Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales.

[beccaelizabeth]

I was just reading a thing about the NYT bestsellers and it said
Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales.

Somehow that's making me more interested in writing for print.
Like, I realise that is Many, but it seems like a reasonable sized many.
I've seen fanfic get that many, and fic has no ad budget.

It's also making me worried for how authors even survive, but that's capitalism for you.

Comments

[nostalgia]

do you think anyone rich just buys 5000 copies of their own books?

[beccaelizabeth]

That was actually what the thing I was reading was about
except closer to 19000
and they got caught

[nostalgia]

ouch!

[jesuswasbatman]

Yeah, they were trying to be sneaking and buying just the number of copies from each shop below the one where it would be officially a wholesale rather than consumer order.

[ex_peasant441]

It used to be most authors could make a sufficient living and artists struggled to survive, now authors have to have a second job and artists seem to make a comfortable living. Seems odd since surely more people read than buy pictures, but doubtless there is some sensible reason.

[elf]

Mainstream companies can make NYT bestseller lists with 5k sales. Indie authors can't; they don't have the connections to make those sales.

NYT Bestsellers don't count "how many books did people buy?" They count how many books are bought by distributors to send to stores. (And they don't exactly count books. They count some arcane calculation of inventory-distribution contracts. Sales counts for mainstream publishing have always been a form of bistromathics.)

But yeah. Several authors who've gone indie when the self-pub options got big, found out that they can sell a LOT more copies and make a LOT more money without going through an agent and a publisher. And that the low threshhold of "useful supplemental income" is not too difficult for anyone who's actually a good writer and pays attention to the business side of things (like, picking a cover and title for marketing reasons); making an actual live-on-it income is not guaranteed but do-able.

The two best blogs to start reading for more info are Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing (the title made more sense 5 years ago) and Rusch's The Business Rusch.

Konrath throws out enthusiasm and encouragement; Rusch tells authors how to cope with being a business in addition to an artist. Both of them regularly say: mainstream publishing is lying to you. An author's career success absolutely does not mean giving an agent 15% of everything you earn and only earning 15% of the cover price.