Paper Book Sales

[lb_lee]

This Publishers Weekly article, "A Bookselling Tail," is from 2006, but this fact in it is still interesting to me: "in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. Those blockbusters are a minute anomaly: only 10 books sold more than a million copies last year, and fewer than 500 sold more than 100,000."

I don't understand how they got the "average book in America sells ~500 copies" from the numbers described, but whatever. The point is, I feel a lot better about my professional self now; Homeless Year has sold at least 200 paper copies (+27 ebooks), Alter Boys In Love is coming very close to 100 paper copies (+38 ebooks), and AllFam has sold... shit, I don't even know, 120 paper copies at the Kickstarter, 30 in 2022, 36 in the prior two years, so... peg it at roughly 180, 190 paper copies? (+158 ebooks.)

My prose paperbacks have been failures, but a lot of the problem is me: I haven't figured out how to sell them properly yet. And my floppies are all basically test-drives to see what sells, and what's worth continuing until we reach the book-with-spine level, since printing books with spines is a LOT pricier and work-intensive. (Since I'll be selling Flights of Reality until the day I die, we're now test-driving ALL things in floppy form, and then in a pilot paperback print run of 20-30, since I can sell 20-30 copies of damn near anything. This will hopefully avoid the dreaded "graveyard of unsellable books" that every self-pubber is so familiar with.)

Not too shabby for someone making such niche work, who is sold by only a couple retailers, and who isn't on Amazon! I feel accomplished.