Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

countercraft.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 143 posts

Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

#101

Post by psnehanshu »

Waterluvian wrote: post #10

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.

But the point is that most people will take the literal definition of "book". They wouldn't differentiate between hardcover, paperback, ebooks, audiobooks. If an "expert" said "90% of books sell less than 99 copies", without any context, most people will assume that the book sold less than 99 copies across all its manifestations and in a lifetime. The article puts light on the fact that there's more to that statement than what it means in a first glance.

Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

#102

Post by okaleniuk »

My first self-published book sold maybe half a dozen copies, and there even was one refund. The reason is simple. It is a bad book.

The next one sold none. Which is expected since I made it openly available from my site. It hit about half a million downloads in the first year. Alas, most of them were from one IP somewhere in Czechia so I guess someone's spider got stuck in the web. But real people downloaded it too, about 12 000 copies. I even got a positive review from John D. Cook of which I'm extremely proud https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2020/04/24/programming-langua...

I'm now working on Geometry for Programming book for Manning https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers. This would be my first collaboration with a publisher and so far it looks like it will become a moderate success. The early access sales are good, the reviews are encouraging. Even though, I would expect first year sales to be in thousands, maybe even low tens if we're lucky but no more. Definitely not enough to live of.

So while the post doesn't reveal any specific statistics, it does agree with my experience. Most books might indeed sell in very low numbers but they are not really published and maybe not even really books. If you're working with a well established publisher, you will get some moderate sales numbers guaranteed, and a even small chance to go big.

Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

#103

Post by ghaff »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #20
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #9

Thus my self-publishing goal - to sell more than 12 copies. Well 14. Don't want to be superstitious !

I bet friends and family can help achieve such an ambitious goal, unless you are a really unlikeable person.

In my experience friends and family often tend to want to be given copies—which they may or may not read.

Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

#104

Post by ghaff »

erwincoumans wrote: post #81

Someone may write a technical book for a niche community. The book may help others, build a portfolio etc. It doesn't need to earn lots of sales to be satisfying or useful.

A fair number of books in this vein are also published electronically in some form free of charge. There may also be a physical book because why not. I’ve done that myself.

Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

#105

Post by lukeschwartz »

lovingCranberry wrote: post #3

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-...

The comment should have been the post.

And this is the unsurprising TLDR:

"The long and short of it is publishing is very much a gambler's game, and I think that has been clear from the testimony in the DOJ case. It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year."

Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

#106

Post by spjwebster »

wheresmycraisin wrote: post #96

My father wrote technical books through the 80's and 90's. I remember him being very happy about a book that sold in the low tens of thousands of copies (I'm guessing 20k or so). I know some of them flopped. Even as a child I knew that it did not make sense financially... stay up til 4am writing for a solid year or more (he had a regular job as well), so that you can get maybe 5-10% royalty on something that likely w…

Having written a bunch of books on Flash and PHP back in the early 2000s, my experience is very much aligned with this.

For a relatively young guy the income was welcome, and after the first book did well I got a pretty decent advance for the subsequent books. They all sold enough to pay back that advance and so I got quarterly royalties on top too, but given the amount of toil it required - and quick turnaround times with new Flash releases, meaning many late nights - I would have been better compensated doing pretty much anything else.

That said, money isn't the only, or even necessarily the most important or fulfilling, reward on offer. I got the writing gig because I was spending a lot of my free time on various Flash-related forums answering questions and helping people with their projects. I did that for the sheer joy of helping others along in their learning journey, and saw writing books as a massive extension of that.

It very much mirrors my experience of the public school system in the UK: teachers are chronically overworked and underpaid, but do it anyway because it's something of a calling. In fact, that probably applies to a bunch of other public sector roles too, not least the NHS primary care roles.

Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

#107

Post by dalai »

lovingCranberry wrote: post #3

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-...

Actually I think the post highlights that even the statistic you quoted means less than one thinks it means. For example, some of the books included may have been only a few weeks on the market. Some titles may be niche books with the expected lower sales volume calculated in the price. BookScan only covers a certain percentage of print sales in the US, the total sales could be more than double that.

Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

#109

Post by raverbashing »

Ooooffff

This started well but it seems like a crap take at tweetsplaining

> When people reference book sales, they’re typically talking using NPD Group’s BookScan numbers

The guy is an author and this is the meaning of sales he pulls first? really?

Number of sales is what your publisher will tell you. Because they owe you money for every sale done. Because a sale is how many times people clicked the 'buy' button (be it digital, Amazon, or went into a bookstore).

"BookScan numbers" LOL

> there are dramatic differences between 1) lifetime sales, 2) sales in the first 12 months after publication, and 3) sales in any random calendar year.

By the context it's obvious what they mean FFS. This guy can't interpret a tweet and came up with this clickbait crap?

Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

#110

Post by obruchez »

gverrilla wrote: post #89

My car broken, so I had to take a long intercity bus trip, for the first time in 15 years. After a short stop in a station, the driver ignited the bus again, but he forgot to turn the internal lights system on - so I couldn't read. I waited a few minutes, but he didn't turn it on, so I had to get up to ask him in the cabin. Coming back, that's when I realized mine was the one and only light on: none of the other 100…

The overwhelming majority of e-readers nowadays have a backlight, right? And reading "electronically" is still reading. But I guess I see your point: reading "traditionally" isn't something that many people do. Just like sitting to listen to an album from start to finish, which is something I did a lot when a was a teenager.
Post reply on HN