Link: Books don’t sell

Only 163 books sold more than 100,000 copies. That’s fewer than one out of every 250 titles published. That’s a pretty low bar: 100,000 is the population of Roanoke, Virginia. If we halve that goal, we only add another 320 books. This means that every time the smartest minds in book publishing spend time, money and effort to publish 900 books, one of them approaches the status of a hit. (And in this case, a hit is simply one book for every person in Pocatello, Idaho.) You could open a bookstore that carries every current hit in every format and you’d only need a few bookcases. On the other end of the scale, we see that 85% of all traditional books published last year sold fewer than 5,000 copies each in their format. Those are extraordinarily bad odds. #

--

Yoooo, this is a quick note on a link that made me go, WTF? Find all past links here.