Wait, you say, everyone knows what a book sale is. *Because “books” is an impossibly large category covering everything from Sudoku puzzles to C++ guides, I’m going to focus on traditionally published fiction books in this article. And since I need a reason to justify the time I’ve spent dicking around on BookScan, here is my guide to everything you wanted to know about book* sales (but were afraid to ask). Personally speaking, my knowledge of the fundamentals of publishing helped me not even think or worry about book sales when my own book was published last year. But I’m still naïve enough to think that knowledge is always better than ignorance, and that after the book is written, writers should come to publishing with a basic understanding of what is going on. Thinking about sales while creating art rarely produces anything good. Are they selling well? What constitutes good sales? Should they start freaking out when their first $0.00 royalty check comes in? Writers should absolutely write with an eye toward art, not markets. This lack of knowledge leads to plenty of confusion for writers when they do sell a book. This is literally the sixth best-selling book of 2016 As great as adult coloring books may be, their sales figures tell us nothing about the sales of, say, literary fiction. However, the growth was driven almost entirely by non-fiction sales… more specifically adult coloring books and YouTube celebrity memoirs. Earlier this year, there was a round of excited editorials about how print is back, baby after industry reports showed print sales increasing for the second consecutive year. But even then, the data we are given is almost completely useless for anyone interested in fiction and literature. While authors avoid the topic, every now and then the media brings up book sales - normally to either proclaim, yet again, the death of the novel, or to make sweeping generalizations about the attention spans of different generations. Most literary writers consider book sales a half-crass / half-mythological subject that is taboo to discuss. And yet, for some reason we aren’t supposed to talk about the latter. Publishing is the business of creating books and selling them to readers. Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch!
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