The bestselling author of Meltdown reveals just how limited the market for nonfiction books is.
By Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Before I became an author myself, I held an inflated estimate of the number of copies the typical book (bestselling or otherwise) sold. I also thought the author earned more per book than he really does. In my experience, the general public shares the misconceptions I once held.
Now for the terrible truth.
Books, says one of my publishers, are some of the hardest things in the world to sell. Nonfiction books, which I’m discussing here, are especially difficult – next to no one, relatively speaking, reads nonfiction. (Fiction carries its own challenges; competition is particularly fierce, given that half the world claims to be working on a novel.) It doesn’t help that there were 195,000 distinct titles published in 2005 alone (the latest statistic of which I am aware). I happen to know of a major publisher all readers of this site have heard of, which, at the time I heard the statistic, had published 3000 different books in one year. How many of those sold more than 2000 copies? About 200.
Books do not sell.
I know of people who expected to write a book and live off the royalties. They were deluded.
Then there’s the question of how much an author earns. Many people assume the author receives 50 percent of the cover price. That is impossible, since the bookstore is already getting a 50 percent discount (and book clubs get at least 70 percent off). If the author receives the other 50 percent, where would the publisher’s earnings come from?
An author with a trade publisher typically earns 15 percent of the cover price of a hardcover. Common contractual terms run as follows: 10 percent for the first 5000 copies, 12.5 percent for the next 5000, and 15 percent for all copies thereafter. Paperback editions earn the author 7.5 percent of the hardcover price. That’s before taxes, though one small consolation is that royalty income is not subject to self-employment tax. It’s also before any agency fees – your literary agent, if you have one, will typically earn 15 percent. Mine, who has helped me with several of my titles, earned every penny, but it’s still a deduction from your income.
University and academic presses are typically less generous. Sometimes you are actually expected to prepare your own index, if you don’t want to be docked to have one of their in-house people perform that service. I did the indexes for a couple of my early titles. It is an unspeakable task. Royalties, moreover, typically don’t exceed 10 percent, and usually operate on a sliding scale beginning with 5 percent.
It’s embarrassing to recall, but I remember thinking The Church Confronts Modernity, my book with Columbia University Press, would sell around 10,000–20,000 copies! After all, I thought, at least that many people would be interested in the subject matter it deals with, so of course it’ll sell that many. Ahem.
My most successful book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, has sold about 170,000 copies so far. That is a veritable miracle for an unknown author with little access to mass media. But it’s well below what most people assume I have sold.
Not long ago, someone referred matter-of-factly to the “millions of copies” of Meltdown I must have sold. Would that it were so. No one sells millions of copies of a nonfiction title, with a few exceedingly rare exceptions: (1) people with television or radio talk shows, who can promote their books before a huge audience every day; (2) authors whose books are featured on Oprah; and (3) the occasional outlier with a clever or quirky idea that attracts a lot of media.
Even with all the attention Meltdown got, it sold about 55,000 copies. This is astonishingly low to most people, particularly given the ten weeks it spent on the New York Times bestseller list. But the publishing world, which knows the dreary nonfiction sales figures all too well, was envious of my publisher for having such a big hit during a depressed period for publishing.
Having done this for a number of years now, I’ve come to expect sales to be at about this level. I realize it’s extremely difficult to sell in excess of 50,000 copies of a nonfiction title, which I have so far managed to do three times (my book on the Catholic Church and Western civilization being the third). But when you tell people the real figures, they are (understandably) stunned and disappointed. It’s like telling a relative at a family cookout that you were just accepted at the University of Pennsylvania or the University of Chicago. Someone in the know realizes you’ve just reached a great milestone. Many average people, on the other hand, figure you just got accepted at a run-of-the-mill school.
Even though nonfiction titles sell fewer copies than you may have thought, they are not for that reason a waste of time, particularly if you derive intellectual pleasure, as I do, from the challenge that comes with writing them. Writing a book (with a major publisher) can open major print, radio, and television outlets to you and your ideas, thereby giving you a chance to spread your message to a wider audience than just the reading public. Authors receive speaking invitations that give them the opportunity to reach a broader audience still, while adding to their (erratic) income. And so on.
If you want to write a book, then, just be sure to go into it with your eyes open. Understand that the chances you will become rich as a nonfiction author are slim to none. But writing a book brings satisfactions other than money, and if those are worth the expenditure of time that your project will demand, then by all means get to work.
Thomas E. Woods Jr. is the author of ten books, including the just released Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. This essay originally appeared at LewRockwell.com. Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com.
This all rings very true to me, having a non-fiction book about to be published for which I’ve set a goal of selling 20,000. Not having an agent to worry about, I probably could live modestly off my earnings for a year or two while I write another.
Given the commercial nonfiction success – that is, comparative commercial nonfiction success – which Simon Singh, Simon Winchester, and Simon Schama have all enjoyed, perhaps the secret to watching the nonfiction royalties flow in is to acquire the Christian name Simon.
