WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 32794973

(no title)

lovingCranberry | 3 years ago

Pretty long post for "I know that I know nothing".

However, there is gold in the comment section: Kristen McLean actually throws some numbers at us [1]. "66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks". Well, uh, that's what I thought. Interesting nonetheless.

[1] https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-...

discuss

order

thomascgalvin|3 years ago

I know that I know nothing is a very important realization, though, and if a lot of words helps someone else realize that they know nothing, too, it's probably worth it.

kortilla|3 years ago

Sure, but don’t click the publish button. There is already so much noise out there that we shouldn’t actively drown out people who actually do know something.

dalai|3 years ago

Actually I think the post highlights that even the statistic you quoted means less than one thinks it means. For example, some of the books included may have been only a few weeks on the market. Some titles may be niche books with the expected lower sales volume calculated in the price. BookScan only covers a certain percentage of print sales in the US, the total sales could be more than double that.

tlarkworthy|3 years ago

No it's a very good stat, I think they mean measure after 52 weeks, and note they exclude self published books, it's the crème and still suffers from huge Pareto (as expected)

lake_vincent|3 years ago

I used to work for a big name scientific publisher, and we published a lot of super-niche research monographs that didn't sell many copies. What a lot of people don't understand was that our bread and butter came from university libraries. We published a lot of books not because they sold individually, but libraries wanted them. They like collections!

lukeschwartz|3 years ago

The comment should have been the post.

And this is the unsurprising TLDR:

"The long and short of it is publishing is very much a gambler's game, and I think that has been clear from the testimony in the DOJ case. It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year."

fancyfredbot|3 years ago

Maybe this is splitting hairs but this didn't make publishing seem like gambling to me. It sounds like if I can publish enough titles at a low enough cost per title I'm guaranteed to make money.