How Books Are Sold

Commercial publishers achieve their high sales levels by ensuring that they have a good stock of books and an efficient distribution system which will get their titles from warehouse to bookshop shelves as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

This backs up the efforts of their sales teams, which use a combination of telesales calls and store visits to take orders from booksellers across the country.

The sales staff are supported by the publisher's marketing staff, who produce full-colour catalogues for the sales teams to refer to. These catalogues list all titles from backlist to front runners, including books planned for publication in the future, and are sent free of charge to distributors, wholesalers, bookshops and anyone else in between. The marketing staff advertise books to the book industry via the trade press, and promote the books to potential readers by buying advertising in national and niche publications; by producing promotional goods like posters, postcards and dump-bins; and by arranging special promotions and book signings. On top of that, the marketing staff also supply all and any relevant publications with advanced reading copies (ARCs) months before each title is published, in order to tie in with the periodicals’ own publication schedules and allow the reviewers plenty of reading time.

Together, the sales and marketing teams operate a double-sided attack which ensures that just as a book becomes available in bookshops across the country, its potential readers will become aware of it, it so maximising its sales.

When I consider the huge orchestrated efforts that commercial publishers make to promote and sell their titles, and compare their sales figures to those of most self-published books, I am surprised: not by the gulf between the two different levels of sales, but by the fact that so many self-published books, none of which have anything like the same level of support that commercially-published titles receive, manage to sell more than five or ten books each. Such sales figures are a testament to the cleverness, creativity and determination of those self-publishers, and should be applauded.

Distributor Or Wholesaler? Writer Beware Explains!

If you're considering submitting to a smaller publisher, one of the things you should investigate before you send your work out is what sort of distribution deal that publisher has. Because if it doesn't have a proper distribution deal in place, its books (for which you can read your books) just aren't going to sell.

But what does that mean? How does distribution work, how does a distributor differ from a wholesaler, and what implications does all of this have for your work? Over at Writer Beware, bestselling author Cathy Clamp explains. Read it now, bookmark the article, and next time you're considering submitting your work to anyone other than a major publisher you'll know what questions to ask, and how the answers might affect you.

Self-Publishing Sales Statistics Clarified

When I appeared on The Write Lines last week I mentioned that the average self-published book sells between forty and two hundred copies, depending on which set of figures you consult. Compared to mainstream publishing, where sales of three thousand copies for commercial fiction are considered by some to be disappointing, these figures are terribly low and the reaction from the other studio guests (a literary agent and three successful mainstream-published writers) was obvious: if you listen to the recording you can clearly hear them gasp.

After the broadcast I caught up with the reaction on Twitter, and found that a few writers were discussing the figures I quoted and reaching some rather unsound conclusions. While I'm not going to quote anyone here (it’s just not appropriate to single anyone out), I do think it’s important that I respond to their points. But first, a very quick primer on how sales figures are usually gathered in the book trade.

Nielsen Bookscan collects the sales figures of various online and physical retailers, then collates those figures and reports them to the book trade (it’s Nielsen which produces the best-seller charts we're all so envious of). However, as relatively few copies of self-published books are sold through bookshops, and quite a few self-published titles don’t even have the ISBNs which are essential for books to be tracked by Nielsen, the majority of self-published sales aren't included in Nielsen’s sales reports: therefore, if you rely on Nielsen to provide sales information about self-published books, you’re likely to be way out of whack with the real picture.

The Tweeters seemed to assume that I was relying on Nielsen, and that therefore my figures had to be way off.

They would have had a very valid point if I had relied on Nielsen’s reports for my statistics, but I used a far more generous source for the figures I quoted on air: the publishers themselves (there’s an obvious difficulty here: my figures came from companies which style themselves as self-publishing service providers, which many consider to be vanity presses: but for the purposes of this discussion I’ll ignore that issue, which is a little off-topic here. I shall return to it at another time, have no fear).

As most publishing service providers of this type offer only print-on-demand services, copies of the books that they publish are only ever printed in direct response to an order; a copy printed is a copy sold, no matter who buys it. So long as a book is printed and sent out from their premises they consider it a sale—when these companies report sales what they’re really reporting is the number of copies printed. You can see that there is not going to be a hidden stash of sales which fail to get included in the sales statistics: if anything, these companies are likely to over-report, rather than under-report, their sales.

