Eric Siu breaks down why most books fail financially. In 2020, only 268 titles sold over 100,000 copies while 96% sold fewer than 1,000. Publishing follows a power-law distribution like venture capital: a tiny fraction wins big, and the rest barely move.
You and I have both published books. So do you know the economics and the numbers behind the book publishing industry? No, but it must be terrible. We've said before that book publishing, if you're trying to make money from it, generally don't want to do it because it sucks for that. The book publishing industry is like the VC business. Bestsellers are rare. In my essay, Writing Books Isn't a Good Idea, I wrote that in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96% of books sold less than 1,000 copies. Okay, that's still the vibe. So 50% of books sold less than a dozen copies. 50% of books couldn't sell 12 copies, right? So basically publishers are like VCs. VCs looking for unicorns. If there's 58,000 titles published in a year, 90% of them sold less than 2,000 copies and 50% sold less than a dozen, right? So basically no one's going to read your book. And it's a power law type of thing, right? In VC, you're looking at only a couple of companies in your portfolio that will have an outsized return. Same deal here.
