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Comment by lovingCranberry | Hacker News Reader

Pretty 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-...

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I 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.

Sure as hell isn’t for me.

Sure, 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.

So many people think they know something wrongly. It’s a breath of fresh air when someone doesn’t pretend they do.

Completely 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.

Agreed! Now I have that Operation Ivy ear worm stuck in my head.

https://youtu.be/hOqvWiDKv_w

Listen at your own risk.

you da real MVP

Great quote. Huge band!

Actually 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.

No 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)

“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.

I 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!

The 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."

Maybe 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.

You'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.

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