The Shape of Book Sales

The song "House of the Rising Sun" might have been written to warn poor sons and daughters not to become writers, since it's "been the ruin of many a poor soul." Artists tend to be temperamental, and a common fate of too many writers of fiction is to "wear that ball and chain" and "The only time he's satisfied, Is when he drinks his liquor down".  Maybe that's an exaggeration. But then again, maybe not.

The reason is that while a few authors become very famous - anything is possible, after all - the vast majority are not only not famous, but not even published. And even today when anyone can publish their own work at their expense, most are not read. As I have noted in the past, it is said that 60% of traditionally published authors are out of the business after three years, and 90% are out after ten. The rate is likely higher amongst self-published authors. The reason is that the book business is one where a relative handful of authors sell a ton of books, a lucky few sell enough books to stay published (this is a declining category) but most fail to click, selling a relative handful of books. I would go so far as to say that most traditional published authors are merely auditioning to become best sellers. They are given their chance - a contract - and if/when they fail to click, the luckiest ones end up either selling their future books to a small presses for a thousand dollars, while the rest find themselves looking for a new career.

To illustrate this sad fact, let's revisit some Amazon data dating back 2016 which I blogged about back then. To generate the data authors provided sales numbers and Amazon sales ranking to AuthorEarning. This data was used to reverse engineer how Amazon ranks each book by sales. Once a quarter, on a single day, AuthorEarnings collected the sales rankings from all the books listed on Amazon's many "100 Best Selling Books" lists and used known rank/sales numbers to estimate the sales of those books on that day. This captured data on 200,000 ebooks. Below is the chart AuthorEarnings "Data Guy" provided for Feb 2016. Click on the chart for a larger version.

The green and grey dots represent author supplied data points. The important thing to note about this curve is that it is logarithmic, both the sales numbers and ranking increase by an order of magnitude at every marking; i.e. sales on the vertical axis go from one book a day to 100, 1,000 and then 10,000 a day at the top, while the sales rankings run from #1 to a million on the horizontal one. This method creates a nice fat curve that looks promising, until you realize that by the middle of the curve, you've gone from 10,000 sales a day to 100 with a sales rank of perhaps 5,000. At the end of the scale you're selling one to 10 books a day. 

The graph below charts the above data on a linear scale, with sales represented by the red line. That fat curve in the graph above is the little bend in the red line below. This graph gives a much clearer idea of the big picture.

Using numbers from these graphs, we can roughly estimate the sales range for ebooks in the various levels of ranking, as they existed in 2016. The numbers might be slightly different today, but the picture is likely the same.

Sales Rank    number of titles  sales per day   sales per year at day rate

#1 to #10                        10     8000 to 2000    2.92m to 730,000

#11 to #100                     90    2000 to 500    730,000 to 182,500

#101 to #1000                900    500 to 100      182,500 to 36,500

#1001 to #10,000          9,000      100 to 12        36,500 to 4,380

#10,001 to #100,000    90,000         12 to 1            4,380 to 365

#100,001 to #200,000  100,000       1 or less            365 or less

The data collected only included the top selling 5% of Amazon sales. The lower 95% of books sell less than a book a day, and once a book's sales rank falls below 200,000, it is a book a month or less. Many sell none at all. While these figures are 7 years old, I doubt things have changed significantly - though pages read in the Kindle Unlimited lending library are now figured into sales ranking, somehow.

I do have one anecdotical bit of information that provides a glimpse of this sales phenomena. By some strange stroke of luck, my book The Girl on the Kerb earned some sort of promotion on Amazon after they cut the price to free, and so for several days it was selling between 700 to 800 free copies a day. This level of sales moved its sales rank up to being the #5 book best selling book on the 100 Best Selling Thriller-Espionage list, and I seem to remember it being somewhere near the 1,000 rank on the complete Best Selling Free chart. Today, with its glory days behind it, it still ranked around #29 on that list and #6,568 on Amazon's Best Selling Free list with its sales of 2 to 3 copies a day (76 for the month of July 2023), so that you see how fast sales fall off the further a book is from the top 10 sales spots.

All of which is to say that freelance writing is a very bad business to be in unless you are very, very lucky, and perhaps have some talent. To continue to be employed in it requires every bit as much luck. Heck, you need to be very lucky just to get your chance to fail at it. Failure is the norm. And it ain't easy being one of the lucky. I've seen an author literally begging people on Titter to buy his book, as he perceives his career circling the drain - without any apparent success. And you often hear of authors taking time away from pursuing their dream of being a published author for mental health issues. Plus, the initial high of landing a book deal- the dream of a lifetime - quickly fades as the reality of the business, settles in. Down through the ages machines have replaced people doing dirty, dangerous, and mind numbing jobs, and in this respect, the rise of AI written books could easily be seen as part of this tradition and a blessing in disguise. 

However, many people write simply for pleasure, myself included, so that AI will never replace writers completely. Human writers will find other ways to reach readers, and some may even find some sort of way of making some sort of money off of it. Again, anything is possible, after all. Perhaps these "handmade" stories will evolve into something that looks like the fan fiction community of today - a community of readers and writers who enjoy writing and reading, and not a business at all. Time will tell.