>>>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
For publishing, I wonder how many copies of little-bought books are read, and how many are printed -- both probably quite different to the number sold. And I also wonder how the outcome distribution compares to venture capital outcomes, and what predictor variables are useful. "Harry Potter" is a famous case of prediction being difficult (or at least badly done?) but you can probably get some signal from author (writing history, other celebrity), genre.
If you believe that BookScan isn't reliable, then you also have to believe that the US Census data is totally crap.
> 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.
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.
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.
I still buy the occasional programming book, but nothing like I used to now that we have all the online resources.
Looking at a random list [1] of O'Reilly books, I can see 3 categories:
- The ones for beginners, like "Learning Python" or "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide",
- The ones that will be outdated even before reaching the shelves of a library, such as "Kubernetes in Action" or "Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow",
- The ones that are more about concepts such as "Clean Code".
I can't see any of those being used as a reference book. The Internet and official documentations is the reference book.
In my experience this is pretty common. Almost everywhere I’ve worked has had some kind of training budget, and most places have had fairly well attended book clubs.
- the numbers are a for a 12 month period of sales, not for books published in a particular 12 month period (see below for why this matters)
- some of those books were published near the start of the 12 month period, so the count represents their first 52 weeks of sales
- some of the books were published in the last week or the 12 month period, so the count represents their first couple of weeks of sales
- some of the books were published almost a year before the start of the period, in which case the count represents the number of sales within the last couple of weeks of their first year of sales (sales >12 months after publishing don't count as 'frontlist' so aren't included in these numbers)
tl;dr the % figures towards the bottom of the list are probably too pessimistic
Limiting it to the top publishers immediately leaves out lots of books. But OK, these are major players who are putting their own resources on the line for some books, so that's a valid slice.
For that 14.7% that sold under 12 copies: as a self-published author, I have to say, "Why not my book instead of that crap?"
The problem, of course, is that they didn't expect it to sell that few copies when they printed it. They didn't say, "Hey, this one looks like 10 copies or so. Let's go with it!"
I believe in physics but I also believe that the map is not the territory. Go back a few centuries and the model of the atom was that of the Christmas pudding. We now know better but our own models are most certainly not correct. Thus I'm believing in something I know to be faulty on some level.
Similarly with God, each religion's conception is different. If you believe in a pagan religion you believe in lots of different gods. If you believe in a monotheistic religion you believe in one God.
It's very difficult to have a conversation free of misunderstanding on abstract matters unless you have a good grasp of the underlying concepts your conversational partner embodies in a word and vice versa. With a subject as touchy as religion, it's prudent to define terms early.
Likewise, I think asking for definitions of 'book' and 'sold' are perfectly valid questions.