As the sales figures I quoted came directly from POD-based self-publishing service providers, not only do those figures include all copies sold in bookshops or by Amazon, etc.; they also include all copies subsequently returned by bookshops to their authors (because with self-publishing the author is the publisher, and so they have to credit the bookseller’s account for those returned books even if they’re no longer in a sellable condition); they also include as sales every single copy that the authors bought and then sent out, for free, to reviewers, or gave away to family and friends; and every single copy which all those hopeful authors ordered, only to have them left mouldering away in their garages when they found they couldn't sell them—of which there are far too many.

Which means that it’s impossible for the sales figures I mentioned to be under-reported: unlike Nielsen's figures, they are going to be higher than the sales which really count in an author's career: the sales made to interested readers who considered the books potentially good enough to pay their hard-earned money for.

Moving From Self-Published To Mainstream Publication

If you've self-published then you've already tested your book, as a product, on the marketplace. If it failed to sell in any great numbers, then in the eyes of a lot of publishers, you’ve proved that it doesn't have the potential to sell in sufficient quantities for them to take it on. This might well be because you, as a publisher, don't have access to the same sales and marketing clout that the bigger publishers employ, but many of those big publishers aren’t interested in that: all they see is the numbers they find on Nielsen’s sales reports. As far as they’re concerned, your book hasn't sold well and so you've shown that it's an uncommercial product.

This probably means that those publishers miss out on a few books with real potential: but as publishers have so many titles to pick and choose from, it's no wonder they tend to dismiss books so easily.

Trios: The Einstein Girl, by Philip Sington: Selling Literary Fiction

Samantha Fanaken works as part of Random House's sales team as a Senior Key Account Manager, and here she discusses selling literary fiction into bookshops.

One of the most enjoyable parts of working for a literary publisher like CCV is reading large piles of paper that will one day turn into books. Reading a book long before it has a cover means you come to it with no assumptions, only the enthusiastic description from the editor when they asked you to read it.

It’s hugely useful to have read as much of our fiction list as possible before presenting them to retailers. Non-fiction is easier to categorise, it’s usually simpler to assess whether a book will appeal to classic military history buffs or foodies etc, whereas fiction is much more subjective.

So, it’s helpful to know a book before trying to recommend it – so you can do the quick reductive ‘it’s a bit blah meets blah’ or ‘if you liked that, you’ll love this’ but then go on to talk about a book in more detail – the characters you can’t stop thinking about, the scenes that stay with you, the plot twists.

The Einstein Girl has much to offer. It has a rich seam of history, set in Berlin just before Hitler comes to power, and uses a little-known fact from Albert Einstein’s life as its core. There’s a mystery to be solved - a young woman is found naked in the woods outside the city with a leaflet to a lecture by Albert Einstein in her hand as the only clue to her identity. There’s a sweet sad love story between her and her psychiatrist, a man battling with his own scars left by the Great War. Slowly between their conversations and the psychiatrist’s own research, the greater story of Einstein’s family and its secrets unravel.

Enough sly pitching of the book at you. Read it, it’s great.

So, reading the book helps give me a steer on the potential readers and how we might best reach them through our retailers. When talking to a retailer like Waterstone’s, who are very supportive of new and developing writers, we have a good discussion around who might buy the book and whether that makes it a candidate for promotion front of store in its first outing in hardback or trade paperback, or whether it’s best to push the paperback a year later. In this instance, I’m pleased to report Waterstone’s are as keen as I am on The Einstein Girl and it is available in all stores in their 3 for 2 throughout August.


Philip's editor at Harvill Secker has kindly squirrelled away five copies of The Einstein Girl for us. If you'd like to be in the running for one of them, all you have to do is answer the following question: where did the designers find the photograph which appears on the cover of The Einstein Girl? Send your answers to "competition at philipsington dot com": next week, Philip will select the five winners at random and I'll announce them here.

Sales Statistics: iUniverse

On March 17 of this year I posted some self-publishing sales statistics courtesy of Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, and I thought it might be interesting to play around with them a little. I should have been an accountant.

In the article I quoted, Victoria wrote, "According to a 2004 article in Publishers Weekly, only 83 of more than 18,000 iUniverse titles published during that year sold at least 500 copies."

