[evandwight]

>>>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

- Kristen McLean from NPD BookScan

[PuppyTailWags]

BookScan isn't a reliable source of information unfortunately. It only counts when a book's ISBN is physically scanned over a scanner (no ebook, audio book, libraries, specialty sales, etc) and also only covers 75% of retail in general. Generally, you can bet BookScan largely undercounts by a very wide margin.

[Taniwha]

The above numbers are from her response in the comments in the original article, it's worth reading that to understand how those numbers are made up, she explains in depth

[FalconSensei]

I would be interested to see kindle data for self-published

[onlyrealcuzzo]

The majority of books written don't even get published - so the majority of books are definitely read by less than 12 people.

[manv1]

A sample of 75% of retail sales is a substantially larger sample than, say, the estimates by the US Census.

If you believe that BookScan isn't reliable, then you also have to believe that the US Census data is totally crap.

[LudwigNagasena]

> Because this is clearly a slice, and most likely provided by one of the parties to the suit, I decided to limit my data to the frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in the U.S. Trade market. My ISBN list is a little smaller than the one quoted in the DOJ, but the principals will be the same.

> The data below includes frontlist titles from Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley. The figures below only include books published by these publishers themselves, not pubishers they distribute.

[AlbertCory]

When you limit your data to those published by (fairly) large publishers, you've already skewed the data irreparably. Most of them won't even look at a book unless an agent brings it to them, and most agents won't represent most would-be authors.

On the other hand, some technical books don't require agents, and O'Reilly has to be a very large publisher in terms of books sold.

Some other categories don't, either -- I know someone who publishes "cozy mysteries" through a real publisher (not a giant one), and she doesn't have an agent.

[mysterydip]

With such a large portion less than 1000, it would be nice to see it broken down more. Was it more 20, or 900?

[mym1990]

Well the distribution would almost have to be skewed to the lower side given then general trend(but obv this isn't a very scientific method)

[evandwight]

Can you just plot the histogram and guesstimate based on the distribution?

[rahimnathwani]

Before you try to try to interpret these numbers, you should be aware:

- the numbers are a for a 12 month period of sales, not for books published in a particular 12 month period (see below for why this matters)

- some of those books were published near the start of the 12 month period, so the count represents their first 52 weeks of sales

- some of the books were published in the last week or the 12 month period, so the count represents their first couple of weeks of sales

- some of the books were published almost a year before the start of the period, in which case the count represents the number of sales within the last couple of weeks of their first year of sales (sales >12 months after publishing don't count as 'frontlist' so aren't included in these numbers)

tl;dr the % figures towards the bottom of the list are probably too pessimistic

[AlbertCory]

McLean's comments are spot-on, if you read them carefully. She describes herself as a "numbers gal" and she is.

Limiting it to the top publishers immediately leaves out lots of books. But OK, these are major players who are putting their own resources on the line for some books, so that's a valid slice.

For that 14.7% that sold under 12 copies: as a self-published author, I have to say, "Why not my book instead of that crap?"

The problem, of course, is that they didn't expect it to sell that few copies when they printed it. They didn't say, "Hey, this one looks like 10 copies or so. Let's go with it!"

[franciscop]

What does "book" and "sell" mean here, following the article's excellent explanation on how those terms vary wildly. Are those figures per year or lifetime for the books?

[hsn915]

This reminds of the Jordan Peterson thing where when he's asked "Do you believe in God" he replies with "Depends on what you mean by believe and God".

[amelius]

Do we have similar statistics for the App Store?