Many thanks to 60Guilders for sending me this article! A very interesting analysis.

Alright, so you’ve written your book, and you’re planning on self-publishing it. You’ve priced your book at $4.99 and done the math, and in order to make a respectable living via writing, you need to sell about 20,000 copies of your work a year.

Now, you know that’s going to take some time get to, considering that you’re not going to have much push beyond what you, your fellow writers, and word of mouth can provide, and you know about the “long tail” and the importance of a back catalog.

In fact, you also know that many, many books the publishers put out don’t sell out their 5,000 copy print runs, and you know there’s a lot of self-published books that sell maybe a dozen copies, but you know the publishers aren’t really selling to readers and that a lot of self-published books are literally unreadable dreck, and the people who’ve read your work have liked it. Further, you know that there’s well over 300 million people in the United States, and even more in the Anglosphere, so you figure that selling at least 2,000 copies of your book should be relatively easy if it’s any good, since it requires less than 1 in 200,000 people in your probable market to buy your book.

So you do everything you need to do—solid cover, nice blurb, maybe some endorsements if you know some people, you advertise a bit—and you publish the book.

And the sales…they do not come as you hoped. You are somewhere in the “L-O” levels of the Alphabetical List of Author Success.

You feel the shame. The dishonor. You cannot sell to even one in a million people. You consider seppuku.

Before you buy a wakizashi and a katana and ask your best friend to act as your second, I’m here to tell you that while yes, you are probably not the next Tolkien, King, or Correia, your lack of sales does not mean you are a terrible writer.

Instead, they are a product of the fact that A. the demand for books is much, much lower than you thought it was, and B. the supply of books is much, much higher than you thought it was.

Demand

We’ll talk about demand first.

I’m assuming that you’re writing in English, so we’re going to take the estimated population of the Anglosphere—the US (342 million), the UK (68.5 million), Canada (40 million), Australia (27.1 million, and New Zealand (5.2 million)—as your market. All told, this comes out to a theoretical market of about 483 million people.

Practically, however, it’s nowhere near that many. To begin with, the under-18 crowd almost certainly isn’t going to be buying your book. Across the Anglosphere, that’s about 21% of the population, so now you’re looking at about 382 million people.

Then it gets even worse. The survey results vary wildly, but by all accounts at least a quarter of the adult population of the Anglosphere does not read at all, and by many accounts it might be closer to half. Frankly, I’m inclined to go with the more pessimistic estimates, so now we’re down to a practical market of about 207.6 million people.[i]

Now, that’s still quite a lot of people, but the thing is, most of those people don’t read that much. About 33% of America’s population and 32% of Britain’s read between one and ten books per year, and from what I can gather it seems like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand’s numbers are similar. Not to put too fine a point on it, but these folks are reading self-help books, celebrity/politician memoirs, whatever happens to be on the bestseller lists, and some classics. The chances of them coming across your book, much less buying it, is as close to nil as makes no difference unless they know you personally.

So now your practical market is down to about 82.6 million people.

But then it gets worse. Nine percent of Americans and ten percent of Britons read between eleven to twenty books a year. These are readers who aren’t just reading the latest self-help book, Colleen Hoover romance, or James Patterson thriller, but let’s be real here, these people are still probably not getting past the front tables at Barnes and Noble or the bookshelf at Walmart or Walgreens. They’re certainly not looking online, which is where you’re publishing.

So now we’re at a practical market of 46.5 million.

Now, about four percent of Americans and 5% of Britons read between twenty-one and thirty books a year. These folks are willing to go back into the shelves at Barnes and Noble, but they’re probably not looking online, and if they are, they are not going to be looking at self-published books.

So now we’re at a practical market of 30.6 million. 

Now, about 8% of Americans read more than thirty books a year, 6% more than forty, and 1% more than fifty; the Brits claim that 8% of them read more than thirty and 4% read more than fifty. Realistically speaking, considering that every publishing house manages to put out more than thirty books a year, for self-published authors your real market is the “reads more than fifty books a year” crowd.

So, now we’re at a practical market of about 6.4 million.

But wait, it’s about to get worse. People tend to like certain genres and dislike others, so depending on what genre you’re writing your percentage of the reading public that will actually read your work might range from about forty percent for mystery and crime fiction, to about twenty-five percent for fantasy and science fiction, to about eight percent for poetry.

In other words, at best, your market is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than you thought it was. Looking at these numbers, the largest potential pool is about 2.6 million people, which means that if you’re trying to sell 2,000 copies of your book you have to sell to about 1 in every 1,300 people, a considerably more difficult proposition than trying to sell to one in every 200,000, and that’s without getting into the fact that there are some people who don’t do ebooks, some people who will reject your work because of their politics/your politics, and some people who just won’t read self-published work, which further reduces your practical market.

Now, let’s turn to the supply side.

Supply

This section is going to be considerably shorter.

It is estimated that over two million books are published every year.

Now, a lot of those books aren’t going to be competing with yours, because they’re in other languages, aren’t in your genre, etc. But if even only one in ten thousand of those books are competing with yours, that’s two hundred new books per year striving for your market’s attention, to say nothing of the existence of thousands of backlist titles.

And remember, your practical rather than theoretical market is “people reading more than fifty books a year,” and most of those people read in multiple genres, which means that practically speaking your book is competing with hundreds if not thousands of others for the time and attention of people who simply do not have time to read all of them, and whether or not they even see your book is something of a matter of luck of the draw, so unless your work goes viral somehow, you’re kind of stuck in the algorithm and hoping for the best.

Conclusion

Now, you might be thinking, 60guilders, I thought you were trying to be encouraging here, but it seems like what you’re telling me is that my chances of making a living at this writing thing are really low.

And to be honest, that is a fair conclusion to be drawn from those numbers.

But here’s the thing: those numbers should also tell you that yes, while your market is considerably smaller than you thought it was, there is still a market out there. You might not be able to make your living at it, even after years or decades of publishing, but if you’re halfway decent at this you’ll at least make enough to cover a few months rent or a couple of mortgage payments, which is not be sneezed at during these times.

And it should also tell you that just because you’re not an overnight success, or even a success after considerable time, it doesn’t mean that you’re bad at writing, it just means that you’re good at it rather than being great.[ii] And while that means you should work to improve, as should we all, that also means that you have the capability to improve, and that the story you’ve told has made multiple people’s lives a little better.

And that’s something to be proud of, and worth pursuing further.

Keep writing, my friends.

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[i] I arrived at the numbers for Australia, Canada, and New Zealand by splitting the difference in percentages between America and Britain. I did not trust the sources I found, and this is a back-of-the-envelope analysis.

[ii] There is no shame in being good but not great at something. We herald greatness because it is so rare. Good is more than good enough.