If you have a look at the link she provided you'll find this information about sales figures for iUniverse books in 2004:

18,108: Total number of titles published

14: Number of titles sold through B&N's bricks-and-mortar stores (nationally)

83: Number of titles that sold at least 500 copies

792,814: Number of copies printed

32,445: Number of copies sold of iUniverse's top seller, If I Knew Then by Amy Fisher

So 18,108 different titles were published in 2004 and a total of 792,814 books were printed, which gives a mean average of 43.8 copies printed per title. And as iUniverse relies on print-on-demand technology, and only prints books in direct response to orders, “printed” here is the same as “sold”.

If you take away the 32,445 copies that Amy Fisher's book sold and then do the numbers again, that average number of copies sold per title goes down to 41.9.

If you then consider that 83 of iUniverse’s books sold at least 500 copies, and take those 83 books and their sales out of the equation (for simplicity I’ve assumed that they sold bang-on 500 copies each but several will have sold more, and so reduce this average further), the remainder of the books published—that’s a whole 18,025 titles, or 99.5% of all books that iUniverse publishes—sold an average of 39.9 copies each.

Let’s assume that those books were priced at £10 each (which is a reasonable-ish price for a paperback right now). I don’t know what rate of royalties they’d have earned from iUniverse (anyone?), so can’t make a direct comparison here: but let’s assume that the writers had not self-published their books and had instead been published by a mainstream publisher, with a contract which specified a reasonable-to-generous royalty of 12% of cover price. On that deal they’d make £1.20 per copy sold: so on sales of 40 copies they’d earn a total of just £48 per book published.

I’d like to find out how many of the titles concerned sold under twenty copies: this would at least filter out a lot of the people who used iUniverse to produce books just for friends and family and had no intention of ever seeking sales for them (which is how I’ve used Lulu in the past). Because if I could take those books off the total it would push the averages up a little bit and give us a better idea of the average sales levels that iUniverse authors were achieving when these numbers were collated—but the numbers would still have a long way to go before they equalled the sales figures of the least successful books from a mainstream publisher.

Some Notes About Rights

Publication rights to a book reside in the book itself, not in the author—although the author will (usually) own the rights to the books that they write.

Once a book appears in print, the first print rights to it have been used up and cannot be retrieved under any circumstances. While other rights to that book might still be available, those first rights are gone for good and nothing, including a change of name for the book or for the author, can legally renew those rights. It's important for writers to understand this as while some publishers will consider republishing a previously-published book, many will not. Self-publishers: take note.

If someone sells first rights to a book and then writes a second book, that second book will have its own full set of rights which the author will own (unless it’s been written under a work-for-hire contract, but that’s a whole new kettle of fish), including first rights.

If you sell full world rights to a book, you can't then sell that book into any other territories or in any other formats, but the publisher which bought those rights can. So if a UK publisher buys first print rights for the UK, US first rights and world electronic rights remain with the writer; if a UK publisher buys world rights to that first publication, they can publish it in their own territory and get their US branch to publish there, for example, or sell those rights to a different publisher. Generally, a writer would get 50% of the advance and royalties resulting from any such sale, but a lot depends on the contract.

Some agents prefer to only sell the rights that a publisher is definitely going to use, which means that the writer retains all other rights: but I think that the best place for rights to belong is with the person or business with the best chance of selling them. There's little point in a writer keeping hold of US rights if he or she has no hope of selling the book into America, when the publisher of their UK edition has a US branch too, or good sales contacts in that country.

Finally, if a book which has already been published is revised, extended, redesigned, and republished, then the resulting book would be a new edition of an old title, not a whole new book—because the main portion of the book would have been published in the earlier edition, so it can't be considered a completely different book.

Reported Sales: Selling In vs. Selling Through

There are two different levels of sales for books: the numbers that sell from publisher to bookshop; and the numbers which sell on from bookshop to reader.

That first number, which is usually referred to as the sell-in figure, is always the higher of the two, because a few books will always get lost, stolen or damaged; and so long as returns are allowed, many of those books will eventually find their way back to the publisher: sadly, returns rates of 30 or 40% are not unusual.

The number of books sold from bookshops to readers is usually called the sell-through, or the sell-on, and it's a very different thing. Readers tend not to return books unless the pages fall out as they turn them, or a segment of the book is bound the wrong way around. As the second figure is more fixed than the first it is a far more reliable indicator of a book’s real sales, even though it is usually much lower.

