How Many Copies of a Book are Sold, On Average?
S teve Laube recently posted an article on average book sales . The figures he posted are interesting and yet, most authors never sell that many books. Across 10 authors and 51 books, he came up with a figure of 12,455 copies. Someone else came up with a figure of 5,000 copies. Most of the one million books published in the United States each year will never sell more than 100 copies. Why the differences in numbers? One thing we have to ask when trying to find the average is what we really mean by the average. As you are probably aware, there is more than one way to calculate an average. The most frequently used method is to calculate the mean. This is done by taking the total books sold and dividing by the number of titles. This is what Steve Laube did. But the mean has little meaning when a few books have very large numbers and the rest are smaller. For example, if we have three books with sales of 5,300, 7,000, and 1,000,000, the mean will be 337,433. We wouldn’t tell an author wh...