Statistics for sales in the book industry
This is all over the Web (I found it via POD-dy Mouth), so I might as well post it here. I haven't found any evidence that the numbers are fudged, though they're certainly open to interpretation. Chris Anderson, editor of the technology news publication Wired Magazine, argues that the future of book publishing is in niche publishing. In order to back his theory, he cites the following statistics gathered in 2004 by Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks book industry sales. According to Bookscan, in 2004, 1.2 million books were sold. * Of those 1.2 million, 950,000 sold fewer than 99 copies. * Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. * Only 25,000 books sold more than 5,000 copies. * Fewer than 500 sold more than 100,000 copies. * Only 10 books sold more than a million copies each. * The average book in the United States sells about 500 copies. Those figures probably include self-published books, but still, the statistics make self-publishing look awfully good in comparison to traditional publishing. Here's Chris Anderson's article, which is from his new book on niche marketing, called "The Long Tail." http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6353274.html?pubdate=7%2F17%2F2006&display=current

I'm not sure how that makes self-publishing look relatively better when it includes both?

From what I understand, those 2004 stats include fiction and non fiction from everyone: the big five, smaller presses, vanity presses, and self publishers. Dunno if it includes e books -- do they get ISBNs? I read somewhere else that of those 25,000 books selling at least five thousand copies, about 17,000 of them came from the big five publishers. I'm guessing the rest came from independent publishers like Kensington, Baen, and Nightshade; academic publishers; and a few from small presses. I think, but I'm not sure, that for any given title, the hardcover and paperback get two different ISBNs and are considered two different \\"books\\", so a lot of those titles selling between 1000 and 5000 copies are probably mainstream hardbacks that then go on to sell a boatload more copies when they come out in paperback form. Does anyone have stats on the average number of copies sold for self published fiction? I believe that in mainstream fiction, selling less than 5000 copies in mmp = tanked, and in small press niche fiction, selling less than 1000 copies in mmp or tp = tanked; and that vanity published books sell, on average, less than 99 copies -- Publish America must've added significantly to that sad category.

"I'm not sure how that makes self-publishing look relatively better when it includes both?" Because only 25,000 books sold over 5000. Five thousand is a reachable number by an energetic self-publisher. We're talking about the type of people who are fiends at sending out press releases, doing interviews, etc., but some self-publishers *have* sold that many books. "I'm not sure, that for any given title, the hardcover and paperback get two different ISBNs and are considered two different 'books'" You're right, and I hadn't thought of that. I wonder whether Bookscan took that into account when compiling the statistics? "Does anyone have stats on the average number of copies sold for self published fiction?" Dan Poyter provides a whole bunch of interesting statistics on the book industry at his self-publishing site. http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm Among them are these stats from the Wall Street Journal: "Xlibris published 10,269 titles through March 25, 2004. 352 or 3.4% had sold more than 500 copies. 1,463 or 14.3% had sold more than 200 copies. The average per-publication sale number of an Xlibris title is about 130 copies." Those figures may have gone up since then, because a 2003 Wall Street Journal article showed that only 3% (352) had sold more than 200 copies. iUniverse is a little vague about its statistics, but it flatly denies a Publishers Weekly report that only 83 of its titles sold over five hundred copies. (Scroll down to "statistics.") http://www.iuniverse.com/community/blog/ SFWA claims that the Facts and Figures provided by iUniverse in 2005 show that the average book sells 166 copies. In 2004, they say AuthorHouse books sold an average of 111 copies. http://www.sfwa.org/beware/printondemand.html The Times has this to say about Lulu.com: "A Lulu bestseller is regarded as a book that sells 500 copies. Some have sold in the low thousands but Young is reluctant to give exact figures." http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2073717,00.html All of this sounds accurate to me, because the average self-publisher doesn't know squat about marketing. Also, some aren't interested in marketing - they only want to sell their books to a select number of people. What would be more interesting is statistics from self-publishers who actually put a good deal of energy into marketing their books. How are they doing, I wonder?

