## Metadata - Author: [[Elle Griffin]] - Full Title: No One Buys Books - Category: #articles - Summary: The publishing industry mainly focuses on big celebrity and best-selling books, leaving many other books struggling to sell more than 1,000 copies. Most of the revenue for publishing houses comes from backlist books and successful bestsellers, while big advances are usually reserved for famous authors. Authors are exploring alternative ways to reach readers due to the challenges of the traditional publishing model. - URL: https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books ## Highlights - 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw3w2xat4cyhqjwndhn2kyfy)) - The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw3w3dtk0qvv5pjrxky8n5rj)) - Books by the Obamas sold so many copies they had to be removed from the charts as statistical anomalies. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw3w4drsdpaqykk6cybrttkv)) - Franchise authors are the other big category. Walsch says James Patterson and John Grisham get advances in the “many millions.” Putnam makes most of its money from repeat authors like John Sandford, Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Lisa Scottoline, and others. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw3w5d7d70vj67jcrhk9f3ve)) - Publishing houses want a built-in audience ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw3w5vvb05084750d3cqad8b)) - Every second book in America, ballpark, is being sold via e-commerce…Amazon.com has 50 million books available. A bookstore, a good independent bookstore, has around 50,000 different books available… an algorithm decides what is being presented and made visible and discoverable for an end consumer online. It makes a huge difference. — Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw3w6k5re5sfchf8c3met3hp)) - Having a lot of social media followers or fame doesn’t guarantee it will sell. The singer Billie Eilish, despite her 97 million Instagram followers and 6 million Twitter followers, sold only [64,000 copies](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/books/social-media-following-book-publishing.html) within eight months of publishing her book. The singer Justin Timberlake sold only [100,000 copies](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/books/social-media-following-book-publishing.html) in the three years after he published his book. Snoop Dog’s cookbook saw a boost during the pandemic, but he still only sold [205,000 copies in 2020](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/books/book-sales-publishing-pandemic-coronavirus.html). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw3w7c5gz446mn3vfanq8z11)) - If new books typically don’t sell well, well that’s why publishing houses make their revenue from their backlist. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw3w9snec55vr9nht4gncvdx)) - Authors are getting more independent If publishing houses make minimal investment in marketing their authors and focus largely on celebrity books and their backlist, authors who can’t snag a large advance might have better luck building their own audience and publishing elsewhere. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw3wbe67f7kgze4yr9s93qgg))