In 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.

50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four-year period sold more than 500,000 units in a single year?

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

Penguin Random House US has guidelines for who gets what advance:
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>Category 1: Lead titles with a sales goal of 75,000 units and up
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>Advance: $500,000 and up
>Category 2: Titles with a sales goal of 25,000-75,000 units
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>Advance: $150,000-$500,000
>Category 3: Titles with a sales goal of 10,000-25,000 units
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>Advance: $50,000- $150,000
>Category 4: Titles with a sales goal of 5,000 to 10,000 units
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>Advance: $50,000 or less
>Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that…..

would actually expect a book that is selling 300,000 units in a year is probably going to sell at least 400,000 or 500,000 over its life once you get backlist in there too.
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>Our backlist brings in about a third of our annual revenues, so $300 million a year roughly, a little less.
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>— Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette
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>The backlist includes all of the books that have ever come out. Brian Murray, CEO of HarperCollins, points out that their backlist includes bibles (an $80 million business), coloring books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, magic trick books, calendars, puzzles, and SAT study guides. It also includes perennial bestsellers like Don Quijote, Steven King’s Carrie, and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—these books continue to sell year after year.
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>Popular children’s books are cash cows selling huge amounts of copies year after year and generation after generation.

20 to 25 percent of the readers, the heavy readers, account for 80 percent of the revenue pool of the industry of what consumers spend on books. It’s the really dedicated readers. If they got all-access, the revenue pool of the industry is going to be very small. Physical retail will be gone—see music—within two to three years. And we will be dependent on a few Silicon Valley or Swedish internet companies that will actually provide all-access.

authors who can’t snag a large advance might have better luck building their own audience and publishing elsewhere.

The publishing houses may live to see another day, but I don’t think their model is long for this world. Unless you are a celebrity or franchise author, the publishing model won’t provide a whole lot more than a tiny advance and a dozen readers. If you are a celebrity, you’ll still have a much bigger reach on Instagram than you will with your book!
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>Personally, I could not be more grateful to skip the publishing houses altogether and write directly for my readers here, being supported by those who read this newsletter rather than by a publishing advance that won’t ultimately translate to people reading my work.

change around ’14, ‘15, with this trend that so many consumers went away from mass-market books into electronic ebooks in particular and self-published books.”

Technically, it does exist. Kindle Unlimited is the largest, followed by Scribd. Audible isn’t quite all-access, but then Spotify got into audiobooks and made them so. But none of these players have quite taken off the way Netflix or Spotify has. That’s for one reason: The Big Five publishing houses refuse to let their authors participate.