Another thing those statistics don't reveal is that earnings are usually much higher for authors for each copy of a self-published book. In the case of Lulu, the difference can be up to ten times higher (80% royalties as opposed to 7.5%). So, in the best-case scenario (ten times higher), selling one hundred copies of a book would earn the self-published author as much as would be earned by selling one thousand copies of a traditionally published book. On the other hand, there's no advance. :/

I know one 1stBooks author who managed to sell in the thousands years ago, when it was still relatively cheap to go through them. The advantage he had, though, was that he was an established journalist in the Catholic media, and managed to get on EWTN for an interview and a few popular radio shows. That spiked his sales. Of course, I've held long to the belief that non-fiction is much easier to market. Most authors I see on TV doing interviews are non-fic authors, unless it's Oprah's book club and good luck to me getting on her show. LOL

Oh, definitely. And if it's not nonfiction, it had better be a niche fiction market. Fortunately, erotic romance is a niche fiction market. :) We've actually had an in-the-thousands novelist stop by this forum: Jeremy Robinson. forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=3464" target="_blank">http://veinglory.8.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=3464 He has sold four-thousand-plus copies of his first novel. Has an agent now and three foreign translation deals.

Dusk said: \"Another thing those statistics don't reveal is that earnings are usually much higher for authors for each copy of a self-published book. In the case of Lulu, the difference can be up to ten times higher (80% royalties as opposed to 7.5%).\" Really? I'd no idea. I had thought that Lulu charged very high prices to print each book, so that it was unlikely an author would make more than a dollar or two profit if s/he were to sell the books at a cover price similar to small press trade paperbacks (around $15 is normal, I think). So (doing math on my fingers here) 7.5% royalty on $15 is, um, around a dollar. Do Lulu authors earn ten dollars per book? Does Lulu only charge $5 per tp printed? Wow, that's.....wow, I'm having to totally rethink everything about self-publishing, I'm even more clueless than I'd realised! I read on Absolute Write that most vanity/Publish America type books only sold less than a hundred copies per title, but, worse, that most of those copies were bought by the authors themselves, so that far from earning a profit the authors actually sunk a ton of money into books they couldn't sell. That doesn't sound like a very good way to go. For y'all who self publish, do you buy your own books and re-sell them? Does Lulu etc have distributers set up who sell the books for you?

I think there are different models within self-publishing. Sales figures below 100 per annum are average for PA (aroud 20) and iuniverse (around 40).