So while publishers will often use the sell-in figure to trumpet a book’s success, writers should not rely on it when estimating what their royalties are going to be like, as those will usually be calculated from sales figures even lower than the sell-through, thanks to the joy of the reserve against returns. Which deserves a whole series of posts of its own!

Income: Self Publishing vs Mainstream Publication

I always advise writers to exhaust all possible routes into commercial publication before they consider self-publishing their work. Recently, I was told that I was wrong. The reasoning went something like this:

Forget about going to one of the big publishers. Put your work out yourself, pay for your own barcode and ISBN, and hire someone to sell it for a cut of the cover price. You’ll make far more money out of it than you’d earn in royalties.

On a book-by-book basis, that’s probably true. A typical royalty for a commercially-published book is 10%, which equates to a per-unit rate of 90p on a book with a cover price of £9. With self-publishing you can set your own cover price, so it’s possible to earn far more per copy.

There are costs associated with those self-publishing sales, though: it would be difficult to hire anyone competent to sell your books on percentage, as each bookshop visit would barely cover the travelling costs incurred even if every bookshop approached took half a dozen copies each.

Even if you do the legwork yourself you’re still likely to end up losing money because of those travelling costs, and because you will only be able to cover a very small part of the country.

Commercial publishers have their own sales and distribution networks in place. Their sales representatives frequently visit every bookshop in the country, and discuss their new and forthcoming books.

Commercial publishers also have publicity departments which routinely send out stacks of review copies to TV programmes, newspapers and magazines, to ensure that potential readers will get to hear about each book as it is released.

The self-publisher simply cannot match this vast sales machine, and so is unlikely to sell anything like as many books: few self-published titles sell more than one hundred copies, while most commercially-published books sell more than a thousand.

And that’s why I almost always recommend mainstream publishing rather than self-publishing. It is likely that the royalty rate per book will be lower than with self-publishing: but the overall sales, and therefore the total amount earned, and the number of readers reached will be so much better that mainstream publication has to be the obvious first choice.

Guest Post: The Implications Of Second-Hand Book Sales

My thanks to Nicola Morgan for this post.


Second-hand books—what’s not to like? The ultimate in recycling, they raise money for charities and independent second-hand bookshops, and offer cheap reading material for those who can’t afford the full price.

At which point, allow me to draw some deep breaths, because I’m trying to be moderate and not mount my hobby-horse for a full-scale rant. Nor would I like you to think that I would steal the food from the mouths of starving babies who are helped by Oxfam and the like. Thing is, I know that at some point I am going to mention Amazon Marketplace....

Let me start by being incontrovertibly reasonable and stating What I Have No Problem With:

• The genuinely second-hand trade in out-of-print books (even though you’ll often have difficulty in determining whether they are, so let’s rephrase that to “books which you can’t buy or order new”).
  
  
• Ditto out-of-copyright books (because the author has been dead a long time—seventy years in UK law—and they can’t use the money).
  
  
• The argument that one’s book being sold in a second-hand shop may create new readers, who may buy or recommend your other books.
  
  
• The giving of used books to schools, libraries (if only they would accept them, but thereby hangs another gripe), hospitals, prisons or any other such organisation where the books will be read on-site.
  
  
• Any scheme which offers good reading material for people on low incomes or reluctant readers.

Thing is, the second-hand book trade poses a specific problem for authors because of how we earn from our work. The advance + royalty system means that we earn when a new copy of our book is sold, but not if it’s sold second-hand (you may know that in the UK now, visual artists DO earn a second royalty when their work is re-sold in a gallery or at auction).

So, any second-hand purchase which replaces a full-price purchase is lost income. This wasn’t a big deal when second-hand book-selling was small business. But now, it’s HUGE.

Take Oxfam. From figures I could quickly find, each Oxfam bookshop would expect to make around £175,000 per year; and bearing in mind they don’t pay most staff and don’t pay business rates, they have an advantage over “ordinary” second-hand bookshops, many of which are complaining about unfair competition. In 2002, Oxfam sold 12 million books in the UK, and with many new shops opening every year that figure must have grown. Forgive me if I don’t search for that info for you—I’m trying to write a book and earn a living at the moment....

