[HN Gopher] No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies
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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.
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