At one point in my life, I was thinking of writing a non-fiction book. It’s something I always wanted to do. My plan was to use some of the articles I’ve written for this website as a foundation. But then I looked at the average sales of non-fiction books from this article: “The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing.” Ugh.
3. Despite the growth of e-book sales, overall book sales are still shrinking.
After skyrocketing from 2008 to 2012, e-book sales leveled off in 2013 and have fallen more than 10% since then, according to the AAP StatShot Annual 2015. Unfortunately, the decline of print sales outpaced the growth of e-book sales, even from 2008 to 2012. The total book publishing pie is not growing—the peak sales year was in 2007—yet it is being divided among ever more hundreds of thousands of print and digital books.
4. Average book sales are shockingly small—and falling fast.
Combine the explosion of books published with the declining total sales and you get shrinking sales of each new title. According to BookScan—which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail sales of books (including Amazon.com)—only 256 million print copies were sold in 2013 in the U.S. in all adult nonfiction categories combined (Publishers Weekly, January 1, 2016). The average U.S. nonfiction book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 2,000 copies over its lifetime.
5. A book has far less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore.
For every available bookstore shelf space, there are 100 to 1,000 or more titles competing for that shelf space. For example, the number of business titles stocked ranges from less than 100 (smaller bookstores) to up to 1,500 (superstores). Yet there are several hundred thousand business books in print that are fighting for that limited shelf space.
It’s stunning to me that the total number of copies of non-fiction print books sold each year is less than the number of Americans. Someday I might again reverse, but these numbers put the kibosh on my book-publishing passion. For now, It’s good to know that I have a website where I can publish my ongoing, evolving, thoughts on a number of topics. I can write about anything that interests me. At a minimum, it serves as a personal diary. As a bonus, there is a fair amount of traffic coming to the site, which leads me to hope that some others are finding some of my thoughts to be useful. I started this website in 2006 and it has served well as a platform for developing my ideas and interacting with others who show an interest.
I have a lot of new ideas I’ve been working on (including many dichotomies that I had intended to feature in my book). Most of these ideas concern cognitive science and philosophy. If my work life cooperates, I’ll be carving out more time in a typical day to work on my ideas – – I hope to publish more ideas to which I can lay personal claim, though everything I write is with a heavy debt to hundreds or thousands of other people I’ve encountered in person or through their writings.
Onward!
It’s worse than you think. I’ve written non-fiction work most of my life, and much of it is valued by clients as excellent. I pull no punches and, where possible, provide references for nearly all claims. That does not translate well into commercial success in writing business books. I’ve written one on how to start a business, and there is no market unless I am already famous or play some of the games that target Amazon’s ranking algorithms. Total sales, number of reviews, positivity of reviews, can all be manipulated.
For the last several years I’ve tried my hand at fiction writing, some of it good, some not so good. The problem is with not only number of titles in every category, it is in Amazon’s price structure. One can get a very generous 70% royalty on fiction, but it must be priced at $2.99 to $9.99. The minimum price has not changed for as long as I can remember, and making a book stand out starts with its cover, which will cost $300+ for an e-book. Editing and proofreading an 80,000 word manuscript comes in at $300-600. As a hobbyist author I only make money on a book if another author or publisher wants to purchase it and re-release under his/her own name. I’ve sold two that way; the rest are money-losers.
Thanks, Bill. You’re welcome to keep publishing here at DI, where we pay you solely in compliments. That is the consequence of having absolutely no advertising. I foot the hosting bill here in order to avoid advertising as a matter of principle. So good luck getting some fame here, but don’t hold your breath about potential fortune!
All true, no doubt…UNLESS the title has Trump in it or the author has Trump in their name ….. (Mary is making a killing I believe. I loved her book “Too Much and Never Enough”. and recommend it to anyone who is interested in how Trump became… well, you know.) … read it now because come Jan 20 it’s gonna be history.