Now, I’d hate to knock Oxfam. But I do argue for an informed choice. And my choice is to give money to my favoured charities (which may include Oxfam), but to buy books from a proper shop and support authors and literature.

But what about people who can’t afford full-price books?

• It’s not only just the economically deprived who use charity shops. People on all incomes use charity shops, for many good reasons.


• But, if you want to save money, use public libraries, where books are free AND the author earns money each time. So, don’t throw the poverty line at me—libraries are the best levellers of all.

And, er... Amazon Marketplace?

Thing about Amazon Marketplace is that the word “second-hand” takes on a blurry hue. Every author I know has found their books listed, sometimes for absurd prices (one of mine is currently available for 1p—apart from the HUGE postage charge) as being second-hand before publication day. Where do these books come from? Back of a lorry? Returns to publishers (which means they’ve already had the royalty payment DEDUCTED from the author, sometimes at a higher rate than the royalty paid to the author in the first place—oh, don’t get me started on that)? I once had a consignment of books go completely missing between warehouse and a school where I was doing a talk. I’d love to know precisely who ended up making money on them—it sure as hell wasn’t me.

Amazon Marketplace is a stunning business model: three parties make a profit—Amazon, the seller, and the postal service. Never mind the author, eh?

Look, don’t get me wrong: I’m all for free trade; I’m all for people getting a bargain; I’m all for charities making money; I’m even all for businesses making a profit. But what I’m most for is every customer making an informed choice. And if you don’t care about the author, fine: that’s your choice.

I call the concept Fair Reading. It’s explained in detail on this Facebook group. I am not telling people not to buy second-hand, or to feel guilty if they do—I want everyone to be aware:

• that most authors earn very little—according to recent Society of Authors figures (for the UK) two thirds of professional authors earn less than half the average wage;
  
  
• that author income is based on a few pence earned on each new book sold;
  
  
• that if authors can’t earn from writing, they won’t be able to write, and then we’ll all be the poorer.

I have been remarkably moderate today, for me. Another day, remind me to tell you what happened when I spoke to people (yes, really, people) at Amazon about it. And I also tried to work out how we could do for authors what was done for artists in the EU—the Authors Licensing and Collecting Authority could manage the collection of second-hand royalties—but we reckoned that it would be too punitive to the charities and we don’t want to knock charities. So, all I’m left with is the power of education and the generosity of people’s natures and sense of fairness: do join me in spreading the word about informed choice and Fair Reading.

The message is simple: Buy your books at the best price you can for the author, or borrow from a public library. If we love books, we need authors.

©2009 Nicola Morgan

Publishers: Size Isn’t Everything

Publishers fall into several different categories.

Right at the top of the heap are the few big conglomerates like HarperCollins and the Random House Group. These houses measure their turnover in millions, and each publish thousands of books a year.

Then come the independents: smaller publishing houses with widely varying turnovers, which print fewer titles than the really big boys. This is a very broad category which includes established, relatively large houses like Canongate, which has a reputation for publishing more cutting-edge fiction than most (I thoroughly recommend Scarlett Thomas’s The End Of Mr Y, and Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle); smaller publishers like the gorgeous Snowbooks (which published Sarah Bower’s spellbinding The Needle in the Blood); and the very small publishers like Myrmidon (which is publishing Hope Against Hope by my friend Sally Zigmond later this year), which publish relatively few books but which nevertheless do very well with what they publish.

While many independents are likely to struggle in the current financial crisis, the big publishers aren’t having too good a time either: some of their smaller imprints, many of which were originally independent publishers, might well close as publishers contract and regroup (and some already have).

Independent publishers can be further divided into two groups: those with good sales and distribution in place, and those without. Small independents will sometimes ride piggyback on the shoulders of the bigger ones and borrow their sales and distribution services to get their books into bookshops, just as the independent Long Barn Books does: its books are sold by Simon and Schuster and distributed by HarperCollins.

Some independents, however, have no distribution deal in place and instead rely on online sales (from their website, and from places like Amazon and Waterstone’s website, which all offer for sale anything with an ISBN); and on the sales that their authors make. But without a sales and distribution deal in place, publishers find it almost impossible to get their books into bookshops: and as bookshop placement leads to sales, a publisher with no distribution will have low sales, low income and a worrying future.

