My Amazon bestseller made me nothing | Hacker News Reader

My Amazon bestseller made me nothing

salon.com

199 pointsacdanger88 comments

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.

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).

Seconded. 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...

You 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.

Those authors make money from doing speaking or consulting gigs where they can then call themselves a "best selling" author.

Yes. 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.

>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%.

Your 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.

In theory, the advance is just an advance, and publishers could ask for the portion back that is not covered by royalties. However, they almost never do that. It's one of the few ways in which publishers actually behave decently towards authors.

So you're saying we should expect this to change very soon?

Well, part of that is that authors are not as a rule gifted with assets, so it's a fruitless task to recover money from them. The other part is that it looks bad. And the third leg is that that is how commercially successful authors subsidize the unsuccessful.

>Your math is a bit wonky

What math? I only put some numbers forward. Didn't even do addition. What I said is that for most technical books, 4000 copies is not that far off the mark. Or $12000 dollars.

And, thanks for clarifying that, the amount includes the advance. Note also that not all publishers give an advance, not all authors get an advance, and some authors even PAY to get their books published and/or promoted.

As for the publisher doing all those wonderful things, that's more about traditional publishing (and back in the day). With technical publishing, today, you get far fewer niceties.

> Traditional publishers take something like 90%

The Pragmatic Programmers offer their authors 50% of the net. I was lucky enough to publish one book with them, and despite that book's anemic sales I made out pretty well. Cant recommend them enough to prospective authors.

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....

Imagine that a tech book breaks even (for the publisher) at 5000 copies sold. Further imagine that a successful book sells about 8000 copies. At a $30 cover price, the author gets $1.50 per copy sold, so 8000 copies is $12,000.

Also remember that the publisher probably gets paid 30 days after the close of the month in which a sale occurred, and the author gets paid at least a month after that--and more, if the publisher holds back royalties in case of returns. If you're fortunate, you get paid monthly. You probably get paid quarterly.

I have a friend who's an O'Reilly author. Granted, he's not the author of, say, the book on Bash, or Git, but it's a current book. He likes to joke around about how little money he makes on the book (now in second edition): "I make hundreds of dollars. Hundreds!"

It seems to me that the money to be made on an O'Reilly book would be in speaking/consulting/job hunting as someone who "wrote the book on X".

Not much money to be made on speaking. You are lucky to get your expenses covered. But sure, better consulting/job gigs could be an outcome from writing an O'Reilly book. Of course, if you took the year or more it took you to write that book and and put that time into paid consulting I am not sure you would ever catch up. As an O'Reilly author myself if you are looking at writing a book for the money you are doing it wrong.

>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.

They 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.

"Plus or minus" is most likely used here to mean "more or less" or "approximately".

The 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)

I'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)

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.

I think most people are vastly over-estimating the number of books that get sold.

From 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."

And 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-connect... [2] http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/?p=1521

Congratulations! 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.

Yes, I'm surprised by that myself.

Congratulations 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?

This is a catchy title, but a more accurate one would be:

> My book on Amazon sold 4,000 copies and made me $12,000.

Indeed. 4,000 books gets you on a bestseller list these days? Methinks the algorithm writers need to get their pencils out.

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.

Isn't that what the author is trying to say. Eventhough it's a bestseller, he is embarrassed to give out the numbers.

He 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.

No, 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.

At $3 profit per book sold, $15 retail, I can see why he is mad at the value suck industry(publishers/distributors).

That's $6 profit... He got $12000 for 4000 books, which is 50% of the profit, his cut. For a physical book, with distribution costs, and the likes of amazon are probably getting about a 20-30% cut.. so that's really more like $9 profit off a $15 book.. 3 for the author, 3 for the publisher and 2-3 for Amazon. bringing the cost of the book's printing to $6 or so... not bad.

Also, the "best seller" was only for the one week, and 4000 books, of which most were probably during that one week isn't so bad.. the tail probably sucked though.

Now, self-publishing as an e-Book on amazon, would have given him potentially a bit more.. say Amazon takes $4, that gives him $11, and if only 1/2 bought it (available in digital only), would gross him $22k, even with a price drop to say $10 for digital (amazon getting $3) would be $14k ... That's some food for thought. If you can write a book every two months, and sell 2K copies for a $10 digital version.. that's not a bad living.

Bonus, if you become a little well known, people will order more of your back catalog.

Finishing a book every two months would be insane for a fiction writer.

But if you look at ebooks on amazon it's getting lot more common to have serials. Shorter books, cheaper price, fast turnaround. My favorite is Wool, which has done 8 books in last 20 months and is excellent.