Dead on. I’ve had several books published by academic publishers who not only expect the author to compile the tedious index with its convoluted rules, but run off small printinings which raise the cover prices to the point where almost no one who works for a living can buy them. Any publicity and marketing are also left almost entirely to the author. There is great satisfaction in getting your book out, but tremendous frustration and disappointment in seeing it priced out of the market and abandoned.
Maybe I’m a nerd, but I actually didn’t mind terribly composing my own index. I’m also fortunate enough to be steering clear of the academic press.
Simon — that’s funny, I just watched Simon Singh’s documentary on the proving of Fermat’s Last Theorem and was sure it was by Simon Schama.
Good primer for those outside the book industry. As one who worked for almost a year as royalty administrator at an academic publisher (Greenwood Press, 1987), and another eight as a bookseller (Borders, 1990s), I often think I should write an essay in hopes of clearing up a few issues and exploding a few myths, such as:
1. The bestseller as faithful microcosm of popular political opinion and the Mood of the People. Truth: even the runaway nonfiction bestseller of the year, selling 1 million copies, is bought by one adult out of 225. Add in the paperback reprint and you’re up to one out of 100 of an outlying, highly motivated and special subculture in no way representative of the broader public, let alone the next election results.
2. The bookseller as persecutor of his politically-conservative customers. This hardiest of perennials is myth of the blood royal, and I was amused to hear it first from Rush Limbaugh in 1992, unchallenged at all by the official right, exploded whole and entire over my next eight years as a bookseller – then repeated in a notorious Jay Nordlinger piece in NR in 2004. The conservative-as-liberal-victim shtick throwing himself mirror-rehearsed pity parties in print and on the radio is one good way to bond with the ignorant rubes in the cheap seats, provided you don’t confuse it with the pursuit of truth. That ideologues claiming the defense of capitalism are often so weak in grasping how such among its actual on-the-ground cash-exchanging institutions actually behave in the “real world” they in their set-piece “culture wars” claim to respect is among the modern marvels helping inoculate me these last 25 years against all but the most stringent forms of right-wing thinking, assuming there still are any.
3. The bookstore as price-gouger, because we pay $6 for the book and sell it to you for $10. I trust the reader knows some economics, enough not to end with the howler that our net profit is therefore 66 2/3 percent, i.e., the whole of the four-dollar margin.
4. The bookstore as surplus-value exploiter. I trust the reader knows enough about both economics in general and in its retail aspect to understand that an annual wage of $15,000 is rooted in such facts as our being on the left end of the hand-shovel v. steam-shovel continuum, that there is no chargeable premium whatever for our advanced individual knowledge of literature entitling our answer to the Ph.D. table-waiter to earn more than our colleagues who read nothing more demanding than People, and that the wheeled handcart is our signature value-added technology, along with the arms that lift the books from cart to shelf.
I could go on, but I’ll stop there, lest my reader drown from the excess of cold water, already.
DSL, I don’t which ideologues are weak in their defense of capitalism but the Ayn Rand Objectivists, the Austrian School
of Economics and the anarcho-capitalists at lewrockwell.com
have never been refuted in the least by the statists. Unless
your one of those Obamacans who really believe that the free market caused the current depression there is no excuse for such ignorance coming from your keyboard.
All forms of leftism along the very narrow liberal-socialist-nazi-fascist-communist continuum have been totally discredited.
Readers are choking on an excess of hot air from you, not cold water.
And when a really great book like Atlas Shrugged comes out it sells in the tens of millions and it’s probably more nonfiction than fiction.
Mr. Hardesty, I am afraid, may have missed the point of my paragraph in question, which was to correct the set-piece ideological fabrications of a certain breed of right-winger – e.g., Limbaugh, Nordlinger, Goldberg – who, rock-ribbed in his donning of sword and buckler against all those challenging capitalism, then turns round and slips on banana peels of his own dropping in making ignorant pronouncements upon realms upon which he knows nothing whatever and I far, far more, that of bookselling, and of the actual practices of its professionals, who do not attempt, contra Limbaugh/Nordlinger/Goldberg, to do other with conservative books than to maximize the number of satisfied hands with cash in search of those same books, without injecting their own political leanings, if any, onto the sales floor.
Mr. Hardesty’s thoughts upon the Austrian school, Ayn Rand, Obamacans, the causes of the current recession, and my presumed dissents from them, are of potential interest, but as I deal here only with the book trade and the ill-informed judgments of marquee conservatives upon it, I shall leave the former for threads more relevant, if and when they arise.
I have no use for the neocons you list above and regard them as far more liabilities than assets in the fight for laissez-faire capitalism but when I read your earlier comments it seemed like you painting a broad brush on the whole Right.
Our difference may be more apparent than real.
Thanks for your clarification.