The Broken Distribution Model Of Publishing or, Why Johnny Can’t Pay The Rent As A Writer

Nielson’s Bookscan has released their retail book sales numbers for 2004. (Um… isn’t it almost 2007?) An interesting picture emerged, from which folks will take away what they need to justify their actions. Ah, statistics. I’m betting the stat that gets bandied about the most will be this The average book sold 500 copies.

And while that is true, it’s utter horseshit to apply any value to the “average” book. Look at this distribution. Of the 1,200,000 books sold in 2004:

  • 79% (950,000) sold less than 99 copies
  • 96% (1,150,000) sold less than 1,000 copies
  • 98% (1,175,000) sold less than 5,000 copies

Only 2% of the books published (25,000) sold more than 5,000 copies.

Of course, these numbers cover the retail book market, so you’ve got fiction and non-fiction wrapped up in these numbers, so your mileage may vary depending on genre. But this is a classic long-tail example. A comparatively tiny amount of products make up for the lion’s share of the sales, while the larger grouping scales off a declining trend. Interesting.

Food for thought. I wonder what the audio book retails sales stats look like?

I’ve been spending lots of time reading POD-dy Mouth and the BookSlut to keep my eye on the larger publishing arena. Both are great resources.





This entry was posted by Evo on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 9:00 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “The Broken Distribution Model Of Publishing or, Why Johnny Can’t Pay The Rent As A Writer”

  1. Bill Miller Says:
    November 19th, 2006 at 11:04 am

    As more and more of the population arms themselves with Ipods and the like as there “book readers” perhaps the market will increase, especially in the long long parts of the tail.

Discuss this post in the box below:


Report a problem with an episode