While some of the independent publishers without strong distribution have an increasing reputation for publishing wonderful books, others are not so reputable and border on vanity publishing. The difference, here, has to lie in the quality of the books they publish. Because while some small presses publish some very questionable titles others publish fabulous books (and Salt Publishing and Bluechrome come first to my mind) which look gorgeous, and which deserve to sell as strongly as titles from any of the bigger houses—go and buy some books from them now.

Sales Statistics: A New York Times Bestseller

Have you ever wondered what a bestselling author earns? Or how many copies are sold as a result of chart placement? Last week, I was thrilled to discover that the author of a book which debuted on the New York Times bestsellers list had made a copy of her latest royalty statement available on the internet, for all to see.

Lynn Viehl writes dark fantasy and science fiction and is published by The Penguin Group USA, and Onyx Books in the UK. By her own admission she does very little promotional work for her books, and her personal blog is a lovely, gentle affair with no overt promotion for her books (but a lot of interesting stuff for writers to consider). When her book Twilight Fall was published last July it hit the New York Times bestsellers list in its first week on sale. It went on to sell nearly 81,500 copies in the first four months after its release, and earned Ms Viehl royalties of nearly $40,000 in that period alone. Her publisher held back $13,500 as a reserve against returns, leaving a royalty figure of $27,700—but as Ms Viehl was paid an advance of $50,000, she has a further $22,300 to make in royalties before this book earns out, after which time all royalties—minus her agent’s fees and tax liabilities—will be hers to fritter on what ever she chooses.

Taken alone, this might not seem very spectacular (a couple of people have already commented on various blogs that they expected a place on the New York Times bestsellers list to depend on higher sales and therefore, higher earnings): but appearing on this list will probably have bumped up sales of Ms Viehl's other books, too, and that has huge implications: Ms Viehl is a very prolific writer who has published a staggering forty-two novels across five different genres using eight different pseudonyms—and all since the year 2000.

I am in awe of her, and more than a little envious: and I bet her house is clean, too!

First Publication Rights

Most American publishers will only consider a first edition of a book, and while British publishers are a little more flexible on this point at the moment, many are moving round to the American way of thinking.

In publishing, as in so many other areas, there can only ever be one first time. So the instant that you first publish your work you’ve used up your first publication rights: and as you can never have more than one first time at anything, you can’t ever get them back. This is true no matter how that publication is achieved: whether you publish through one of the big conglomerates like Random House, a tiny independent like Salt or Bluechrome (which are growing in stature and reputation every day), whether you self-publish or get to market through one of the many murky vanity presses which lurk on the periphery of the industry: your book has been published and those first rights are irretrievably gone.

Now, if those first rights are granted to a reputable publisher with good editorial skills and a solid sales and distribution system in place, it’s likely to receive a decent amount of promotion and get into a reasonable number of bookshops nationwide. You have a good chance of making a decent number of sales out of that first publication.

If you give those first rights to a vanity publisher or to a disreputable or ill-informed small press, or if you self-publish, you’re unlikely to make many sales at all to anyone other than your family and friends. Even if your book picks up some good quotes or reviews, it is still unlikely to sell in any great quantity. You might find yourself wondering why you didn’t persist in finding a more mainstream publisher to bring your book to the market. And so you start to submit it again, using those good reviews as a selling-point. But you’re in a very difficult position here.

Despite those favourable comments your book has received, you’re likely to have sold relatively few copies of it: you’ll be lucky to have sold one hundred. And although this is many more than most self-published books sell, it’s still not enough to impress the big publishers who will, generally, want to see much higher numbers before they consider publishing a second edition of your work.

Where Books Are Sold

Most books are still sold in real, physical bookshops and not online, despite claims to the contrary by many of the vanity presses and self-publishing services.

There are exceptions: few textbooks ever make it into bookshops and are instead sold direct from the publisher to the end-user, sometimes through the university or school. Few self-published titles or vanity-published titles make it into many shops either: most of these books are sold via the internet, or as a result of the authors’ efforts to sell into individual bookshops. But their overall sales are notoriously low, which has a lot to do with the fact that they just don’t get the exposure to their potential readers which comes with bookshop placement.

Sales Statistics

There's a very useful analysis of self-publishing via the POD route on the Writer Beware website. While this extract discusses sales statistics, the complete article is far more extensive and essential reading for everyone who is considering self-publishing their work.



