Simon Willison's Weblog: publishing

No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies

2024-04-25T03:41:12+00:00

No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies

I linked to a story the other day about book sales claiming "90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies", based on numbers released in the Penguin antitrust lawsuit. It turns out those numbers were interpreted incorrectly.

In this piece from September 2022 Lincoln Michel addresses this and other common misconceptions about book statistics.

Understanding these numbers requires understanding a whole lot of intricacies about how publishing actually works. Here's one illustrative snippet:

"Take the statistic that most published books only sell 99 copies. This seems shocking on its face. But if you dig into it, you’ll notice it was counting one year’s sales of all books that were in BookScan’s system. That’s quite different statistic than saying most books don’t sell 100 copies in total! A book could easily be a bestseller in, say, 1960 and sell only a trickle of copies today."

The top comment on the post comes from Kristen McLean of NPD BookScan, the organization who's numbers were misrepresented is the trial. She wasn't certain how the numbers had been sliced to get that 90% result, but in her own analysis of "frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in the U.S. Trade market" she found that 14.7% sold less than 12 copies and the 51.4% spot was for books selling less than a thousand.

Tags: books, publishing, statistics

No one buys books

2024-04-22T21:55:04+00:00

No one buys books

Fascinating insights into the book publishing industry gathered by Elle Griffin from details that came out during the Penguin vs. DOJ antitrust lawsuit.

Publishing turns out to be similar to VC investing: a tiny percentage of books are hits that cover the costs for the vast majority that didn't sell well. The DOJ found that, of 58,000 books published in a year, "90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies."

UPDATE: This story is inaccurate: those statistics were grossly misinterpreted during the trial. See this post for updated information.

Here's an even better debunking: Yes, People Do Buy Books (subtitle: "Despite viral claims, Americans buy over a billion books a year").

Via Hacker News

Tags: books, publishing

Quoting Clay Shirky

2009-03-15T05:09:37+00:00

It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem.

— Clay Shirky

Tags: clay-shirky, newspapers, publishing

The Art & Science of JavaScript

2007-10-15T22:35:10+00:00

The Art & Science of JavaScript

My first author credit: I’m contributing a chapter to SitePoint’s next JavaScript tome.

Tags: books, javascript, publishing, sitepoint, theartandscienceofjavascript