It’s a Tough Business

Here are the 2022 sales numbers of print, front-list books, published by the top ten publishers, as excerpted from an article by Len Wilson titled, “How Many Copies Does it Take to Become a “Bestselling” Book?” and turned into a pie chart.

These are the numbers he cites:

• 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

Len Wilson doesn’t really answer the question he poses in the title of his article, of how many books it takes to be a best seller. Additional research indicates that the best seller rank depends on how you define “best seller.”

If you count as best sellers those selling over 20,000 copies in a year (a pretty modest definition), then about 3% of the books cited above are “best sellers”; the other 97% are not. Sales numbers for small publishers and self-publishers would be even lower.

Complicating factors make book sales numbers hard to come by and interpret. Neither authors nor publishers want to talk about their sales numbers, unless those numbers are exceptionally good, which most aren’t. Confusing the issue further, the number of “sales per book” differs depending on whether you are talking about an individual format of a book, hardcover, paperback, audiobook, or eBook, or an individual title with all formats combined. Also, are you talking about just the year of release, which might be a partial year, or a full first year of sales, or the lifetime of a book?

Mr. Wilson cites a Publishers Weekly lifetime average of 500 units sold. In this case, all formats of a title are included. But, here again, it depends on how long the “lifetime” of each book has been, and best-sellers that sell millions of copies skew the average upwards.

With all those complications, you can see why the numbers are messy. In general, you could say that if you ever sell over 500 units of a title, in all of its formats, you are doing better than average.

Help me beat the odds. Preorder my forthcoming book, Caravans Pursued, which is available for pre-order in eBook format. The publication date is December 1, when it will also be available as a paperback.