Business Post: What's a Good Number to Sell?

One of the most common questions I see by new authors are 'how many books is a good number to sell' or 'how many can I expect to sell' or 'what's a good estimate for sales?'. It's a string question of course ('How long is a piece of string?') because there are no 'right' answers.

A lot of it has to do with genre, with covers (do you have a good product to sell), with timing and reach and yes, luck. Some genres have a large audience, others a tiny one. Sometimes, you manage to hit it big by pure luck, other times, Amazon will have a hiccup and your launch goes to hell and never recovers.

You can never tell, and it's frustrating for everyone connected to it, so no one ever wants to try to give an answer; because every year, the debut experience will change too.

Furthermore, using 'averages' or survey's are horrendous ways of getting information. Many of them do not provide enough details on how numbers are arrived at, or in many cases, they rely on self-reporting. 

Self-Reported Sales Numbers

A commonly quoted number that half of authors earned less than $500 is taken from the Taleist survey as quoted here (https://www.sfwa.org/2012/05/25/two-surveys/). However, if you look at the details, that number comes from half of those who reported their sales which were 60% of the 1000 respondents. Put another way, that's 300 respondents who gave that often quoted $500 number.

The most recent Written Word Media report on the other hand (https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/2024-indie-author-survey-results-insights-into-self-publishing-for-authors/) has 1500+ respondents and 46% (nearly half) not even making $100 a month. Note that these are authors, so this could include individuals with 1 book or 40+ (in fact, there's an average for number of titles for authors below $100 that says they have 9 books). 

Note that this number has jumped a lot compared from 2023 (https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/survey-results-the-state-of-indie-authorship/) where those earning less than $250 per month had on average 5 books. So there's a significant discussion that the numbers might have been warped by 'AI' or 'fast money' authors.

Either way, if you looked at just that stat, it's rather depressing. After all, if you figure say, 5 books at $100, that's $20 per book, or maybe... 7-8 units a month at most. Multiply that by 12 and you have 84-96 books sold in a year at most.

So on a 'pessimistic low end' you might sell 100 copies of your book in a year.

Some Other Numbers

Here's some other statistics I've found. For example, the majority of New York Times bestselling books sell from 10,000 to 100,000 copies in their first year.

NYT bestsellers are generally traditionally published books, and because of that, they generally can expect the majority of their sales to happen in the first 90 days. So a 10,000 copy number in the first year is likely to be the majority of their sales.

If you assume that the NYT list is the cream of the crop, with 10,000 books the low-end; then you could assume for your average mid-lister, sales between 3-4,000 would be 'good'. 

Having talked to some traditional publishing professionals, the number of 3-5,000 was considered 'good' sales for their authors. Now, this number for a new deal might be higher with a bigger publisher (Big 5) where I would assume, 5-8,000 books would be much more pleasing to their eyes. So, there's definitely a bias depending on the size of your publisher in trad pub.

Translating that number into cash ($), 3000 units at say $3 per unit is rouhgly $10,000. Which is the higher end of advances these days, with many advances for tradpub coming in the $5-15k range for debuts from what I've heard. If you're a minority, expect that number to crush downwards ($3-5k seems to be the mode from the PublishingPaidMe article). Assuming it's a $10k advance, then the expectation of sales of 3000 units makes quite a bit of sense for your 'average' debut.

Mind you, this is tradpub and what they consider a 'good', stable earned out author.

Here's another piece of information, this one that got into the discussion from the Penguin Random House trial about how 'most books only sell a dozen copies'. Which basically refutes the facts of that case.

Here's the full article - No, Most Books Don't Sell Only A Dozen Copies (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen)

Most importantly, check the comments but realise that a 'book' in Bookscan numbers is a single ISBN. Every version of a book gets an ISBN, so if you create a hardcover, large print hardcover, large print paperback and paperback, that's 4 different 'books' according to these numbers. 

Quotes from the comments (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen/comment/8883524) , here's the breakdown:

Here is what I found. Collectively, 45,571 unique ISBNs appear for these publishers in our frontlist sales data for the last 52 weeks (thru week ending 8-24-2022).

In this dataset:

>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more

>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies

>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies

>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies

>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies

>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies

>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies

>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies

Assume that the 51.4% are the paperbacks or hardcovers (major print run) utilized by the trade, and you can assume that most sales should be between 12-5000 copies (i.e. 72% of all books). If we figure there's some mass distribution weirdness here, you're likely looking at somewhere in the 500-3000 copy range for most books.

So, not a great number, and quite the range; but at least there's another rough number range.

Talking to Small Press

Chatting with some (Canadian) authors, one thing I learnt was that their print (which was, again, the majority of their sales focus) was often in the 1000 book range. Of which, the expectation of most authors is to sell 300-500 of those books. Not a lot of books for sure, and it wasn't clear if that included ebooks or not.

Overall, not a huge number of books to be sold, with average income from that meaning to land in the $1000-1500 range if you assume they get around $3 per sale.

That's what I have found out over the years. I'm sure there are people with other numbers, and if you have it, do provide the information (and the data!). Do note, I'm trying to get information for a single book, preferably debuts in this case. Experienced authors, non-debut authors, etc. might have different numbers.

Indies who exist on backlist who care more about long tail might have very different numbers. But this is just trying (as best) to answer that 'how many books will I sell on publishing' question. 

The Conclusion

Overall, those numbers vary a lot. It seems for most tradpub - 300-500 copies might be considered 'poor' sales, 3-5k is decent(ish) or good and anything over 8k is amazing. 

For indies, we see a wider range, but I'd assume anywhere from 100 copies in a year is not uncommon, somewhere in the 1000 copy range is decent and 'average' and anything over 3000+ copies a year puts you in the higher end of most indie sales.  Mind you, indie sales numbers are the toughest to pin down - just because there's SOOO much variation there because of the disparate genres and quality of work being put out and the varying levels of promotional efforts and marketing expertise.