I was very confused by the title. I read it a few times just thinking it was poor English. Had to click through to the article to find out why.
Why was the leading "No" removed?
Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
111–120 of 143 posts
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#112I 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 10,000-1…
There were many useful facts that I hadn't considered, to be honest, especially regarding what was counted (probbly print sales tracked by BookScan) and how (unique ISBNs).
Also, whenever some party brings up stats to make some point, I think it's fair to examine their figures, methodology and so on and just be a bit pedantic about it. And this was a claim made in a major antitrust case. The facts, and the general pedantry, show some serious likely issues and raise some important questions about the figures a party in a major trial made, and which were then - mostly uncritically - echoed all over the place.
Regarding Kristen McLeans comment:
The "in their dataset" is a very important detail that shouldn't be overlooked. The dataset for this is the book sales figures of the top 10 publisher published books. They get the numbers from partnered retailers (some 75% of retailers according to the article), and it only covers print copies, not ebooks, not audio books. It does not cover direct sales to larger organizational buyers, like library systems, either.
And it's grouped by unique ISBN, not by title. As the article points out, most books come in many editions (hardcover, paperback, etc), each of which has their own ISBN. The article author illustrates this by telling about his own book, which is one book with 4 different unique ISBNs (though one was for an ebook, and one for the audio book, both of which wouldn't be covered by this dataset anyway).
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That only means that sales aren't your forté. Good friends and family members can be sold many copies each — which they may or may not read.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#114Writing a book in 2022 is like opening a DVD renting shop...
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading on a bus would make me barf in 5 minutes
That bites. I can read on rough seas.
That’s easier. Problem is when the word you are reading is constantly tossed back and forth. Following that makes your head hurt.
On the sea is low frequency noise it is much easier.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#116My 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,…
interesting. does your book cover geohashing. I've been curious how points and polygons get converted to geohashes and how the search using these work. I currently postgis as a black box but I haven't been able to find any books or articles that really explain in depth how they work.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#117My 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…
You don't write tech books for the royalties, you write them for the consulting opportunities they lead to.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#118Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I think you are drastically over-estimating the share of developers that read software development related books. Out of the 150+ software engineers I worked with on a daily basis throughout my career so far, I can guarantee you not even 5% have ever read programming books (and I work…
Really? I can't think of any dev I've worked with who didn't at least have some reference books handy. Though to be fair, it's been 10 years or so since I've worked in-person with people on a daily basis, so maybe my impression is just way out of date. I still buy the occasional programming book, but nothing like I used to now that we have all the online resources.
> some reference books handy
Looking at a random list [1] of O'Reilly books, I can see 3 categories:
- The ones for beginners, like "Learning Python" or "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide",
- The ones that will be outdated even before reaching the shelves of a library, such as "Kubernetes in Action" or "Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow",
- The ones that are more about concepts such as "Clean Code".
I can't see any of those being used as a reference book. The Internet and official documentations is the reference book.
Re: Most books don't sell only a dozen copies
#120Pretty 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.
No it's a very good stat, I think they mean measure after 52 weeks, and note they exclude self published books, it's the crème and still suffers from huge Pareto (as expected)