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How many copies does a first time author sell?

The average traditionally published non-fiction book sells about 250-300 copies in the first year, but when we manage a book launch, our target is to sell 1,000 copies in the first 3 months. Why 1,000? Because at that number of sales, a book has the momentum it needs to keep spreading by word of mouth.

scribemedia.com - Everything You Need To Know About Book Sales Figures - Scribe Media

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What Do Book Sales Really Mean?

There was a time when book sales were straightforward. Publishing companies printed books and sold them to bookstores. From there, bookstores sold them to readers—or returned the ones they couldn’t sell—and publishers tracked sales through physical inventory. Today, the book market is completely different. Digital formats like ebooks and audiobooks don’t have a physical inventory, and most self-published books are printed on-demand.

Today, book sales come from 3 sources:

Ebook (digital) sales

Print book sales

Audiobook sales

It sounds simple, but each of these numbers has to be calculated separately.

Self-published sales

As a self-published Author, you have direct access to your own sales data, so let’s start there. How do you figure out your own total book sales?

Ebook sales

Your monthly ebook sales consist of all your sales from every ebook retailer and lender:

Amazon

iBooks

Kobo

Nook

Scribd

Overdrive

Hoopla

etc

If you’re using an aggregator like BookBaby to distribute your ebook, you’ll get full sales reports without having to add everything up yourself. That’s a huge plus and saves a ton of time. If you’re not, you won’t know your total ebook sales numbers until you calculate them. PRO TIP: Ebook retailers often report US and global sales separately. Be sure to include every market in your total.

Print sales

Print book sales work basically the same way, combining:

Print books sold online through retailers

Print books sold in brick-and-mortar stores

Print books you sell yourself (direct sales)

As a self-published Author, your printer and/or distributor will report retail sales figures from both online and brick-and-mortar booksellers.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks, like ebooks, are digital. They can be “printed” on CDs and distributed as physical copies, but that’s very rare now. Most Authors sell only digital downloads of their audiobook.

Audiobook sales work exactly like ebook sales, with one simple difference:

It’s almost impossible to distribute an audiobook widely without using a digital distributor.

In other words, most self-published Authors have only 2 choices:

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sell your audiobook exclusively through Audible and/or iBooks, or use a digital distributor to sell it everywhere.

Either way, you’ll get monthly reports of your audiobook sales.

Traditional publishers

If you’re not a self-published Author, you probably don’t have direct access to sales numbers.

Not even for your own book.

Traditionally published Authors get royalty statements from their publisher maybe 2 or 4 times a year, and even those don’t tell you where the sales came from.

So, what if you want to figure out how many books someone else is selling, like an industry leader or your top competitor?

Let me be very clear about this:

The best you can do is guess how many copies that book is selling based on a very limited amount of public data. Still, if you want to make the best possible educated guess, here’s how to do it.

Step 1. Find the book on Amazon

Search for the book on Amazon and pay attention to the different editions, such as:

Kindle

paperback

hardcover

audiobook

To estimate total sales, you’ll have to look at each edition separately.

Step 2. Check the book’s Amazon sales rank

For each edition, note the book’s rank in the entire store, not just its own category. Some categories are bigger than others, so the rank within an individual category doesn’t mean much. Once you have the book’s overall rank, enter it into an Amazon sales estimator like AMZ Scout. Be sure to choose the right Amazon store:

Kindle store for Kindle books

Books for every other edition

The calculator will give you an estimated monthly sales number for that edition of that book, given its overall rank.

Step 3. Rinse and repeat

This system is a lot better than nothing. It can give you a feel for how well a book is selling at any given moment, but it has its problems:

It estimates monthly sales based on a single data point.

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That’s statistically terrible. To get a better estimate, you’ll have to enter each edition’s rank into the calculator several times over the course of a month and then take the average. The more data points you use, the better the sales estimate.

It only measures sales on Amazon.

Kindle controls a huge portion of the digital market in both ebooks and audiobooks, so the Kindle estimate is a good indicator of digital sales. But even this can be off by a big factor, and print sales are even worse. To even out the effect of short-term spikes, take the average of a book’s estimated sales across a few months. Why? There are several things that can change a book’s sales numbers dramatically, affecting the rank for days or even weeks afterward:

price discounts

advertising

media coverage

BookBub promotions

any other sales or marketing push

The Amazon rank algorithm rewards consistency.

In other words, a high book rank can mean either:

it’s selling a lot of copies in one day, or

it has sold a much smaller number of copies consistently all month

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself, “Is this really the best way to estimate book sales?” If all you have is public data, then yes. Publishing houses do not share hard numbers. But if you’re truly dedicated to getting real sales data, there are private data sources—like BookScan, which Authors can sign up for through Publisher’s Marketplace for $2,500 per year. Yes. $2,500. The price alone shows how hard it is to get good numbers any other way. But everyone has a story to tell—and every potential Author should have the tools they need to do that. Which is why we’re sharing our own data on nonfiction book sales, right here.

scribemedia.com - Everything You Need To Know About Book Sales Figures - Scribe Media

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