Sales Statistics

Despite some highly publicized successes, the average book from a POD service sells fewer than 200 copies--mostly to the authors and to "pocket" markets surrounding them--friends, family, local retailers who can be persuaded to place an order. According to the chief executive of POD service iUniverse, quoted in the New York Times in 2004, 40% of iUniverse's books are sold directly to authors.

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.

iUniverse's most recent Facts and Figures sheet reports that the company published 22,265 titles through 2005, with sales of 3.7 million: an average of 166 sales per title. Obviously some titles can boast better sales (Amy Fisher's If I Knew Then sold over 32,000 copies)--but not many. According to a 2004 article in Publishers Weekly, only 83 of more than 18,000 iUniverse titles published during that year sold at least 500 copies. And in a 2008 article in The New York Times, iUniverse's VP, Susan Driscoll, admitted that most iUniverse authors sell fewer than 200 books.

As of 2004, stats for Xlibris were similar. According to a Wall Street Journal article, 85% of its books had sold fewer than 200 copies, and only around 3%--or 352 in all--had sold more than 500 copies. 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.

Once independent companies, AuthorHouse, iUniverse, and Xlibris are now all owned by the same company, Author Solutions. In a New York Times article published in early 2009, Kevin Weiss, Author Solutions' CEO, put the average sales of titles from any of the company's brands at around 150.

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.



Many thanks to Victoria Strauss for giving me permission to use this piece.

What Is A Synopsis For?

A synopsis is selling-tool, which shows editors and agents that you can write well and that you know how to structure a book.

A synopsis, therefore, has to entertain and inform. What it shouldn’t do is intrigue. If you don’t give away your book’s ending in your synopsis then how will anyone you have submitted to know if you can construct a water-tight plot?

Snowsales

The rather lovely independent publisher Snowbooks is now publishing details of sales and returns on its new(ish) Snowsales blog.

Do you want to know how many copies of each title Snowbooks sold in December? How many returns bookshops made the following month? Or which bookshops return copies of a book one day, only to reorder them again a few days later (and what the environmental and business implications of this silly shilly-shallying really are)? It's all there. Each blog post takes the form of an overview with a spreadsheet attached, which you can download and examine at your leisure

All you have to do to read all this fascinating stuff is email Emma Barnes and ask for a password, so she knows who has access to her sales information. You can find out everything you need to know here.

How Not To Sell To Book Shops

Any self-published authors who intend to sell their books direct into bookshops would do well to read this post from the Fidra blog, which tells everything you need to know about how NOT to do it.

There's also a sequel to it, in which a better strategy is revealed, which will be useful to all writers, whether they're self-published or with a mainstream, commercial house. Go and read these two pieces now. You will be glad you did. Honest.

How To Write A Synopsis

The job of the synopsis is to tell the story briefly and coherently; to outline the ups and downs of your story, and to introduce your characters and to demonstrate their appeal.

Your synopsis has to be good, because it has a lot of work to do: you’re going to use it to sell your book to an agent; your agent will then use it to sell your book to an editor; and your editor will then use it to sell the book to their publishers and sales people.

When I write fiction I don’t outline in advance, and instead use Word's endnote feature to attach a brief endnote to each and every scene as I write it. When I review my work, a quick read through those endnotes reveals most plot-holes and continuity problems which are then relatively easy to fix; and it provides me with a lump of text to base my synopsis on. But I still find synopses incredibly difficult to write, and struggle every time.

Thank goodness, then, for crime-writer Beth Anderson, who provides some very useful information about synopsis-writing on her website. Countless people have been saved from synopsis-writing hell by her great advice—including me.

Bumping Up Your Sales

Suppose you’ve done everything right for your self-published book but your sales have fallen flat. How can you spark things off again and rejuvenate your order-book?

You could get yourself a mainstream publishing contract—although you’re unlikely to manage this unless you’ve sold a high number of copies already, in which case you’re not likely to need one.

You could marry George Clooney.

Or you could send out a press release, or another appropriate pitch, whenever you see an opportunity. You could offer to give talks, write articles, or run workshops; and news stories which bear some relation to your book provide all sorts of promotional opportunities. You can try just about anything, so long as you’re qualified, able and confident.

It’s unlikely that anyone would self-publish if they had a mainstream publishing contract on offer, and Miss Snark has assumed first dibs on Mr Clooney: but the third option is something that anyone could do.