The One About Book Sales

Some ways to figure out what to expect in terms of book sales

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Recently, the main character of Substack was a post about book sales. If you missed the discussion, I would start with this post by Lincoln Michel, which is a good more nuanced discussion of book sales that responds to the original piece.

One thought I had when reading the original post is that author expectations for book sales and actual book sales are often pretty different. I think it’s helpful for aspiring and debut authors to have some idea of what to expect so you (hopefully) aren’t completely blindsided by sales numbers.

Before my book came out, I spent some time trying to figure out what I should expect in terms of sales. I think the first question I wanted an answer to is “What number of books sold would be considered a good amount in terms of sales?”

Through talking with other authors directly and in online writing groups and following industry discussions, I learned that numbers are subjective: I saw a well-respected writer say that selling 500 copies of a book published with a small press can be good and in Jen Mann’s book How I F*cking Did It she wrote about her first two traditionally published books selling tens of thousands of copies and those numbers not living up to her publisher’s expectations.

Advances also come into play with this — if you get a $1,000 book advance the sales expectations are going to be different than if you get a $100,000 advance.

Why do book sales vary so much?

Sales can vary widely due to a variety of factors including the type of book, size of publisher, marketing put behind it, and author platform; and even when a book has all the ingredients to sell a lot of copies it sometimes still doesn’t.

When I think about my experience publishing short pieces over the past 20 years, I have also seen a mix of results with how many readers a piece reaches. There are times when I’ve had humor pieces go viral and times when they’ve barely gotten any readers. Sometimes I can point to reasons why something took off or didn’t — but other times I can’t.

Of course, having a book you’ve spent years of your life on not sell a lot of copies can be a lot more painful than having a short humor piece about cats not reach a lot of readers (although that’s probably a bad example because cat content is often popular).

But I think that one thing that can make the book publishing process so fraught for authors is not knowing what to expect. At some point, the question I was curious about became more along the lines of: What do average book sales for books similar to mine look like? Or more specifically — what do authors at similar points in their careers writing similar books from similar-sized publishers average in terms of sales?

One book sales dataset I’ve found helpful

Again, types of books and book sales vary. But having some sense of how many copies of a book like the type of book you are publishing typically sell can help to set expectations (or make you not feel bad if you did not sell what you felt were a large amount of books).

One of the most useful stats I’ve seen to demonstrate sales of books from bigger publishers is from this comment in a 2022 Substack post by Lincoln Michel discussing book sales (I’m including a screenshot of it below). The comment came from Kristen McLean, an industry analyst for NPD Bookscan - Circana, and was an attempt to recreate a viral stat that emerged in the Department of Justice vs. Penguin Random House trial.

Some things you should know before looking at the dataset include:

• As mentioned in part of the comment I screenshotted below, this dataset only represents 1 year of sales of frontlist (new or recently published books) and it’s only from the bigger publishers she notes. Sales over multiple years might vary and this is only a small subset of numbers that doesn’t include smaller publishers or self-published books.

• BookScan tracks print sales from mainstream retail outlets, so these numbers only reflect print sales (not ebooks or audiobooks) and not print sales from things like libraries or non-mainstream retail outlets. The BookScan sales numbers for my book and the sales numbers on my royalty statement are off by a pretty big amount (and I don’t have access to my audiobook sales numbers at all because my publisher sold those rights to another company). I’ve seen others reporting the same in terms of BookScan vs. actual sales. Also worth noting: when you publish a book, BookScan numbers are the numbers most traditionally published authors have access to most quickly via Amazon Author Central. And since you can wait several months before getting a royalty statement, you may be spending a (sometimes unhealthy) amount of time with the BookScan numbers for your book.

So, this is not a complete picture of all sales from the year McLean pulled the dataset from, but still worth a look:

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Screenshot of this comment.

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One thing that stands out to me is that the biggest chunk of BookScan sales numbers for the one year shown above is between 12-999 copies. Again, actual sales are probably more but that is where the majority of books land, and the next biggest chunk is 1,000-4,999. So those two combined categories represent 73% of sales for this dataset. For a point of comparison, my book sales for the first year fell into that 73% chunk (it BookScanned in the 51.4% category but my royalty statements showed print sales in the 21.6% category).

Whether the numbers in those categories are a lot or a little to you is subjective, but if you are imagining you are going to sell 100,000 copies in your first year of sales as a non-famous debut author, it is probably unlikely. Not impossible, but the odds are not in your favor. What counts as success is also going to be variable.

Also, advances are a whole other topic and they also vary pretty widely, but I think it’s worth doing some research on what to expect given your genre and the type of publisher that might acquire your book. The #PublishingPaidMe data from a few years ago might be a good place to start.

So how can you get an idea of book sales for your specific type of book?

I think aspiring and debut authors would probably benefit from gathering data specific to their type of book, and here are some potential places to get more info on sales:

• Lincoln Michel’s recent post in his Substack Counter Craft includes a section about what an average novel can expect to sell.

• The Publishing Rodeo Podcast is very transparent about many aspects of the traditional publishing process (including contracts, advances, sales numbers, and why certain books sell better than others). The hosts and guests are typically writing Sci-Fi and Fantasy so it’s probably most helpful for those genres but I’ve found it really eye-opening and I write outside those genres.

• Publisher’s Weekly lists “units sold” next to their bestseller lists, but these are bestselling books and so probably not as helpful for most debut/aspiring authors as a means of comparison. Still, it might just be useful to see what some actual numbers are.

• BookScan: Looking up sales data for specific books that are comparable to yours is probably the most helpful data. You can pay for BookScan to look up sales data for specific books but it’s pricey for normal annual subscriptions. Publisher’s Marketplace does offer a monthly option to view sales data for 5 books per month (that clocks in around $50 a month because you also have to pay for a membership to Publisher’s Marketplace to access it). It could be useful if you are putting together a book proposal or just trying to get a better handle on how many books that are comps to yours sell. I’ve paid for it before and found it useful because a lot of the other data out there seems to be outside the gift/humor book genre I currently write in.

• Other writers: There are a lot of reasons to build a writing community but one of them is that you can have someone to talk about the realities behind publishing a book with. By the time my book came out, I had several writer friends who also had books coming out and it was helpful to talk about some of the behind-the-scenes stuff (including numbers) with them.

• Your agent: If you have a literary agent, sometimes talking through sales numbers with them can be helpful.

If you are looking for more information on traditional book publishing, two of my favorite Substacks on the subject are Kathleen Schmidt’s Publishing Confidential and Kate McKean’s Agents and Books.

And if you have a book coming out I highly recommend reading Courtney Maum’s book Before and After The Book Deal to walk you through a variety of debut author questions (and bonus points — it has a lot of humor woven in).

Do you have other resources on book publishing numbers that you’ve found helpful? Feel free to shout them out in the comments.

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