Countercraft

There were some shockers that came out in the PRH trial, including how little major publishers spend on marketing for the books and (related) stats describing the minuscule number of books that are sold. The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-doz… As for marketing, I can't find the figure now, but it transpired that these billion-dollar publishers devoted low-single digit portions of their revenue to marketing.

> The DOJ stated that of 58,000 trade titles published annually in the U.S., 1/2 sell fewer than 12 copies. Someone from NPD disputed the DOJ's claim, stating that of 45,571 frontlist ISBNs from the top 10 U.S. publishers, 15% (not 50%) sold less than 12 copies. Another 51% sold between 12 and 999 copies. Still not great. (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...) And that's a bad thing because? i assume this includes books still in print but first published a while ago. Anyways, long tail is going to long tail. Seems pretty normal to me.

Oh, hey. I was just looking at this article the other day. I think this article makes some good points, but it's a little too absolutist about this data. As far as I can tell, if you are an author or industry professional, you can get access to the following data: * If you want data on your own books: sign up for Amazon Author Central and they'll give you the BookScan data on your books. This is free. https://press.aboutamazon.com/2010/12/weekly-nielsen-bookscan-data-for… * If you want data on comps (i.e., comparable books, or books you are competing against): sign up for Publishers Marketplace and pay for the monthly package ($25/month on top of the PM subscription). This gives you the ability to track 5 ISBNs (and I assume, you can pick new ISBNs every month). https://www.publishersmarketplace.com/bookscan/about.cgi#dataPack * If you want public library data checkout data: as linked in the article, go to the Seattle Public Library. Free. https://data.seattle.gov/Community/Checkouts-by-Title/tmmm-ytt6/data The situation only really gets ugly if you want access to broad market data (i.e., across all ISBNs for a given time window, and covering a majority of retail outlets). The best I'm able to find is this comment by Kristen McLean from NPD: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-doz… But this data is (a) limited, and (b) I think it has some…

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-only-a-doz… Now I'm curious how unique the many books on my shelf are!

Just going to drop this here: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-doz… This comes up constantly and it’s just wrong.

I'd agree that the pattern is typical. That said, substantiating Substack's actual total income would be helpful to the argument. But generally, see total corporate earnings or market cap vs. size, or book sales (recent discussion, some dispute over numbers: <https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-doz… <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794673>)

Bookscan numbers are highly inaccurate and represent a floor. https://www.comicsbeat.com/just-how-accurate-is-bookscan-anyway/?amp https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-doz…

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-only-a-doz…

He still writes about this sort of stuff if anybody is curious: https://countercraft.substack.com/people/2796313-lincoln-michel

> Wrote a book, published nine years ago. This might work for some writers and books, but not for others. There was this one Tweet that went into detail about what some trial documents revealed about a particular publisher: https://twitter.com/aprilhenrybooks/status/1566230658766503937 > In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books. There were also articles that disagreed with the claim: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-doz… Which also had some discussion on HN, where some people suggested that it was somewhat true, while others explored other aspects of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794673 But even the article itself refers to more claims like that, with many suggesting that in writing, like many other industries, there will be a few very successful books/projects, and many that will fall by the wayside (honestly, I'd say the same about most things, from making SaaS products, to game development and art/music). Here's a humbling article that someone wrote: https://hughhowey.com/most-books-dont-sell/ I guess what I'm trying to say here: don't write a book hoping to earn a lot of money. Write a book because you find the experience interesting or fun, and just because you want to write (and publish) a book.