Research Note: How Many Copies Do Business Books Sell?

• Is the average really 5,000?
• If a person uses a book agent or PR service, what difference does it make?
• What other factors might affect book sales?

In The Business Impact Of Writing A Book: Data, Analysis, And Lessons From Professional Service Providers Who Have Done It, RainToday.com asked 200 authors how publishing a book has affected the success of their practices, as measured in numerous ways.
 
Here's what we found:
 
How Many Books Did You Sell?
 
We asked authors how many copies of their first business books sold. Here is some of the data we found:

Books Sold	Who Sold This Many Books
4,500	Median* number of copies sold of the first book that an author wrote where the author did not use a book publicity or marketing service
5,000	Median number of copies sold of the first book an author wrote where the author did not use a book agent
10,000	Median number of copies sold of the the first book an author wrote where the author did use a book publicity or marketing service
12,000	Median number of copies sold of the first book an author wrote where the author did use a book agent

* Median: 50th Percentile. In other words, as many authors sold more of this number of their first books as did authors who sold fewer than this number of books.
 
Items to note:

• We found the same trends analyzing the mean averages as we did in our review of the medians. The means were approximately 5 to 6 times higher than the medians, with first book sales ranging between 25,000 and 65,000 copies sold.
  
  In this study, the mean averages are much higher than the median averages, due to the effect of statistical outliers. For example, if a small number of authors sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their first book, their data raises the mean quite a bit, but doesn't affect the median as much.
  
  On the one hand, authors should make this distinction and should think about the median more than the mean as a baseline for expectations. On the other hand, authors shouldn't discount the possibility that their book could be a big seller.
  
  
• Whether or not the authors self-published or published at a well known publishing house made a significant difference in the number books sold.
  
  
• Authors who can “sell” an agent on helping them to get their book published and navigate the Kafkaesque morass of the book publishing world may have a brand or “platform” already established to help them sell books, otherwise the agents might not be interested.
  
  As we recently learned from interviewing literary agent Jeff Herman, agents need to be extremely picky with the books they take on, often rejecting 97 to 99% of the books they review, or else they risk losing their credibility with publishers.
  
  
• How many books you sell depends on a number of factors: how good the book is, how aggressively you sell and market it, and if you choose the right tactics, if it catches the business world at a time where it takes off, what publisher you use, and other factors outlined in the report.
  
  
• See my research note Effects of Selling More Copies of Your Book for more information on how many books you have to sell to have it make a real difference in your practice.  

To learn more about the impact that writing a business book actually has on a professional firm, check out RainToday's recent research study, The Business Impact Of Writing A Book: Data, Analysis, And Lessons From Professional Service Providers Who Have Done It, available in the RainToday Store.