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Most books don't sell only a dozen copies

countercraft.substack.com

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

#131

Post by lake_vincent »

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-...

I used to work for a big name scientific publisher, and we published a lot of super-niche research monographs that didn't sell many copies. What a lot of people don't understand was that our bread and butter came from university libraries. We published a lot of books not because they sold individually, but libraries wanted them. They like collections!

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

#132

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

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.

Who has 14 friends and family? I have like one friend and two family.

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

#133

Post by perlgeek »

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.

I agree.

I've published three books with a publisher, and the one I'm most proud of and which got the best reviews (19 ratings on Amazon, all 5 stars) is the most niche, and got the lowest sales numbers.

https://smile.amazon.com/Parsing-Perl-Regexes-Grammars-Recur... if anybody is interested.

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

#134

Post by mark_l_watson »

Good article and then a data-rich comment from Kristen McLean. This article makes me feel better as an author. 30 years ago, the first 2 books I wrote for the scientific publisher Springer-Verlag didn’t sell many copies, although I have received a lot of nice feedback about the first book over the years.

After writing 10 books for traditional publishers, all fairly niche technical books, I switched to self publishing and my readership has gone up dramatically (I think). When my publisher returned book rights to me, I released the second edition of my Java AI book under a Creative Commons license. For the 5 years that I tracked downloads from my web site (https://markwatson.com) I averaged 300 downloads a day over 5 years, and the book PDF was also downloadable from many other sites. I imagine that most people downloading a free PDF only read a small part of my open content books, but I have no data on that.

Currently I distribute on the leanpub.com platform (which I recommend!!) and I get about 50 free downloads for each time a person decides to voluntarily pay for one of my open content books. The exception is my Common Lisp book for which about 1 in 20 people choose to pay for it.

Writing is a lot of fun and it has opened the door to meeting and sometimes becoming friends with some amazing people.

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

#135

Post by zlurker »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #116
okaleniuk wrote: post #102

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,…

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.

There's a great blog written by someone who wrote a very efficient geohashing algorithm in go/assembly that may help a little bit with understanding it.

https://mmcloughlin.com/posts/geohash-assembly

The simplified TLDR is:

1. Convert lat and long to something that's represented by bits. 2. Interleave these bits such that lat and long bits alternate in the sequence. 3. Optionally, but seems to be the standard, encode the bits into the custom base32 character set.

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

#136

Post by fancyfredbot »

lukeschwartz wrote: post #105
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."

Maybe this is splitting hairs but this didn't make publishing seem like gambling to me. It sounds like if I can publish enough titles at a low enough cost per title I'm guaranteed to make money.

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

#137

Post by rcarr »

hsn915 wrote: post #47
franciscop wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "book" and "sell" mean here, following the article's excellent explanation on how those terms vary wildly. Are those figures per year or lifetime for the books?

This reminds of the Jordan Peterson thing where when he's asked "Do you believe in God" he replies with "Depends on what you mean by believe and God".

To be fair to JP, he's not always right but in this instance, he does have a point.

I believe in physics but I also believe that the map is not the territory. Go back a few centuries and the model of the atom was that of the Christmas pudding. We now know better but our own models are most certainly not correct. Thus I'm believing in something I know to be faulty on some level.

Similarly with God, each religion's conception is different. If you believe in a pagan religion you believe in lots of different gods. If you believe in a monotheistic religion you believe in one God.

It's very difficult to have a conversation free of misunderstanding on abstract matters unless you have a good grasp of the underlying concepts your conversational partner embodies in a word and vice versa. With a subject as touchy as religion, it's prudent to define terms early.

Likewise, I think asking for definitions of 'book' and 'sold' are perfectly valid questions.

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

#138

Post by lukeschwartz »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #136
lukeschwartz wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Maybe this is splitting hairs but this didn't make publishing seem like gambling to me. It sounds like if I can publish enough titles at a low enough cost per title I'm guaranteed to make money.

You're guaranteed to make little money, yes. The big publishers make most of their revenue from a small number of titles that make publishing any other title viable.

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

#139

Post by dredmorbius »

fortran77 wrote: post #71
memling wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" There's a good book on this called "Damned Lies and Statistics" that I recommend to people.[1,2] [1]: https://archive.org/details/damnedliesstatis00best [2]: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520274709/damned-lies-and-s...

There's also a much earlier "How to Lie with Statistics" (published in 1954). I read it in high school (45 years ago) https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff-ebook...

HTLwS was written as tobacco-lobby propaganda.

https://www.refsmmat.com/articles/smoking-statistics.html>

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

#140

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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.

Aha - the sub-clause that drags down my lofty ambition ...
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