How many books sold is considered successful? (2024)

FAQs

How many books sold is considered successful? ›

The Definition of Success

For a traditional publisher to think of a nonfiction book as a success, it has to sell more like 10,000 copies over its lifetime.

If a novel sells 10,000 copies in a year it is doing well. For a first time novelist, with little track record, a figure of 2000 copies per year is probably closer to the truth.

In short, The New York Times Bestseller list requires an author to make a minimum of 5000 book sales (higher, depending on the list) in a single week across diverse retailers and from multiple geographic locations.

For traditional publishing, the average book sells around 250-500 copies in its lifetime, with the majority of those sales happening within the first few months of publication. However, some books will sell significantly more than that, and others will sell much less.

The number is different for every publisher.

A small publisher may be delighted with sales of 4,000 books the first year where a bigger publisher will be disappointed with sales of 20,000 books.

To make a comfortable average wage you need to sell between 6171 and 7731 books. The delivery charges take less of a percentage of your royalties and of course you get more back per book sold. Of course in many genres $9.99 books will not be competitive, but it does put pricing into perspective.

Mercedes Lackey has stated repeatedly that self-published authors can expect between 1 and 500 copies sold, tending more to the zero.

If you want to become a bestseller, you must sell at least 5,000 - 10,000 books in one week. The amount needed to succeed fluctuates based on the level of competition and the number of new releases each week. The nonfiction lists tend to be more competitive and usually require weekly sales of 7,500 copies or more.

But while books of all sizes have cracked the list at one point or another, the vast majority of #1 bestsellers fall into a much smaller range. Over 64% of the #1 bestsellers since the list began have fallen in the 200 to 400 page range.

What is considered a good amount of book sales? ›

Qualifications aside, if you are a new writer at a big publisher and you've sold more than 10,000 copies of a novel you are in very good shape — as long as you didn't have a large advance. It should be easy for you to get another book contract. If you sold more than 5,000, you are doing pretty well.

To make $100.000 / year, you have to sell 50.000 books, which equals to 50.000/12 = 4.667 books per month. After the first year, you'll have 12 books published. To make $100k with those 12 books, you'd need to sell 348 copies of each book each month.

For a first-time author, selling a few thousand copies can be considered a success, while for a well-established author, selling hundreds of thousands of copies might be the benchmark. However, a general rule of thumb in the publishing industry is that a book that sells more than 5,000 copies is considered successful.

Romance novels are the biggest category of fiction, generating over $1.44 billion in sales revenue. In 12 months, over 19 million printed romance novels were sold in the United States.

Only 163 books, 0.4% of the total, sold 100,000 copies or more.

Something like 0.08% of books published in the US annually (300,000) make the US Best Seller lists. To break this down, you have a better chance of winning the lotto (1 in 300M) and being struck by lightning twice (1 in 9M) than writing a book, getting it traditionally published, and making the Best Sellers list.

Do you want to be as successful as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos? The secret is to read a lot.