Re: Fantasy fans...

In article <1he750f.1lurrwf1o8y5wiN%usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Catja Pafort) wrote:

scififanman wrote:

Average, means, take every publisher (mainstream publishers,
Tor, Penguin, etc...) The average book sells 7500 copies. Now Stephen
King, J.K. Rowling, Terry Brooks, Nora Roberts, etc. . . sell millions,
but the average author in these companies sell 7500 a year.

I'm really sceptical where you got your figures from.

So far I agree--and I think said so earlier in the thread. "Facts" like
this have a life of their own, so unless one can trace them back to
their origin ought to be distrusted.

....

Real editors at Tor (and I'm certain at other companies as well) would
regard a book with 7500 copies sold as a failure, because it wouldn't
just lose them a little, it would lose them _a lot_ of money.

I don't think that's inconsistent with his claim. It might be that most
books lose money, but are worth publishing on the chance of being the
one that makes money. Whether that is the case I don't know.

Sure, 3000 copies of a self-published book is an achievement - but it
speaks more of your ability to market yourself than your ability to
write. At 30.000 copies, they might look up, but you'll need to have a
really good product for that - and I think there have only been two or
three of them.

My guess is that by 3000 you are giving evidence of both your marketing
ability and the quality of the book.

But that raises a different question I had been wondering about--does a
publisher regard an author's ability to market himself as an asset of
any importance? At least some commercially published authors put
significant energy into arranging to be on talk shows, do book signings,
get articles about them published--I've been trying to do so, with mixed
success so far. From the publisher's standpoint is this merely something
authors do in order to feel good about their efforts or is it helpful
enough in selling the book so that your success in selling 3000 copies
of a self-published book is actually positive evidence about you?

--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
.

Relevant Pages

  • Suitability of FP
    ... A site that has one person in charge of publishing but with several ... The ability to password protect specific areas ... Easy search facility, which includes document searches ... programme needs to be easy to use and should not require programming ...
    (microsoft.public.frontpage.client)
  • Re: terrifying
    ... Surely the publishing of polemics is what the 1st Amendment was truly about, ... rather than the ability to sell videos of gynaecological exams. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: Page Viewer Web Part
    ... We currently have a bunch of publishing pages in the pages library. ... We use the content by query web part in places to bring forward some ... as an additional option or code into the master page the ability to ... gets the targets XML and uses XSLT to format the output, ...
    (microsoft.public.sharepoint.windowsservices)