Actually, that’s not the case. The book sells, but Book I don’t. The chance that a particular book will sell in large numbers is close to zero.
The long tail truth is that most titles are on the periphery. Now that book publishing has been untethered from retail distribution, this calculation is difficult to avoid.
According to Bookscan, more than 450,000 new books were published last year. A title is a book in a particular format. Therefore, audio is counted separately from hardcovers, etc. Conservatively speaking, he could triple the sales here considering the digital and audio formats of the same title.
If we narrow this down to the 45,000 books published by the largest publishers (books that are not self-published by any definition and must be written by teams), we get the following graph (click expansion).
Only 163 books sold more than 100,000 copies. This is less than one of his 250 books published.
This is a fairly low bar. 100,000 people is the population of Roanoke, Virginia.
Cutting this goal in half would only result in an additional 320 books. This means that every time the smartest minds in book publishing spend the time, money, and effort to publish his 900 books, One Some of them are nearing hit status.
(And in this case, a hit is simply one book for every resident of Pocatello, Idaho.)
You can open a bookstore that carries all the current hits in all formats. All you need is a few bookshelves.
Meanwhile, 85% of traditional books published last year sold fewer than 5,000 copies in their respective format. These are very bad odds.
Books are important. Making them is a combination of skill and insight. Publishing them is a generous act of faith. It is important to add to the corpus of shared knowledge. Books change culture when people act on them, even if they don’t sell many copies. And your backlist can sometimes surprise your accountant.
But the economy of new books has nothing to do with these advantages. Scarcity has made the world of book publishing work as a business, and scarcity is gone.
Write a book because you can and because it might make a difference. However, don’t listen to publishers’ suggestions just to increase circulation. Probably not.