Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies (2022)

countercraft.substack.com

92 pointsjahnu66 comments

One thing that’s true is publishing works on a blockbuster model. Most books sell relatively few copies and a handful sell millions. The statistics about the vast majority of traditionally published books selling fewer than five thousand are likely true

I didn't see the "dozen copies" or "less than 99 copies" thing, but I did read an article on the front page about the overwhelming majority of published books not recouping their advances, and this article seems to concur. Of course, that's what you'd expect; it's how a lot of businesses work.

Books not recouping their advances is definitely a thing. With a traditionally published book an author makes their money off royalties which is a few percentage points of the price of the book. The percentages are different for the various formats of the book, a hard cover has different rates than a paperback or eBook.

The advance is paid out of the author's royalties for the book. If an author is making a dollar per sale, they'll need 5,000 sales to cover a $5,000 advance before they actually see any additional money from the book. Audiobooks and foreign translations are their own kettle of fish and don't tend to count towards sales to pay down the advance. Sometimes even eBooks don't count towards "sales" to pay down the advance but that is typically older pre-eBook contracts.

If an author publishes multiple books with the same publisher each book will have its own advance and sales tracked. A new edition will often come with its own advance but have its sales tracked separately from previous editions. Sales of Book A have no effect on the royalties for Book B.

The upside for an author is an advance is a bet on the part of the publisher. So long as the author doesn't break their contract by missing a deadline or not doing the work, they don't have to pay back the publisher's advance (conditions will be in the contract). An author that has an unsuccessful book won't typically end up owing the publisher their advance even if their sales never actually manage to pay it back.

For publishers, unless the author totally screws them over, aren't really positioned to lose money on an advance. The blockbusters make them enough money to farm potential blockbusters with other authors. They have lots of ways to get rid of low demand books including just writing them down as a loss so they'll break even on the advance. They're also not going to pay out huge advances to an author with no history or no apparent demand.

Source: I know a bunch of people that have published books.

> books not recouping their advances

This is in fact a feature, not a bug.

Traditional publishers consider a book to be a "success" when it has recouped about 70% of its advance. Publishers prefer this situation because advances are a fixed cost and by holding down royalties (which they essentially refuse to negotiate on except with the most successful authors), they earn big money on the few books with low advances that do really, really well.

This means that authors have an incentive to negotiate as large an advance as possible; so from an author's perspective, if you have earned out your advance, it means you have failed to capture as much value from your book as you could have (and/or, you are a runaway best-seller, so you will presumably negotiate better the next time).

Source: CEO testimony from the trial transcripts in the antitrust case against the merger of Peguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Available here if you're interested (disclosure: I have no interest in Publisher's Lunch, and the transcripts may also be available publically): https://shop.publishersmarketplace.com/

Edit: it is funny to see in the trial that some authors and agents clearly do not understand this, even with having it being explained by the CEOs of publishing companies earlier in the very same trial.

(The subtext here is that advances for midlist authors are not all that high, and for first time authors [or at least "non-celebrity" authors who don't have built-in audiences] substantially lower still).

I agree with you that not recouping tends to work to the benefit of both parties in the relationship.

(2022)

Related: "No one buys books" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119958

> Sales to libraries, for example, can be a significant portion of a book’s sales.

This is one reason why I was skeptical of some of the stats getting promulgated recently. My local library, not a particularly large library, has many shelves full of "obscure" novels that you and I have probably never heard of. This is repeated in libraries across the country and the world. I like to browse the stacks and select books somewhat randomly, an admittedly hit-or-miss procedure, but I've found some diamonds in the rough.

I suspect that public libraries are not actually "stealing" from retail book sales. For a currently best-selling book, a library may have multiple copies but never enough to satisfy patron demand, and there's typically a long backlog on holds. Whereas for lesser-selling books, the library sales are a bonus and may expose readers to the writer in a way they wouldn't otherwise.

My personal experience knowing a lot of authors is that even a unknown author manages to sell at least a hundred or a few hundred books. Unless you're trying to make a living out of authoring books, I would say that selling more than a thousand books is already extraordinary success.

A book might be 20 bucks, amazon or bookshop will take a cut, publishing house will take a cut, and there are costs to be borne, so even with a 1000 books you are not breaking bank, are you?

And I wonder if the textbook monopoly mostly favors the authors or companies?

No. Coffee money. I mean success in personal achievement terms, not on money terms.

In France, after the editor, the book maker, the distributor, points of sale and the state (VAT) take their part, the author gets only 11% of every book sold.

This is accurate in my experience. My two self-published history books have sold about 400 and 150 copies respectively (combined print an ebook), with no marketing other than my blog, which occasionally makes it to the front page of HN.

