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.
> My book on Amazon sold 4,000 copies and made me $12,000.
So it seems you can hit the top 5 on Amazon with 300 sales a day.
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.
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.)
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.