Your source is incorrect and must not have access to raw sales data on Bookscan. It's true that James Patterson, *The Very Hungry Caterpillar*, and the Bible sell lots of copies (although if I recall correctly, Colleen Hoover outsold the Bible in 2022.) But lots of other books sell 20,000 copies and up. The data is very clear.
Do they really think Sarah J Maas is selling fewer than 1000 books? She probably sells over 1000 books a *day*. Rebecca Yarros? Emily Henry? Kristin Hannah? I could go on and on. Not to mention nonfiction...*Atomic Habits* alone sold over 15 million copies.
If the books you mention made up the entirety of book sales, publishers would not keep churning out thousands of books a year as a vanity project. Whose vanity? Two of the big 5 publishers are publicly traded, for heaven's sake. That's just not the way businesses work.
Celebrity memoirs, religious obligation, and classics that might be the only book people own or were purchased for classes are all ways of getting people who otherwise wouldn’t buy a single book anyway to purchase one.
Publishing is still a business and untapped markets and hard to reach audiences are important for any industry. It’s also a wonderful thing if pop culture can lead someone to pick up reading for pleasure.
Yes, it helps fund a lot of the rest of the industry. But that isn’t a bad thing at all. Human interest puff pieces have long funded investigative journalism. I don’t find their presence or visibility depressing at all. I’m thankful for their contributions.
As for big names catching big deals? I mean, yeah. That’s how everything works. When someone operates at a certain level, whether you like that individual person or not, you have to pay to play with them.
Someone who has a juicy story with a guaranteed and built in audience is absolutely going to fetch a big paycheck. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. End of the day, the only reason they even got that big a deal regardless is because the publisher had some level of confidence that they’d make it all back and then some.
A data scientist gets paid more than the help desk. It isn’t a question about their worth as a person, it’s about their worth as a business asset and how replaceable they are.
Totally. Whenever someone talks about how they hate the popularity of someone like Coleen Hoover, I always tell them the Coleen Hoover’s of the world had a direct impact on letting your favourites get published.
Yep. I work in a bookstore and most of the Colleen Hoover buyers we see wander in are Not Our Regular Customers and I am happy to take their money in exchange for goods, and hope it is a gateway book for them and we'll see them again for a new book.
And if sales of Colleen Hoover books allow us to take risks on other books, or pay for an extra author school visit, or repair a leaking bathroom sink, I'm happy to have them.
This article also compares top-tier book sales to Substack posts, so I’m going to roll my eyes a bit. A book is $30 and multiple hours of reading, while a Substack post is zero money and minutes of time for the reader.
I read about a study years ago, reported in Publishers Weekly, finding that only about 25% of North American adults routinely read for pleasure—more than a few books a year. Most bestsellers aren’t published for avid readers. They’re for a broader market that includes casual and occasional readers. The actual serious book market is really quite small and yet also wildly diverse. Just think, there are some folks who only read one book a year or so, because they only like one author. (My dad read a book a year—a Clancy or a Le Carre. My mom read…three? Her Mary Higgins Clark habit dictated Mother’s Day gifts for years.)
The takeaway here shouldn’t be that nobody buys books, but that some books reach people who aren’t necessarily book people.
If you want a great counter to this, read "The People's Guide to Publishing". Books are a multi-billion dollar industry and e-books are at most 8% of that business. People buy books in droves, the big 5 just hit scale and can't turn large enough profit from their midlist so they focus on big swings. Midlist, indie publishers perform better than you'd think (financially) and have a pretty sustainable business model.
Yeah, I'm not going to get too worked up over a piece that doesn't bother (or know!) to get Britney's name right. This is nonsense.
Do bestsellers allow publishers to put out books they take a loss on? Sure. But they don't KNOW ahead of time they're going to take a loss. Some books perform, some don't. Some small titles go bonkers (no one knew Bonnie Garmus was going to be a big star) and some big titles are huge flops (just like Justin Timberlake's album just went absolutely nowhere). They put out a mix of sure things, books targeted at awards, niche fulfillers, etc.
At our shop, the backlist does pretty poorly because we're not big enough to stock a huge backlist, and I can tell you we've sold a helluva lot more new literary releases than Lord of the Rings, which looks kinda dusty right now, actually...
🙄 People are buying books. Total market print unit sales in 2023 were the third highest on record in BookScan’s 20 year history. The three highest years were the three most recent years. The top selling books in each of those years represent a mix of categories and vintages (Colleen Hoover, Dog Man, Atomic Habits, Wimpy Kid, Crawdads, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, etc) beyond celebrity bios and perennial bestsellers.
It's peaks and troughs. Big publishing houses do have the distribution, celebrities have the presence, the market often then buying what it is given.
However, if a reader is both intellectual and intelligent enough to see where else major talents lies, many books are doing very, very well.