Note that this is purely a 'hobby' project at this scale. Both books are still in the red counting just the expenses paid for cover and interior design, illustrations, and editing (i.e. not counting the many hours of my own time). To make a self-sustaining amount of money self-publishing I would have to sell a lot more copies and make books that can be written with much less effort (e.g. genre fiction).

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.

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-....

Now I'm curious how unique the many books on my shelf are!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yeah I'd love to have metrics around that -- wish this data was public

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.

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.

I wonder how much a truly high-quality book recommendation service that actually worked and people trusted would change the landscape of the book publishing industry. My own experience as an avid reader is that it's quite hard to find books I actually like and that are worth spending money on. But when you hear these numbers about how many books are published and few books make it big, it makes me wonder how many amazing books there could be that I've never heard of because the publishing industry never marketed them.

I’m using ChatGPT as a personalized book recommendation tool. After each book I re-open the thread and explain what I liked and didn’t like and then ask for some more book suggestions and short explanations why. It’s working well enough, and I’m on my 5th book so far with this method.

Been using it the same way to pick movies to watch.

Surprised Amazon hasn't implemented this.

Don't weep too many tears. These are the same publishers that market e-books at their physical copy prices, like their movie and music counterparts.

> it's quite hard to find books I actually like and that are worth spending money on

I bet there are people stuck deep in every one of these organizations trying to get e-books priced down as a way to do more market discovery, and thus more blockbusters statistically. However these ideas are blocked by upper management when they uniformly lambast lost imaginary revenue.

Why wouldn't they? It costs about the same to make an ebook as a physical copy, and provides better value to those who read using ereaders.

As well it makes the purchasing decision much easier for consumers.

A lot of people assume that physical books cost a lot more and it just isn't true--maybe a few dollars.

almost always I really liked the book when a friend recommended it or i stumble upon online thread/conversation where somebody recommended a book. I rarely liked any book that was recommended from some recommender platform like goodread or other variants

Also consider how many audiobooks/books are now crowd sourced, and only available on 3rd party sites for the first 1-2 years, then available to kindle free and audible. Those numbers reflect in Amazon sales numbers.

I am unaware of this. Where can one find these audiobooks?

Many books start out as a story to see if people like it on HFY, LitRPG or Royalroad type forums, then if people vote up, they start kickstart/patreon to write the series. Many new authors have started like that. Its also how some manga/anime are launched, content fans really want is turns into content.

The comic book industry also used this model, thats why so many 3rd party publishers now.

nathan lowell started publishing his books read by himself on podiobooks for free. that's where i discovered him myself. it seems he is doing pretty well now.

I assume you mean crowdfunded, and not that the actual book content is crowdsourced?

Both, many new writers are publishing shorts, and if popular, then turned into paid content by kickstarter type funding. Many new writers have popped in the last 10 years due to the internet.

Almost like podcasting, Podcasts are free, but then paid content can come out of it. Short stories to books, cartoons to comics, etc.

Two book authors meet in a cafe:

- I bought the book you released last week, it was really entertaining read!

- Oh! It was you!

When my colleagues at my day job discovered I'd published a novel, I could tell roughly how many of them (most) bought it right away from my sales stats... I've sold more than average, but to put it this way I'm still very happy I don't depend on it for money.

Short summary: internet meme statistics!

> most traditionally published novels that you see on bookstore shelves or reviewed in newspapers sell several hundred to a few thousand copies across formats

This is interesting. I had envisaged tens of thousands or more. If this is US-based, and there are hundreds of millions of Americans, that is a very low ratio of book to person.

On the plus side, you can reasonably claim that the brand new, non-bestseller, book you bought is a rare book, since "there are likely only a few hundred copies in peoples' hands* throughout the world".

*A way of skirting the fact that there are probably >1000 copies in warehouses that will be pulped at some point

Since most books are, at any given moment, probably lying somewhere and not being actively held, chances are pretty good that yours is the only copy currently in a person's hand!

two people holding the same book in their hands at the same time is so rare that you can actually feel it when it happens ;-)

Doesn't this partly come down to how you define most books? Like yeah, if you go to a bookstore and look at the shelves you are seeing the books that the store thinks are going to sell, not the thousands of books they chose not to stock. Most books (as in the individual physical books) created in a given year are going to be a relatively small number of best sellers.

Only ~70% of Americans read at least one book a year.

That's a suspicious statistic in my opinion and feels like something people would like about on a self reporting survey lol.

Is that an entire book or any part of any book? Does it count audiobooks? I know a lot of people who claim to "read" a lot of books, but they actually are listening to audiobooks.

