[HN Gopher] No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies ___________________________________________________________________ No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies Author : herbertl Score : 47 points Date : 2022-09-10 21:21 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (countercraft.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (countercraft.substack.com) | keyle wrote: | The whole 2% makes 95% of all revenues doesn't just apply to | books... it certainly is true for the video game industry, and I | suspect, most of the industries being sold online. | nemo44x wrote: | Yeah power law distributions are everywhere nowadays. Nassim | Taleb talks about this a lot and uses book sales as a | reference, which is cheeky since he's doing it in his own best | seller books. | rgrieselhuber wrote: | This "fact-checker" headline template is quite tired by now. | quickthrower2 wrote: | Because people have friends? | codazoda wrote: | I dunno, seems that the "spirit" of these comments is correct. | I've self-published half a dozen small books that have only low | double digit sales. The comment that goes through the data is | also really interesting. | [deleted] | lovingCranberry wrote: | 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-... | evandwight wrote: | >>>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 | | - Kristen McLean from NPD BookScan | mysterydip wrote: | With such a large portion less than 1000, it would be nice to | see it broken down more. Was it more 20, or 900? | PuppyTailWags wrote: | BookScan isn't a reliable source of information unfortunately. | It only counts when a book's ISBN is physically scanned over a | scanner (no ebook, audio book, libraries, specialty sales, etc) | and also only covers 75% of retail in general. Generally, you | can bet BookScan largely undercounts by a very wide margin. | LudwigNagasena wrote: | > Because this is clearly a slice, and most likely provided by | one of the parties to the suit, I decided to limit my data to | the frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in | the U.S. Trade market. My ISBN list is a little smaller than | the one quoted in the DOJ, but the principals will be the same. | | > 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. | AlbertCory wrote: | When you limit your data to those published by (fairly) large | publishers, you've already skewed the data irreparably. Most | of them won't even look at a book unless an agent brings it | to them, and most agents won't represent most would-be | authors. | | 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. | swatcoder wrote: | TLDR; author doesn't find the numbers shared in some Twitter | gossip as plausible, but has no better data than their own gut | feeling from being in the industry. | | There doesn't seem to be much to take home here, other than that | the original tweet isn't clear about its own denotation or | veracity. | phantom_of_cato wrote: | I really don't like "fact-checking" articles like this which | don't contain many useful facts, only pedantry. The first comment | by Kristen McLean from NPD BookScan) is much more interesting | than the article itself: | | >>>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 | | So, ~66.1% or 2/3 of books in their dataset sell under a thousand | copies. | II2II wrote: | The pedantry was intended to point out that there is plenty of | room for publishers to mislead when they don't detail how the | data is collected. When you don't have access to the data, it | is usually the best one can do. | | Even the comment by Kristen McLean has limits, though they are | much more forthcoming about what the data includes. That said, | I think they summed it up best when they said publishing is a | gambler's game. That being said, whether the outcome is good or | bad for a gambler depends upon how much they invested and the | return across all of those bets. Their data does not venture | into financial aspects. At best, it gives us an idea of the | minimum number of units sold in a particular subset of the | market. | ZiiS wrote: | "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" | lifeisstillgood wrote: | Thus my self-publishing goal - to sell more than 12 copies. Well | 14. Don't want to be superstitious ! | Waterluvian wrote: | I forget if there's a term for this, but I once read (and | subsequently discovered) that a large portion of disagreements | are simply because people are working with different definitions | for things. | | This seems like an example of that: depending on how you define | "book" these claims are accurate or not. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-10 23:00 UTC)