That’s not true, actually. Books sell, but book doesn’t. The odds of a particular book selling a lot of copies are close to zero.
The truth of the long tail is that most titles are way out on the fringe. Now that book publishing is unleashed from retail distribution, the math is hard to avoid.
There were more than 450,000 new titles issued last year according to Bookscan. A title is a book in a specific format–so the audio counts as separate from the hardcover, etc. To be conservative, you can triple the sales numbers here, to account for digital and audio formats of the same title.
If we narrow that down to the 45,000 books published by the largest publishers—books that by every definition are not self-published, and that required a team to create—we get this chart (click to enlarge):
Annual sales by title, from major publishers, of new books. Each ‘title’ is a given book in a given format.
Only 163 books sold more than 100,000 copies. That’s fewer than one out of every 250 titles published.
That’s a pretty low bar: 100,000 is the population of Roanoke, Virginia.
If we halve that goal, we only add another 320 books. This means that every time the smartest minds in book publishing spend time, money and effort to publish 900 books, one of them approaches the status of a hit.
(And in this case, a hit is simply one book for every person in Pocatello, Idaho.)
You could open a bookstore that carries every current hit in every format and you’d only need a few bookcases.
On the other end of the scale, we see that 85% of all traditional books published last year sold fewer than 5,000 copies each in their format. Those are extraordinarily bad odds.
Books matter. Making them is a combination of craft and insight. Publishing them is a generous act of faith. Adding to the corpus of shared knowledge is important. Books change the culture when people act on them, even if they don’t sell many copies. And sometimes the backlist surprises the accountants.
But the economics of new books have nothing to do with any of these benefits. Scarcity made the book publishing world work as a business, and scarcity is gone.
Write a book because you can and because it might make a difference. But don’t listen to your publisher’s suggestions simply to sell more copies. You probably won’t.
It’s easy to get focused on the public-facing mouth of the funnel.
More followers.
More impressions.
More buzz, hype, promotion. Get the word out.
Just about all the time people who call themselves “marketers” spend is on this. Don’t worry about what happens later, just pour more attention into the top.
But the math is simple:
Most of the people at the top leave long before they engage, buy or spread the word.
Which means that doubling your conversion is exactly the same as doubling the number of people who are aware of you.
It means that by the time you get to 20 people (out of 1,000) who are ready to become committed fans, each of these people is worth fifty times as much effort as you’d put into getting one new stranger to be aware of what you do.
Don’t send a poorly-written mail merge to your best prospects. Send them a handwritten note.
It’s not the bottom of the funnel. It’s the foundation for your future.
It’s an important question. Lots of opportunities come with one, and going in with your eyes open helps avoid problems later.
Two challenges:
Sometimes, a really good opportunity doesn’t actually have a catch. And spending a lot of time looking for one keeps us from the work we ought to be doing.
And sometimes, a really exciting opportunity is so exciting we forget to look. And we should.
In 1970, when Walter Cronkite was narrating current events for the United States, he was 54 years old. Hitchcock made his last film when he was 77.
When there’s a limited number of slots for narrators to fill, they can stick around for a long time.
One of the overlooked cultural shifts of our time is that by dramatically expanding the number of slots (and removing the gatekeepers) we skipped twenty or thirty years. Now, there are writers, pundits, video stars and producers who aren’t being asked to wait two decades to have a voice.
Existing media (like traditional book publishing or network TV) will hold on to proven voices for as long as it can, but new media (which now captures far more attention) has no mechanism for that.
If it seems like it’s happening all at once, compared to history, it is.
PS the big finale of the GOODBIDS auction launch week is ready. Get two Taylor Swift tickets (in Amsterdam in July) plus a travel budget. To benefit charity: water.
It’s possible to have a useful conversation about what to do about something that’s broken or needs improvement. But first, we must acknowledge that it happened.
It’s not controversial to understand the facts, the data and the shifts that are happening in the world we live in. In fact, the only way to have a useful conversation about what to do about it is to understand and accept the reality of what’s here.
Movements that deny reality choose to do this because they don’t have a better plan, and stalling is their best option. Which is no option at all.