I'm writing a book on building and launching mobile apps end-to-end ( https://opinionatedlaunch.com ). I'm treating it like building and launching an app (Dogfooding my method! But for book-writing!). It's got a website, a marketing plan, and even an affiliate system.

I took the self-publishing route because the book's target market is niche; there's only one CTO in a company. Someone I know went the publisher route, and I think he's quite successful. I have only sold a dozen so far, but I'm pricing it accordingly.

In summary, I like to think of book authoring as starting a SaaS. Start from your target market, then the book topic, then from there you can tell whether you can cast a wide net, or aim narrowly.

got lost in all the "quotes"

I think the main takeaway here is publishing a book isn't the road to riches, though nor has it ever been

My anecdote is that I sold a somewhat technical book through one of the big publishers, then got a second edition, earned out my advances but basically earned beer money. I'm guessing that's not unusual. (Was still great as a career move but made very little direct money.)

Another anecdote - I sold a technical book through one of the big publishers, never heard back post advances, and found out that the international edition wasn't considered to be part of my royalty agreement. This was bad for my coauthors and I as the international edition became part of the curriculum for several universities for several years.

Live and learn.

I suspect that certain classes of books (technical books being one of them) have much more predictable markets (and so if you polled tech writers, you'd find many who earn out their advance but not much beyond).

Yeah, and I suspect at least a modest amount of my earnings came about because I got organizations I knew to organize book signings that they purchased books for.

One advantage of self-publishing (even on Amazon where you can order "author's copies" - https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G7BBN68RYX5UMDZF ) is that you can get the "whole enchilada" if you do the footwork at conventions, speaking slots, etc.

And anyone who is already doing those kinds of things, should consider writing a book to go along with it, even if self-published. The sales can add up over time.

Having a "real" publisher still carries a lot of cred whether it should or not.

The fake reviews for unpopular books are pretty funny.

> My husband just loves this book here is his quote for this review: Hands down the best reference for learning system design concepts to feel confident going into a system design interview...

Not so coincidentally posted on the same day the book was published, with 5 stars.

From a different perspective but related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119958

> Take the statistic that most published books only sell 99 copies.

No wonder. 99 % in a book store is crap.

"We can't sell books" say publishers

"There is nothing to buy" - me.

The distribution of income from books is quite similar to what we see in professional sport or entertainment - a small % take away nearly everything.

Conversely, is there an industry where this isn't the case? Does a truly top to bottom spread exist in any industry?

Movies/Entertainment? Agriculture? I don't know the answer but your comment prompted the line of thinking.

Yes, medicine, law, engineering and most typical industries.

You can earn a good living as an average engineer, doctor, or lawyer, but obviously won’t earn millions unless you get to the top level.

In contrast, the average author, musician, and YouTuber earns less than minimum wage and need a second job to enable them survive while they hope to strike it big with their hobby (most of them won’t at the end)

Basically any normal job. There are tiers within those normal jobs but assuming some base level of competence, it's mostly not the delta between Taylor Swift and someone playing for tips at the local bar on weekends or doing Tik-Tok.

I think there's a little ambiguity in the question here, between stuff like "what is the distribution of different books by sales" versus "what is the distribution of companies by market-share." (To illustrate the difference, imagine a world where 99% of all books were sold by UberPublisher but almost every book-title in their catalog is equally popular.)

Mechanics, plumbers, doctors, nurses, engineers, electricians, landscapers, elevator installers, accountants, lawyers, air traffic controllers, pilots, architects, HVAC installers,

Sure you can find examples in every industry where few are paid far more than average or norm in that industry, but nothing like the spread you find in pure popularity based industries like entertainment be it professional sports, music, acting, YouTubers, streamers, authors, poets, etc.

More importantly the divide comes when you have something that can be infinitely reproduced at marginal or no cost (software, videos, books).

In general even the software world is "order of magnitude or so" between top performers and everyone else, but there are still outliers where an indie developer goes on to sell millions.

What's interesting about the author world is you can perpetually support yourself on advances as "mediocre but not complete failures" if you can write enough. And who knows? Maybe one day it'll hit gold and your back catalog will become valuable.

Argument for the article title: "I’m pretty sure publishers would go out of business if 50% of their books sold less than 12 copies!"

(2022)

Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794673

Yesterday's more recent:

No one buys books

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40119958

>Some books are never published in print at all and exist only as ebooks and/or audiobooks. And many books exist in “print on demand” form in which a physical copy doesn’t exist until someone purchases it. In the old days, books would go out of print when people stopped buying them. But in the modern digital age books can exist “in print” for forever.

Yeah that was the answer to my first question. If they're only selling a few copies, no need to print many / any.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com