John Scalzi's "The Human Division" is another serial that Amazon has really been pushing me to buy that I can only assume is worth it. Second for Wool being excellent.

Not really. Since my wife started writing she's averaging about 2 1/2 to 3 months. And that includes the 2-3 weeks waiting on the copy editor.

Unless you are Isaac Asimov, and your writing produces about 8 books a year on average during your whole lifespan.

I don't think it would be that hard.. also, once you have a back catalog, your newer books will raise interest in your older books until it becomes more self-sustaining... fewer sales of older books keeping a consistent income.

Clearly the idea here is to sell more books. That and the heavily monetized links inside the article itself.

When an author talks about their book sales like their so pathetic I often wonder what exactly did they expect? And more importantly why did they expect that?

If it was possible as a writer to just sit down, spend 3 to 6 months writing something, and then walk away with a million bucks there would be an entire ecosystem built up around finding these authors, then giving them enough money to write their books, in exchange for a cut of the profits down the road.

Currently the only way to do that as an "unknown" is to write code, not prose. And guess what, there is an ecosystem that built up around that activity. Hence the lure of this and other web sites.

> there would be an entire ecosystem built up around finding these authors, then giving them enough money to write their books, in exchange for a cut of the profits down the road.

That's a great idea! We could call the entities that do that "publishers". They'd pay their authors in advance, independent of book sales, but then after that they'd take almost all the money raised by selling the books. Perhaps they'd give the authors, say, 10% of the takings, so that authors of really successful books could do well too.

It's amazing no one's thought of it before, really.

(Less-snarky version: It's perfectly true that you can't sit down, write for a few months, and reliably get rich. But what you present as evidence for that isn't, because in fact exactly the ecosystem you describe is what already exists, and it works just like you say, except that usually the authors do more work than 3-6 months and only a tiny fraction of them walk away with $1M.)

This 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.

And he didn't even change the cover after the C&D: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621050203

Maybe they should have sent something else than a strongly worded letter.

I 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..)

I expect when it came to money actually changing hands, or the deadline of that C&D the tone would change a bit. They'd either have their own interpretation of the vague phrasing of "reasonable amount", or more likely want to see invoices.

The producers of Warhammer 40k ought to take note.[1]

"Trademark Bullying" has totally gotten out of hand.[2] Brands have a duty to protect their rights, but a letter like this is really all that's necessary. Good on Jack Daniels. There is no reason to send indie publishers to the poorhouse over trifling infringement.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5176820

2. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/stupid-lawyer-tricks-a...

They did redesign the cover: http://amzn.to/1436x0J

You can read more about how that story ended here: http://brokenpianoforpresident.com/2012/07/19/jack-daniels-l...

<blockquote>In case you’re wondering, no, my publisher, Lazy Fascist Press, will not be taking them up on their offer. We’re proudly independent and don’t need any of that sweet corporate booze money to redo the cover.</blockquote>

As requested, they did change cover on the reprint and digital version, you are linking to the first print.

This 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.

I'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.)

> 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

That 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.

Oh 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.

The 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.

I 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.

Yes, they say it costs about $75,000 to buy yourself on to the best seller lists.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732386430457831...

You made 12.000 and you sold 4.000 copies. I don't see the problem with that.

There's nothing more annoying than some person with a vanity project complaining they aren't getting rich.

I'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".

He 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.

Does 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-ra...

[2] Yog's Law: http://www.sff.net/people/yog/

it's evil, but normal. And not as bad as music contracts.

"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.

The author says others, like his wife's family, believe that authors on best sellers lists make millions.

Yes, 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.

I 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.

I 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.

Interestingly, it turns out you can buy your way onto a best-seller list: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732386430457831...

(not saying that was the case here)

Misguiding 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.

As 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/Fifty-Shades-Grey-Book-Trilogy/dp/0345...

18,000 vs 21

The 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

The 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.

Well 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.

But for a writer, it's not a side project, is it?

Lots of authors are arguably aspiring writers.

The 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.

I 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.

My 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.

I find it more baffling that the author doesn't have a way to know the exact number of books sold by the publisher.

Is there an study about statistical distribution of money among authors? I am most interested in median income.

Yes 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.

> The book sold plus or minus 4,000 copies.

So... 0 to 8,000?

Actually, somewhere between -4000 and 4000.

That was my other guess.

...now let's all be nice, appreciate the hard work (of riding PR waves) and buy his book http://amzn.to/12Z6uDs

That's BigBalli's affiliate link. Here's a non-affiliate link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621050203

Sorry, but that has no place on here.

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