Book Sales Figures: How Many Copies Can You Expect To Sell?

YOU ARE READING: Book Sales Figures: How Many Copies Can You Expect To Sell? AT PhebinhvanhocEN

what do book sales really mean?

There was a time when selling books was easy. publishers printed books and sold them to bookstores. From there, bookstores sold them to readers, or returned those they couldn’t sell, and publishers tracked sales through physical inventory.

Today, the book market is completely different. digital formats, such as eBooks and audiobooks, do not have a physical inventory, and most self-published books are printed on demand.

You are reading: How many books sold is considered successful

Today, book sales come from 3 sources:

ebook (digital) sales
print book sales
audiobook sales

sounds simple, but each of these numbers must be calculated separately.

self-published sales

As a self-published author, you have direct access to your own sales data, so let’s start there. how do you calculate your own total book sales?

sale of electronic books

Your monthly eBook sales consist of all your sales from each eBook retailer and lender:

amazon
ibooks
kobo
nook
scribd
overdrive
fuss
etc

If you use an aggregator like bookbaby to distribute your eBook, you’ll get comprehensive sales reports without having to add everything yourself. that is a great advantage and saves a lot of time.

if not, you won’t know the total ebook sales figures until you calculate them.

print sales

print book sales work basically the same way, combining:

print books that are sold online through retailers
print books that are sold in physical stores
print books that you sell yourself (direct sales)

As a self-published author, your printer and/or distributor will report both online and physical bookstore retail sales figures.

Add that monthly sales report to the number of books you sold yourself, and that’s your monthly print sales.

audiobooks

Audiobooks, like e-books, are digital. they can be “printed” on cd and distributed as physical copies, but that is very rare now. most authors only sell digital downloads of their audiobook.

Audiobook sales work exactly like eBook sales, with one simple difference:

It is nearly impossible to distribute an audiobook widely without using a digital distributor.

In other words, most self-published authors only have 2 options:

sell your audiobook exclusively through audible and/or ibooks, or
use a digital distributor to sell it everywhere.

Either way, you’ll get monthly reports on your audiobook sales.

traditional editors

If you’re not a self-published author, you probably don’t have direct access to sales figures.

Not even for your own book.

Authors with traditional publications get royalty statements from their publisher maybe 2-4 times a year, and even those don’t tell you where the sales are coming from.

So what if you want to find out how many books someone else, like an industry leader or your biggest competitor, is selling?

let me be very clear about this:

The best you can do is guess how many copies of that book are selling based on a very limited amount of public data.

Still, if you want to make the best possible guess, here’s how to do it.

step 1. find the book on amazon

look for the book on amazon and pay attention to the different editions, such as:

kindle
paperback
hardcover
audiobook

To estimate total sales, you’ll have to look at each edition separately.

step 2. check the amazon sales ranking of the book

For each edition, note the book’s ranking across the entire store, not just its own category. some categories are larger than others, so ranking within an individual category doesn’t mean much.

once you have the book’s overall rating, enter it into an amazon sales estimator like amz scout. make sure you choose the right amazon store:

kindle store for kindle books
books for any other edition

The calculator will give you an estimated number of monthly sales for that edition of that book, given its overall ranking.

step 3. rinse and repeat

this system is much better than nothing. can give you an idea of how well a book is selling at any given time, but it has its problems:

estimates monthly sales based on a single data point.

That’s statistically terrible. To get a better estimate, you’ll need to enter the range for each edition into the calculator several times over the course of a month, and then take the average. the more data points you use, the better the sales estimate.

only measures sales on amazon.

kindle controls a large part of the digital market in both ebooks and audiobooks, so the estimate for kindle is a good indicator of digital sales. but even this can fail for one important factor, and print sales are even worse.

promotions can skew data.

To offset the effect of short-term spikes, take the average of a book’s estimated sales over several months. why? There are several things that can drastically change a book’s sales figures, affecting the ranking for days or even weeks afterwards:

price discounts
advertising
media coverage
bookbub promotions
any other sales or marketing push

amazon’s ranking algorithm rewards consistency.

In other words, a high book ranking can mean:

sells many copies in one day, or
has sold a much smaller number of copies consistently throughout the month

At this point, you’re probably wondering, “Is this really the best way to estimate book sales?”

if all you have is public data, then yes. publishers do not share specific numbers.

But if you’re really into getting real sales data, there are private data sources, like bookscan, that authors can sign up for through the publisher marketplace for $2,500 a year.

yes. $2,500. the price alone shows how hard it is to get good numbers any other way.

but everyone has a story to tell, and every potential author should have the tools they need to do so. That’s why we’re sharing our own data on nonfiction book sales, right here.

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