We’ve all heard it. Heck, we’ve all said it. “I could write a book, if only I had more time.” And yes, it stings. Because writers don’t have more time than anyone else. Most of us hold down one or more non-writing related jobs, supplement our income with side hustles, or forego sleep/vacations/friend & family get-togethers to make time.
No matter where you are on your writer’s journey – whether you’re bursting with ideas or have published your twentieth novel – it’s easy to focus on what other people have accomplished and lose sight of this incredible thing that you’ve accomplished already!
Goals are important – as long as they are under your control. Don’t have an agent yet? Set a goal to query 5 agents this week. Don’t set a goal to get an agent this week. Working on your first (or fiftieth) novel? Set a goal to write x thousand words this month. Don’t set a goal to hit all the bestseller lists by the end of the year.
Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. Those blockbusters are a minute anomaly: only 10 books sold more than a million copies last year, and fewer than 500 sold more than 100,000. – Publisher’s Weekly “A Bookselling Tail” Jul 14, 2006
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Comparison is the Thief of Joy. It’s easy to get discouraged when your local bookstore doesn’t have a single copy of your book but it has an entire display of another book. Maybe your next book will have it’s own display, and the billboard, and the spot on <insert your favorite morning show here>. Maybe it won’t. But the important thing to remember is that you’ve already come so very, very far because it’s no secret that the odds were stacked against you from the start and you’ve already overcome many of them!
Enough with the feels and onto the facts:
- Only 3% of people who set out to write a novel actually finish a novel. To put that into context, the USA (pop 332M) is about 4% the population of the world (8B).
- Less than 0.1% of people ever write a book, so we’re down from a worldwide population of 8B to 8M. That’s equivalent to New York City. It’s still a lot of people, but think of it like this: in the entire world, 7,992,000,000 will never write a single book.
- The odds of getting a book traditionally published is around 1-2%.
- The average traditionally published book sells around 3,000 copies over its lifetime, and less than 500 the first year.
- A PUBLISHER breaks even on a $10,000 advance by selling around 1,000 copies. There are a lot of variables at play here, but an AUTHOR earns out on a $10,000 advance by selling more than 5,000 copies. Less than 25% of books “earn out” their advance.
- What about best sellers? Again, these numbers are clouded in secrecy but one estimation is that a book has to sell at least 10,000 copies during the FIRST WEEK to even have a shot at the NYT Best Seller list. Something like 0.08% of books published in the US annually (300,000) make the US Best Seller lists. To break this down, you have a better chance of winning the lotto (1 in 300M) and being struck by lightning twice (1 in 9M) than writing a book, getting it traditionally published, and making the Best Sellers list.
Where exactly am I going with all this? It seems pretty bleak, right? Wrong. Just the opposite, in fact.
If you’ve written a book, you’re in an elite category already. You’re in the 3%.
If you’ve got an agent, got a publishing contract, earned out your advance, and/or sold more books to publishers, you’re killing it! If you haven’t (yet), and these are your goals, keep going until you get there!
Traditional publishing has a STEEP curve, and THE ONLY THING YOU CAN CONTROL is writing your book. Write your book. Make it the best book you can possibly write. If you want to trad publish, query/sub. In the meantime, start your next book. Make it even better than your last. Rinse and repeat.
Note: These facts have been gathered by multiple sources all over the internet in 2023. I tried to cross-references sources but eventually gave up, and my grasp of mathematical statistics is somewhere between zero and “If you have three oranges and you eat one, how many do you have left?” so take any/all of this with a grain of salt.
