What's a lot of books to sell?

Pushingfordream said:

I am wondering for self-publishing what is a lot of books to sell in a year? Is over a thousand a lot? I am also wonder from a publisher what is a lot of books to sell in a year? Is breaking a few thousand copies rare?

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A lot in what sense?

Generally, I've heard it said that a self-published book will get interested from agents or trade publishers if it sells over 20,000 copies or so.

For most self-pubbed books, a thousand is probably a lot in a year, if ever, yes.

As with most things, it's relative and depends on what you're asking about specifically, kind of.

10

Most self-published books hardly sell at all, so a few thousand sales would certainly be good compared to those.

But if the self-published book is sold for 99 cents, the author gets 35 cents per sale, so a few thousand sales would barely be more than $1000. If the book was professionally edited and has a professional cover, there's probably only a few hundred dollars left over for net profit. Assuming the book probably took a few hundred hours to get written, edited, etc., that's about $1/hr for the writer. Which, by most standards, is NOT a good wage.

That's one scenario. If the book sold for more than 99 cents, if the author didn't pay for outside editing or art, if the author spent more or less time writing - there's lots of variables.

Cornflake's already given you about the only objective numbers I can think of. The rest of it's all subjective.

ETA: Books from a publisher is also a bit hard to put a fixed number to. It depends on the scale of publishing (Big 5, e-pub, etc.) and the genre and length of the book. But I would say that the average book from a publisher is expected to sell more copies than the average book from a self-publisher. (I work with e-pubs, and I expect to sell at least 5 000 copies of my books (novel-length) in the first couple years after release. I don't always make it, but that's the expectation. If I don't reach that goal, I look at what went wrong. If I were with a larger publisher, I'd expect to sell significantly more copies (albeit with lower royalty rates)).

... to answer that a consideration of the average, helps. My guesstimate would be 25-40 for a self-pub'd title if you include all self pub'd books. And that may even be a high estimate. So based on that a lot would be 100 plus sales.

Many of my ebooks that are through publishers have been selling in numbers ranging from 2000 up to 17000 per book.

The ebooks I've self-published ( admittedly they're short story collections ) struggle to reach 100 sold.

Pushingfordream,

You know, god bless you and your enthusiam and wanting answers, but the answers to your questions can often be found in other threads if you search. Also, most of the questions you are asking don't have firm answers because your questions are somewhat vague.

Take for instance the above question about sales in self publishing; are you wanting to know results for monthly, quarterly, yearly, or life time sales of a self published book.

The problem with answering this question is that different self published writers are going to have different results depending on the value of the story, their skill set in formulating the story, and even the genre they right in. The same can be said for authors in commercial publishing, some sell way more than others.

But, from my observed experience, Willie's numbers sound about right, or average for SP vs commercial publishers.

It's difficult to know what's average as it's impossible to get accurate and unbiased data on self-published sales. But judging from the accounts I've seen I'd guess that if you sell 200 copies of your self-published novel you're doing better than most.

As for trade-published books: again, an average is difficult to provide because much depends on genre, the publisher concerned, territory, and format. A friend who writes crime novels expects to sell around 2,500 hardbacks in his first week of publication; a friend who writes poetry would love to sell that many copies across a year; and writer-friends in the US rather than in the UK tend to have much higher expectations. While it's impossible to give any meaningful averages, I'd expect trade books to count their sales by the thousand, if only because if you're selling fewer than a couple of thousand you're going to struggle to recoup the cost of publication, which makes it difficult to stay in business.

It's difficult to know what's average as it's impossible to get accurate and unbiased data on self-published sales. But judging from the accounts I've seen I'd guess that if you sell 200 copies of your self-published novel you're doing better than most.

In reality for SP, that's about the closest and most accurate estimate I've seen.

Most of our data on this stuff is pretty much artisanal--i.e. anecdotes.

That said, when I sold a thousand copies of my SP novella (that's it at the bottom of the post!) a lot of people in my field, who also do SP and professional publishing, said "Be proud, that's a LOT of copies to move."

When I publish through my Big Six publisher, my MG series (which is doing very well, don't get me wrong!) has an opening print run of at least 20-30K and we expect it to go back to press at least four or five times in the life of the series, if not more. If one of this series doesn't sell at least 30K copies in the first pay period, we all get a little worried and start giving marketing the side-eye.

When I was a complete unknown with a first MG book, its initial print run was 9K in hardback.

When my buddy, the super well-established historical romance author sells a book, the initial print run is going to be at least 300K in paperback.

As the current system stands, nothing I self-publish is ever going to move the kind of numbers that my trade publisher can generally manage in the first week without breaking a sweat.

My first book tanked. It tanked hard. It was a good little book but the stars lined up against it and a lot of things went wrong that were not my fault, not its fault, not the editor's fault. Stuff happens.

It has still, over the last 5 years, mostly on the coat-tails of later, more successful books, manage to sell some 15K copies in hardcover. Whereas my weird little novella, where everything went right, will be successful beyond my wildest dreams if it sells 3000 copies in its life, at a third the cover price of my first book.

That being said, while SP pulls in a lot less money, it's still money. $3K isn't a $40K advance, but I'm still not gonna leave $3K lying on the table.

There is stuff SP is awesome for, and it should totally be used for those things. Just be aware that trade houses will sell oodles more copies and make you oodles more money if you're able to write stuff they're able to sell.

I read one data point several years ago (think it came from Para publishing). Of the 1.2 million titles released in the US, on average each title sold roughly 200 copies, but that included all forms of publication.

Michael, that's a meaningless statistic for the discussion here. It includes all sorts of things, like diaries, calendars, academic publications... anything with an ISBN, I think. It's been widely discredited, as it doesn't demonstrate the sales which can be expected for books published to the book trade, which is what we're mostly interested in here.