shades-Grey-Book-Trilogy/dp/0345... 18,000 vs 21
- smtddr 14y agoWell I don't know the time/effort/resources that went into making the book but $12,000 USD is not what I would refer to as "nothing". I have side projects that I'd love to make even $1,000 on.
- manojlds 14y agoBut for a writer, it's not a side project, is it?
- maxerickson 14y agoLots of authors are arguably aspiring writers.
- rmc 14y agoThe important question is how much time did he put into it. If it took 12 months to write, then he's got a terrible return on investment. If it only took 1 month, it looks much better.
- jdrenterprises 14y ago"Bestseller" does not equal income. I think there are a percentage of authors who believe that because they get on a bestseller list, they are going to be a millionaire. The article stated 4000 copies sold, and $12000 in income. Math is math, no matter how you look at it. $3 a copy in income isn't all that bad at all. The author's book was priced at $8.95 according to the article (Kindle version). Perhaps the author should consider price adjustments to see if the market will respond with more sales? And this all assumes the author did a nice job with their marketing efforts in the first place... because "bestseller" also doesn't mean book sales on autopilot.
- manojlds 14y agoThe author says others, like his wife's family, believe that authors on best sellers lists make millions.
- jdrenterprises 14y agoYes, but the article title makes it sound like the author got screwed even though he made the bestseller list. $12000 isn't nothing, and Amazon has nothing to do with the results an author gets from their book in terms of units sold, except for providing search results. Just seems like one of those attempts to get eyeballs to an article to me.
- tomku 14y agoI get the impression that most or all of his sales were due to the "controversy" surrounding the C&D letter from Jack Daniels. He got a bunch of short-term publicity from that, and the book's popularity faded along with the media hype. Maybe he assumed that once it was on the bestseller list the sales would just keep rolling in, but that clearly wasn't the case. It seems misguided for him to blame Amazon for that, when it's possible that readers just didn't find the book appealing.
- tomku 14y agoThe difference between his book and "Gone Girl" or "Fifty Shades of Grey" is that he sold a couple thousand copies in a week and dropped off the radar, while those books are numbers 12 and 9 on the list almost 9 months later. Being a best-seller for a week is a great way to sell a couple thousand copies, but you don't sell hundreds of thousands or millions due to one week at the top caused by some temporary publicity.
- scottfr 14y agoAnd I just raised $27,000 to fund writing my first book [1]. I'm a first time author and despite my best efforts agents and publishers wouldn't touch the project. The world is changing rapidly, and traditional publishing just doesn't make sense for many authors anymore. Also of course refer to the recent discussion on O'Reilly's changing practices [2]. [1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/605480326/beyond-connecting-the-dots http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/605480326/beyond-connect... [2] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521 http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521
- petercooper 14y agoCongratulations! In particular, I'm very impressed you got 9 backers at over $1000 for a book, you must have a very good following/dedicated fanbase.
- scottfr 14y agoYes, I'm surprised by that myself.
- stfu 14y agoCongratulations Scott! Really cool project. Love the idea of interactive models within a book. Can you give us some thoughts on how you went about promoting the project? Are you guys very active in the SystemsWiki and were able to leverage that community?
- larrys 14y agoThis story while interesting is just a creative way to draw more attention and get people to buy the book. "In one more week I was going to be a millionaire." We don't know how long of a period it was on the best seller list at all. It almost certainly made it to the list because of activity following mention (as the author points out) "the story went viral and was featured in places like Forbes, Time magazine and NPR’s Weekend Edition" which had nothing to do with the quality of the writing but more of a David and Goliath human interest story. So what we have is a book that made a list because of a cease and desist letter which got it major media attention which created a concentrated interest in the book. The takeaway from this is that he made roughly $3 per book for a book that is sold by amazon at $14.95. (Also the kindle edition is less and I don't know how that factors into the count obviously.) Also to find creative ways to get publicity for your creative vessel. Pissing off a large company is certainly one way to do that. Then after the attention that generates dies down simply write another angle about how well you didn't do and get more publicity. I didn't buy the book but I did look at it on Amazon. Obviously the Salon story and links to it will help him sell more books.
- revelation 14y agoAnd he didn't even change the cover after the C&D: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621050203 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621050203 Maybe they should have sent something else than a strongly worded letter.
