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My husband is sending me tweets like this to prepare me for my book publishing later this year. That’s our love language.

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Jason Colavito

@JasonColavito

Jan 30

The publishing figures for 2022 were rather depressing. In a country of 332 million people, only 28 books out of ~300,000 titles sold more than 500,000 copies. Eight were by one author, Colleen Hoover, and no book of history or politics sold more than 295,000 copies.

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Andy Greenberg (agreenberg@infosec.exchange)

@a_greenberg

Feb 2

Replying to

@kashhill

Not disputing the overall grimness of this, but it seems to be based on NPD bookscan which in my experience hugely undercounts real sales. I don't think it even includes ebooks or audiobooks. For my last two books audiobooks have outsold any other single format.

Replying to

and

Is it “grim”? You could lemonade/lemon this by arguing that you only need to sell a very small number of copies to land on the top of the best-seller lists. Also congrats on the new one andy!

Andy Greenberg (agreenberg@infosec.exchange)

@a_greenberg

Replying to

@pkafka

and

@kashhill

Thanks Peter! And yeah maybe the grimmer NPD stat is that 98% of books sell less than 5,000 copies the year they’re released: nytimes.com/2021/04/18/boo (weird year but I’ve heard this is the ballpark) Just a lot of pretty good books almost no one reads.

nytimes.com

What Snoop Dogg’s Success Says About the Book Industry (Published 2021)

Will the shifts brought on by the pandemic, favoring online retailers over bookstores and established authors over new ones, change publishing forever?

7:58 PM · Feb 2, 2023

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Andy Greenberg (agreenberg@infosec.exchange)

Replying to

and

(And I know I just said NPD numbers are an undercount but it was nonetheless a sad day for me when I learned book audience numbers are not like web audience numbers)