(Mathematically incompetent author tries to remember how to do percentages on a calculator. How I ever passed my math SATs, I'll never know.) You're right in catching me about the book pricing issue, because the cost of the book can affect the author's earnings. However, the basic reason you're startled by the numbers is that you're calculating royalties for traditional publishing in the most favorable manner. I didn't want to get into the net versus gross issue in my last post, but Lulu calculates royalties (or earnings, if the author owns the ISBN) by net profits rather than gross earnings - i.e. the cost of printing is deducted. Some publishers calculate royalties according to net, some according to gross (the retail price of the book) - it differs according to publisher. Obviously, gross royalties are a heck of a lot better for the author. So no, if you calculate a gross royalty - which is what you did in your example - then things are going to be more slanted toward traditional publishing. But even then, I think, Lulu comes ahead, just as e-book publishers do, because the percentage of earnings for authors are so high in comparison to those offered by traditional publishers. As for the pricing issue, that's the bigger problem, but more in terms of distribution than of the actual price of creating the book. The problem comes when you have to mark the book up to retail prices - the prices charged by bookstores - which doubles the amount you have to charge for the book. Basically, if you sell your book at a bookstore - either real-life or online - the bookstores and the folks who handle the book on its way to the bookstores demand a fifty percent cut. I imagine that e-book publishers tear their hair out about this too, because the actual production costs are fairly low till you get the middlemen involved; then the price of the book shoots up. At that point, royalties have to go down. Lulu just revamped its pricing structure, so I'm going to work this out from scratch. Assume a 300-page book (which is probably a bit hefty for a romance novel, but that's the page numbers I'm calculating for my own novel). Bookstore-distributed books cost $1.50 plus two cents per page, for a total cost of $7.50. Double that and you get the retail price of $15, which doesn't leave you with much margin for adding on royalty. However, if you distribute only through Lulu - as I'm doing, which is why I thought in those terms during my last post - the situation is very different. Base price is $4.53, while the pages are again two cents each, for a total of $10.50. This price *doesn't need to be doubled*, because there's no middleman taking his fifty percent cut. So if your list price is fifteen dollars - the number you choose - your earnings are roughly $3.50 per copy, which isn't bad in comparison to a gross royalty of one dollar, and is even better against a net royalty, which would be lower. Incidentally, you can go even lower in pricing if you forego yet another middleman - a self-publishing company such as Lulu - and deal directly with Lightning Source, which does POD printing for Lulu and practically everyone else who is publishing POD . . . and which, as I understand it, will also take care of fulfilling orders. Working directly with Lightning Source requires a certain amount of publishing savvy that I, for one, do not have. However, if you do so, as I understand it, it's quite possible to make a healthy profit, even if you're pricing your book for retail. "Does Lulu etc have distributers set up who sell the books for you?" Lightning Source (which Lulu uses if you choose to go for the retail option) makes your book available to online bookstores - and theoretically to real-life bookstores too, but the return policies of POD companies are so appalling (or, to put it another way, the POD companies can't comply with the real-life bookstores' appalling return policies) that real-life bookstores generally won't touch POD books. Again, one can apparently work around this if one publishes without a middleman like Lulu. And if a self-publisher takes the offset printing route (i.e. not print-on-demand), then by all means it's possible to sell to real-life bookstores. However, that takes start-up money, and most self-publishers choose Lulu precisely because it requires no or minimal investment. As far as the online bookselling is concerned, things look peachy for Lulu authors who go retail - their books are listed at places like Amazon in the exact same manner as books from big-name presses. I, personally, have bought a book from Amazon, thinking that it was from a publishing company, only to learn when I got it that it was a self-published book. And I didn't search out that particular book - I stumbled across that book because it was listed in Amazon's "People who bought this also bought . . ." list from a book entry I was looking at. "I read on Absolute Write that most vanity/Publish America type books only sold less than a hundred copies per title, but, worse, that most of those copies were bought by the authors themselves" Being a writer is a very different thing from being a book marketer, and most self-published writers don't realize that. As far as mainstream books are concerned, I think there's no question that most big presses and some of the small presses do a much better job at marketing than writers do. However, when you get down to niche publishing - and especially if the alternative you're facing is an e-publisher rather than a print publisher - then I think things tend to even out. What drove me to make the decision to self-publish was when I looked at Torquere - one of the few markets available for the type of books I write - and realized that their marketing efforts really were much less than I - who have been marketing my e-zines for many years now - could do myself. If you do a Web search on Torquere authors and see where their books are mentioned, you'll see what I mean. The number of places where Torquere authors are being reviewed and promoted are really quite small. No doubt this is because Torquere has limited resources, but I think that, in certain respects, Torquere's staff simply haven't tried to tap into all the places their books could go - they don't seem to be very savvy about reaching the gay market, for example. The limit for me came when I discovered that the best-sellers at Torquere had sold three hundred copies each. At that point, I washed my hands of traditional publishing. (This was a couple of years ago. Hopefully Torquere's sales have risen since then. Any e-book authors here want to contribute thoughts on their total sales?) Similar problems occur at the small printed press level - a lot of small presses give only lip service to marketing efforts and depend primarily on the author to do the work. Shameful to say it, but even big presses are leaning heavily on their authors to do the grunt work these days. So being traditionally published is no guarantee that your books will be decently marketed. If an author really doesn't have any skills or knowledge at marketing their own writings, then traditional publishing is certainly the route they should take, because books just don't sell themselves. However, I think that a marketing-knowledgeable author can do as well as a small printed press, and can do much better than an e-publisher. (We'll see whether I eat all these words when I get published.)

Thanks! A very informative and comprehensive answer. Gosh, this forum is better than a textbook :-)

I am told that I am highly skilled at sounding erudite on topics I figured out five minutes before. I'm glad to see that I haven't lost this skill. :)

Gakked from POD-dy Mouth, this New York Daily News article provides a few more stats. http://www.nydailynews.com/business/story/469494p-395148c.html "In 2005, the four biggest print-on-demand companies (iUniverse.com, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, and Lulu.com) put out 17,000 books, up 31% from 2001, according to Bowker's Books In Print database." (Incidentally, that number wouldn't cover Lulu authors who bypass ISBN numbers.) "First-year sales of iUniverse-published books average between 125 and 150 copies."

I should add to this, Dusk, that what many authors don't get is that if they want their book to prosper, they have to do their bit to promote both their book AND their publisher. The more interest in the publisher, the more chances of future books selling. It's a team effort. But many authors new to the ebook industry don't really get this. They think they can leave it in the hands of their publisher to promote and then concentrate solely on their single book or so, but it works best if you pimp the whole deal, drive public to the publishing source. That aside, this thread is for self-publishing. And yes, I think you're on the right track for your books, because you do have quite the network going for you already. :D

"That aside, this thread is for self-publishing." Don't worry, I'm not anal about keeping threads on-topic. :) Besides, this applies to self-publishing authors too, if they use a self-publishing company. If Lulu prospers, then so do its authors. "you do have quite the network going for you already." It's going to be interesting to see whether that network translates into sales. Will online readers buy printed books? Especially if the books are also available online? I know *I* will (I have "The God Eaters" on my wish-list for when I have money again), but I don't know how typical I am.