- larrys 14y agoI just read the letter from JD and there are many fascinating things about the way it was written including the offer to pay a reasonable amount to re-do the cover. This is definitely a letter that, prior to the Internet, would never have been written. It goes out of it's way to not appear to be a "dick" and appeal almost in a friend like way to make the person receiving want to do "the right thing" by not making a threat. I've never seen a letter written like this in this situation (having received them and seen many over the years.) I wouldn't have let an opportunity like this pass. I would have seen what JD would pay to redo the cover, let them do it, and garnered even more publicity. And maybe pocketed some money by subcontracting the labor. The cover design isn't that critical and the extra press mention would most likely drive more sales. As only one example they could have said "it will cost me $5000 to redo" found someone to do it for much much less and pocketed the difference AND gotten more publicity. And I've done things like this is the past with large corporations they will write a check to dispose of a problem they won't say "um we want to have our artist do it". If the price is reasonable they would just pay. (The only question is how much I would have started much higher than $5k that is arbitrary..)
- caffeine5150 14y agoI know someone whose husband wrote a business leadership book (a crowded category). The book hit the New York Times best seller list for a couple weeks. However, my impression was that he simply paid a publicist (or agent or whatever) who was able to make that happen in some narrow subcategory of the list for 2 weeks. The sole purposes was that on their next printing, they could add the "New York Times Bestseller" badge to the cover. It sounded like a game.
- jld 14y agoYes, they say it costs about $75,000 to buy yourself on to the best seller lists. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323864304578316143623600544.html?mod=itp http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732386430457831...
- RougeFemme 14y agoI think the key is that was an Amazon bestseller. Not that Amazon is anything to sneeze at, but, regardless of the alogorithm used, it's already limited as an Amazon bestseller.
- forgingahead 14y agoThis is like saying "I got featured on TechCrunch and Hacker News and my business STILL failed!" 4000 books => $12K seems about right. A good way to apply this to life: Vanity metrics mean nothing. Recognition is largely irrelevant to fiscal well-being. It's the same in the fashion industry -- most "famous" brand-name folks work for other big companies to pay the bills. I don't know who designs the jeans for Gap, but I'm sure he/she gets paid a ton of money.
- drcode 14y agoThere's nothing more annoying than some person with a vanity project complaining they aren't getting rich.
- mattmaroon 14y agoThat letter from Jack Daniels is impressive. I've never seen anyone be so nice about that. I've received a couple myself (my favorite was from Zamboni) and they've not been hostile but nobody offered to pay money to switch it.
- triplesec 14y agoOh it's nice, but with deeply crafty intent behind it, because they know it's hard to enforce. See the bolded "optional" reply date? Meant to look like velvet glove tactics: this scares most non-lawyered up people I'm sure.
- smnrchrds 14y agoIs there an study about statistical distribution of money among authors? I am most interested in median income.
- rmc 14y agoYes I've seen a few places. Rather than median income, the inequality indexes (like GINI) are interesting numbers. Book authors have income equality worse than 3rd world kleptomaniac dictatorships. Sometimes 5 authors will account for like 70% of all income.
- arkem 14y agoDoes anyone else think that his publishing contract is odd? He mentions it being a 50% revenue split after publishing expenses, I was under the impression that any contract that put any of the costs onto the author were considered bad to the point of exploitative[1][2]. It obviously couldn't have worked out terribly for him if he was making $3 a sale but I wonder if this is more common than I thought. [1] Hydra's Contract: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/note-to-sff-writers-random-houses-hydra-imprint-has-appallingly-bad-contract-terms/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/note-to-sff-writers-ra... [2] Yog's Law: http://www.sff.net/people/yog/ http://www.sff.net/people/yog/
- triplesec 14y agoit's evil, but normal. And not as bad as music contracts.
- kayoone 14y agoMisguiding headline. 4000 sales of something netting 12k USD isnt all that bad. As an example, 4000 sales of an iOS app probably put you in some of Apples Top Lists as well and could amount to the same amount of money, but its nothing super interesting or unexpected.
- ndessaigne 14y agoInterestingly, it turns out you can buy your way onto a best-seller list: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323864304578316143623600544.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732386430457831... (not saying that was the case here)
- bjourne 14y agoThe authors point is that this is how poorly you'll do monetarily even if you reach bestseller status. Even if we assume a whopping 25% of all books becomes bestsellers, that means 75% of all books don't and are likely to net their authors even less money.