Today is Earth Day, which like Mother’s Day, shouldn’t be a day at all, more like an all-year-round celebration.
Two years ago, hundreds of volunteers from 90 countries came together and produced an Almanac.
Since then, the book has been translated into languages around the world (recently with a free edition in Spanish), been a bestseller from China to Italy to the Netherlands, and remained in the top 100 in its category in the US.
And yet, it’s possible that you haven’t seen it yet, that your kids aren’t using it in school, that it’s not being handed out at community meetings or required reading at organizations large and small. Today would be a great day to share a copy.
It’s surprisingly easy to be generous and find solutions to our friend’s problems.
Much easier than it is to do it for ourselves. Why?
There are two useful reasons, I think.
FIRST, because we’re unaware of all the real and imaginary boundaries our friends have set up. If it were easy to solve the problem, they probably would have. But they’re making it hard because they have decided that there are people or systems that aren’t worth challenging. Loosening the constraints always makes a problem easier to solve.
And SECOND, because resistance is real. Solving the problem means moving ahead, confronting new, even scarier problems. It might be easier to simply stay where we are, marinating in our stuck.
When we care enough to solve our own problem, we’ll loosen the unloosenable constraints and embrace the new challenges to come.
These are useful tools, but they don’t pretend to be well-informed or wise. They’re dumb, and they look dumb too.
That’s one reason that tools are effective. We use them to leverage our effort, but we don’t trust them to do things that they’re not good at.
The reason AI language models are dumb is that they don’t actually know anything, the model is simply calculating probabilities. Not about the unknown, but about everything. Each word, each sentence, is a statistical guess.
I’ve switched mostly to claude.ai because it’s more effective and less arrogant, but it’s still guessing.
If a guess is good enough, you’re set. If it’s not, plan accordingly.
In my experience, the most useful approaches to AI are:
Ask clearly bounded questions, where you can easily inspect the results.
Don’t let AI make decisions for you. Instead, challenge it to broaden your options.
Take advantage of the fact that it doesn’t have feelings, and use its honesty to get useful feedback.
Don’t ignore AI because it’s dumb. Figure out how to create patterns and processes where you can use it as the useful tool it’s becoming.
Expertise and firmly held beliefs don’t always go together.
Here’s a simple XY grid to help us choose where to sit at whatever table we’re invited to:
Plenty of well-trained professionals have earned the right to have strongly held beliefs. These convictions save them time and error, particularly if the world is stable. Surgeons, jugglers and historians make countless decisions, and they rarely have the time or resources to reconsider each underlying factor. This makes them efficient, but can also cause a field to get stuck.
Fortunately, there are innovators. These are individuals with plenty of experience and training who have chosen to be flexible, to repeatedly ask ‘what if’ and ‘why’. When an innovator suggests a counter-intuitive or even nutty concept, it might pay to listen carefully.
For most of us, most of the time, we have the chance to be curious. We don’t have a lot of domain knowledge, but we’re able to ask intelligent questions and to listen carefully to the answers. The hallmark of a curious person with goodwill is that they’re eager to change their minds.
Alas, social media has elevated the foolish. People possessing little in the way of expertise, and generally unwilling to change their assertions or goals.
Dreams are fine. And dreams involve contradictions. We want this AND that, but both can’t happen. That’s what keeps them from being plans.
Plans embrace boundaries and reality, they don’t ignore them. Plans thrive on scarcity and constraints. Plans are open for inspection, and a successful planner looks forward to altering the plans to make them more likely to become real.
Sometimes, we’re so afraid of creation that we don’t even leave blank pages around.
If your workspace has a hole exactly the size of a creative idea in it, you’re more likely to fill the hole.
When we decrease the number of steps to begin creating, and increase the expectation that something is going to arrive, it’s far more likely to happen.
Book a recording studio. Leave the laptop open. Schedule a blog post. Make sure the whiteboard can be seen. Buy more blank canvasses than you need.
Blank pages beg to be filled, and it helps to have them around.
Some GOODBIDS auctions to consider:
Get some direct and useful advice on your project from Daymond John. Supports BuildOn.
PS check out the auctions that are ending today… (last minute bids extend each auction.)
April 17, 2024
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