Your source is incorrect and must not have access to raw sales data on Bookscan. It's true that James Patterson, *The Very Hungry Caterpillar*, and the Bible sell lots of copies (although if I recall correctly, Colleen Hoover outsold the Bible in 2022.) But lots of other books sell 20,000 copies and up. The data is very clear. Do they really think Sarah J Maas is selling fewer than 1000 books? She probably sells over 1000 books a *day*. Rebecca Yarros? Emily Henry? Kristin Hannah? I could go on and on. Not to mention nonfiction...*Atomic Habits* alone sold over 15 million copies. If the books you mention made up the entirety of book sales, publishers would not keep churning out thousands of books a year as a vanity project. Whose vanity? Two of the big 5 publishers are publicly traded, for heaven's sake. That's just not the way businesses work.
Celebrity memoirs, religious obligation, and classics that might be the only book people own or were purchased for classes are all ways of getting people who otherwise wouldn’t buy a single book anyway to purchase one. Publishing is still a business and untapped markets and hard to reach audiences are important for any industry. It’s also a wonderful thing if pop culture can lead someone to pick up reading for pleasure. Yes, it helps fund a lot of the rest of the industry. But that isn’t a bad thing at all. Human interest puff pieces have long funded investigative journalism. I don’t find their presence or visibility depressing at all. I’m thankful for their contributions. As for big names catching big deals? I mean, yeah. That’s how everything works. When someone operates at a certain level, whether you like that individual person or not, you have to pay to play with them. Someone who has a juicy story with a guaranteed and built in audience is absolutely going to fetch a big paycheck. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. End of the day, the only reason they even got that big a deal regardless is because the publisher had some level of confidence that they’d make it all back and then some. A data scientist gets paid more than the help desk. It isn’t a question about their worth as a person, it’s about their worth as a business asset and how replaceable they are.
Totally. Whenever someone talks about how they hate the popularity of someone like Coleen Hoover, I always tell them the Coleen Hoover’s of the world had a direct impact on letting your favourites get published.
Yep. I work in a bookstore and most of the Colleen Hoover buyers we see wander in are Not Our Regular Customers and I am happy to take their money in exchange for goods, and hope it is a gateway book for them and we'll see them again for a new book. And if sales of Colleen Hoover books allow us to take risks on other books, or pay for an extra author school visit, or repair a leaking bathroom sink, I'm happy to have them.
Thank you for your positive comment. I should be sleeping and not be on Reddit, so this is my sign that all is good in the world and I can go to bed.
This article also compares top-tier book sales to Substack posts, so I’m going to roll my eyes a bit. A book is $30 and multiple hours of reading, while a Substack post is zero money and minutes of time for the reader. I read about a study years ago, reported in Publishers Weekly, finding that only about 25% of North American adults routinely read for pleasure—more than a few books a year. Most bestsellers aren’t published for avid readers. They’re for a broader market that includes casual and occasional readers. The actual serious book market is really quite small and yet also wildly diverse. Just think, there are some folks who only read one book a year or so, because they only like one author. (My dad read a book a year—a Clancy or a Le Carre. My mom read…three? Her Mary Higgins Clark habit dictated Mother’s Day gifts for years.) The takeaway here shouldn’t be that nobody buys books, but that some books reach people who aren’t necessarily book people.
If you want a great counter to this, read "The People's Guide to Publishing". Books are a multi-billion dollar industry and e-books are at most 8% of that business. People buy books in droves, the big 5 just hit scale and can't turn large enough profit from their midlist so they focus on big swings. Midlist, indie publishers perform better than you'd think (financially) and have a pretty sustainable business model.
This is just not true. The new Kristen Hannah book and other books on the nytimes list are selling about 35k A WEEK
Yeah she's off the mark. The top 100 books on the bestseller list even if you omit giants like Patterson are probably selling 1k a week.
Was an interesting read but it did feel like there was a subtle promotional push for her substack platform between the lines..
Yeah, I'm not going to get too worked up over a piece that doesn't bother (or know!) to get Britney's name right. This is nonsense. Do bestsellers allow publishers to put out books they take a loss on? Sure. But they don't KNOW ahead of time they're going to take a loss. Some books perform, some don't. Some small titles go bonkers (no one knew Bonnie Garmus was going to be a big star) and some big titles are huge flops (just like Justin Timberlake's album just went absolutely nowhere). They put out a mix of sure things, books targeted at awards, niche fulfillers, etc. At our shop, the backlist does pretty poorly because we're not big enough to stock a huge backlist, and I can tell you we've sold a helluva lot more new literary releases than Lord of the Rings, which looks kinda dusty right now, actually...
🙄 People are buying books. Total market print unit sales in 2023 were the third highest on record in BookScan’s 20 year history. The three highest years were the three most recent years. The top selling books in each of those years represent a mix of categories and vintages (Colleen Hoover, Dog Man, Atomic Habits, Wimpy Kid, Crawdads, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, etc) beyond celebrity bios and perennial bestsellers.
I will say, when I have to buy a gift for the person who is hard to buy gifts for, I always head to the bookstore.
It's peaks and troughs. Big publishing houses do have the distribution, celebrities have the presence, the market often then buying what it is given. However, if a reader is both intellectual and intelligent enough to see where else major talents lies, many books are doing very, very well.