- shalmanese 14y agoI think most people are vastly over-estimating the number of books that get sold. From http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bookbiz/advice/bestlist.htm http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bookbiz/advice/bestlist.htm which is an old resource but the numbers are still within the same range: "It does not take a tremendous amount of book sales to make a bestseller list. Depending upon the competition and category, sales of 50,000 books through bookstores over a period of weeks could do it. Some books have made #10 with sales of just 3,000 in one week. Most print runs are just 5,000 books, so 3,000 is a lot of books. On the other hand, with 119,000 titles being published each year, there is some competition for attention. In 1995, there were 93 hardcover fiction titles that sold more than 100,000 copies and 101 hardcover nonfiction title over that number. Softcover books did even better. Most first printings are 5,000 copies, and any book selling 5,000 copies a year is considered successful."
- icelancer 14y ago> The book sold plus or minus 4,000 copies. So... 0 to 8,000?
- alanfalcon 14y agoI'm not sure there's a good reason to go with an Indy publisher these days. Self publishing is stupidly easy and a heck of a lot more profitable. My Amazon #50,000 seller[1] has earned me over $2,000 so far and of course nobody ever wrote an article about my little book. If I'd had his publishing deal I expect I'd have exactly the same amount of publicity but have earned maybe $600 or so. And I wouldn't have been getting monthly checks within three months of sale as I do by directly publishing. [1] This fluctuates wildly, of course. Right now I'm around #18,000 thanks to giving away 3,000 free copies of the book over two days, but just before the promo I was at #400,000. Point is I've never been anywhere visible on any lists. (His point stands that simply being a best seller isn't automatically quit-the-day-job money, but at least if you self publish you control your costs and most of what money you do earn.)
- ky3 14y ago> Self publishing is stupidly easy and a heck of a lot more profitable. The tradeoff used to be that if you'd go to a publisher they'd do your marketing. Every creative type I know of is not only utterly n00bish when it comes to marketing but also regards it as a disease you wouldn't touch with a long pole. But these days even famous publishers expect authors to do their own marketing [1]. Every last bit of it. So yes, go self publish! Take a course on marketing while at it. Does wonders. [1] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521 http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- brown9-2 14y agoI find it more baffling that the author doesn't have a way to know the exact number of books sold by the publisher.
- macspoofing 14y agoHe created something that moved 4000 units . $12,000 for 4000 (~$15/unit) units is pretty darn good. If you spent a year or two developing an iOS game, your haul would have been half that. It looks like people don't buy books at high enough quantities to make it worth the effort.
- alanfalcon 14y agoThe website novelrank.com seems to have a decent handle on how book sales on Amazon translate into sales rank. And according to them, the current best-selling Kindle book has some 1500 sales this month. http://www.novelrank.com/asin/B00BLTOXEI http://www.novelrank.com/asin/B00BLTOXEI
- scott_meade 14y agoI'll admit, I fell for the title. I read it because I was intrigued to find out how an independent author would have gotten $0 for having sold > 1 book. When I got to the "$12,000" I immediately felt tricked. Sure, it is in one sense pocket-change for a "bestseller", but it's not "nothing".
- cjoh 14y agoI'm an author who wrote an Amazon "bestseller" -- it was the #1 Culture book in the store for six months, and the #1 Technology book for about one month. (http://amzn.to/infodiet http://amzn.to/infodiet) I sold more than 4,000 books (closer to about 15,000), but have basically made a relatively comparable amount of money from royalties from the book. That said, if you're writing a book looking to profit from the sales of the book, you're doing it wrong. I easily pull in six figures for speaking fees that result from having written a book. I wasn't getting those offers before having written the book. Maybe fiction is a bit different. But you can always find a way.
- Jaygitau 14y agoI think he misunderstood. Bestseller lists are based on velocity + sales. Not just pure sales. Someone could sell 4K books in one week and make a list. Versus someone who sold 1,000 books per week and sold 52K books total and they wouldn't make any list at all. It's all very screwed up. Really, it's a measurement of short term popularity more than anything.
- ams6110 14y agoMy takeaway: being an author is like being a startup software developer. A few hit it big. Really Big. Tom Clancy. Instagram. The other 99.5%? You never hear about them.