From mid-March to mid-April, LLBR held a poll asking you how many copies of your book sold the first year if your book had been published for at least one year. The blog received a total of three thousand hits during this time, and only thirty of you voted in the poll. So, 1% of our visitors voted in the poll, and I think that’s actually a fair comparison to how those 30 people ranked in sales.
16 of the 30 voters sold less than 100 copies. That’s 53% of all voters.
8 of the 30 sold 100 to 200 copies. 27% of all votes.
6 of the 30 sold over 200 copies. 20% of the total votes.
Most blogs out there say the majority of self-published books sell less than 200 copies, including the sales statistics information at Writer’s Beware. The sales are mostly to friends, family, community bookstores, and the author, what WB calls “pocket markets.”
POD services’ own statistics support these low sales figures. AuthorHouse’s online Fact Sheet, updated in September 2008, reported 36,823 authors and 45,993 titles. According to the New York Times, AuthorHouse reports selling more than 2.5 million books in 2008, which sounds like a lot, but averages out to around 54 sales per title.
The same can be said for information available at writing-world.com who reports the following:
In 2003, for example, Xlibris circulated a promo declaring that it had published 9000 books since 1997, and sold 300,000 copies. Punch those numbers into your calculator, and you’ll find that this gives an average of 33 sales per title. But that’s just the average. If just 20 percent of those titles sell 100 copies apiece, the remaining 80 percent are left with an average sale of 16 copies per title. In reality, a few books actually sell far more than 100 copies — which means that a great many titles must sell less than ten copies apiece.
Back to WB, Xlibris sales actually improved just 4 years later…
Things looked up in 2007: according to Xlibris’s own internal reports, recently obtained by Writer Beware, 4% of its titles had sold more than 1,000 copies. However, the averages still aren’t good. As of mid-2007, Xlibris had 23,000 authors and had published 23,500 titles, with total sales of over 3 million–around 127 sales per title.
The WB article ends with the following (opinionated) information about Lulu:
Lulu.com, one of the most popular and cost-effective of the POD services and still independent despite the apparent trend toward consolidation among POD services, is explicit about its long tail business model. In a 2006 article in the Times UK, its founder identified the company’s goal: “…to have a million authors selling 100 copies each, rather than 100 authors selling a million copies each.” A Lulu bestseller is a book that sells 500 copies. There haven’t been many of them.
Taking a closer look at Lulu, the following sales statistics were reported in the Lulu Corporate Profile 2009 Update :
Lulu creations: more than 1.1 million
o Paperback books: 716,191
o Hardback books: 98,770
o E-books: 52,343
o Photo Books: 34,006
o Calendars: 54,862
o Brochures: 7,085
o Digital Content: 176,824
Exact Lulu $$$ sales figures are hard to come by since the company is private. Most information I found on the web was posted by authors on their blogs or in the Lulu forums about individual sales results. However, I did come across this interview with Lulu CEO Bob Young at ABCtales giving a pretty broad spectrum of one title that has sold over 40,000 copies, then stating the average print run of a Lulu book is less than 2. When LLBR was created, I remember reading on another blog that the average sale of a Lulu book was 1.8, meaning most authors probably bought 1 copy for themselves. The End.
Sales figures continue to be skewed by the fact that the “Published by You” option on Lulu allows you to pick your own name for your publisher, and people can also just publish their book on Lulu and never have to invest in an ISBN to get circulation outside of Lulu. This is important only because I decided to do some investigating using Amazon.com’s Advanced Search engine. Doing a search for all paperback books, in all subjects, with Lulu.com listed as the publisher returns a number of 3,383. Hardcover titles are only 47. And note this may not include some foreign published titles, and would only include Lulu titles that purchased an ISBN for global distribution. For what it’s worth, the average cost of the paperback (averaging the top 10) titles is $29.17 and the average list price of the hardcover (top 10) titles is $34.83.
