Oh boy am I behind in my reading. I just hopped over to POD-DY mouth and she has a post on there that, although I know it's fact, and have known the 'facts' for some time, it is still enough to make a writer want to cry.
the dry statistics are:
Regarding Neilsen Bookscan's tracked sales of books for 2004 (1.2 million), here are the results:
Of those 1.2 million, 950,000 sold fewer than 99 copies.
Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies.
Only 25,000 books sold more than 5,000 copies.
Fewer than 500 sold more than 100,000 copies.
Only 10 books sold more than a million copies each.
The average book in the United States sells about 500 copies.
Click here for the full comments from POD-DY MOUTH.
4 comments:
Yay, you're back! :-)
I saw these too, a few days ago. Been trying ever since to forget them but they won't go away.
Stupid numbers. When it's laid out in black and white like this, it's so hard to keep the faith...
But ha! These numbers do not include ebooks!! (G)
Statistics without context can mis-lead and distort.
Hi Miss Write,
It's great to see you blogging again! I've been trying to stay out of trouble. ;-)
There's a new lit agency blog and I read an interesting stat (at least for them) about "The Waiting Game" and the slowness of publishing. Some of the books being bought now won't be printed until 2009! Good grief!
http://dglm.blogspot.com/
Well, would you look at that? Looks like my lovely editor has been Spammed! Sorry...
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