For fun, I decided to find the “bestselling” Lulu.com paperback book on Amazon and compare its sales rank on Amazon to its rank on Lulu. As of April 28th at 6:47pm CST when I’m writing this article, the #1 book on this Amazon search is Permanent Passenger by Micha Berman. This book has a sales rank of 203, 489 on Amazon. On Lulu.com, it’s #214. Not bad. I decided to email Micha Berman, the author, and ask him a few questions about the number of books he’s sold to date and how he did it.
At this point in time I am nearing 1550 or so in sales, and that includes books I have sold on my own.
In my first year I sold close to 1300 books, the breakdown was something like this:
786 sold on US Amazon
62 sold on British Amazon
178 print Lulu
132 download Lulu
I should point out more and more of my books have been bought on Amazon Kindle in the past 6 months, in the first year probably 50 or so sold on Kindle.
I sold the rest myself at book talks around the country. I try to direct many folks to Lulu but many people are used to buying books on Amazon so that seems to be where most people buy my book.
So how did he do it, you ask?
Don’t follow the rules, I get the word out everywhere and am constantly telling folks about my book from people on the elevator to the grocery clerk. Second, get the word out to radio stations, tv stations, alumni magazine, special interest magazines, in my case cruise magazines and websites.
One funny story, that gives you a feel for what I am doing, I wrote emails to every radio station in San Francisco/Bay Area, it took time, guts and lo and behold in resulted in me getting on the biggest talk radio station several times. Also the San Francisco Chronicle reviewed my book, unheard of for self published books, but I wrote to reviewers for 8 months talking about their reviews and finally got a response.
So there you have it! Throw out the fact that the 30 people who voted in our poll might not have an ISBN and that their book might not be available on Amazon, and I still think we have a pretty fair snapshot of how well self-published books do their first year. We all know that getting your book on Amazon is not enough. It takes determination and hard work to market your book and to do it well. And marketing is a must if you want to beat the odds!
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Shannon, so much depends on the genre and the promotion authors do. That’s the big reason I shared all the stuff I learned when I was promoting my first novel, This Is the Place, with my first nonfiction book, The Frugal Book Promoter.
This Is the Place won its publisher’s Mille Award for marketing and sales the first year. It was a literary novel published in 2001 (though it’s still available in the new and used book section on Amazon). I think I sold about 2,000 but that was because–at least in part–it was set in Salt Lake City and was released just before the winter Olympics in that city. I also got it into a couple of airport book stores.
And, of course, that big success, that lead to The Frugal Book Promoter which is still selling well on Amazon because it is based on personal experience selling the hardest of all genres, poetry and short story collections and literary fiction.
Best,
Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Blogging at Writer’s Dieges 101 Best Websites pick, http://www.sharingwithwriters.blogspot.com
I think it’s a HUGE misconception that book sales are up to chance. Authors look and say, “Well, my chances aren’t very good, so I won’t try.” It has NOTHING to do with chance and EVERYTHING to do with how much you market your book, as Carolyn said.
You have to do this on your own. Buyers almost never just find books on their own. You have to make an effort and reach them.
Dawson
I agree 100% with the posts here. Full tilt marketing is the key to any sale. I fully anticipate taking advantage of every outlet that will let me put the name of my book out there. It’s all about getting into the public eye and letting them know you exist.
You cannot sell a book if it’s burried in the millions of other books. You gotta make that read hunt for your book.
Dawson-
I agree with you. As self-published authors we do have to work hard to find our market and to reach our readers. However, there is a certain part of it that is left up to chance. Those are the few that get lucky and popularity of their book breeds by word-of-mouth. But even those titles probably landed a good review or interview somewhere, or hired a PR firm to do their dirty work for them. A self-published author cannot sit back and wait for that “chance” to happen on its own though.
The misconception lies with authors who think that writing and self-publishing and then getting their book on Amazon is enough. It isn’t. There are billions of books out there. I find new ones every day. Authors who stop after these steps-or give up-are the majority that make up that 1.8 books sold.
Thanks for your comment!
-Shannon