Why Selling Books is Difficult
And how you can do it.
The Business of Writing | Lecture Series
Tonight at 7 Eastern I’ll be talking about Hand-to-Hand Marketing. I have far more information than I can cover in an hour, but we’ll roll through what we can.
This lecture is one of the benefits for folks who subscribe to The Rhizosphere at any level. If you’d like to catch the lecture, feel free to subscribe for one month.
The talk will not be recorded, although I will offer it again in the future.
The Rugged Statistics
In 2020 Steven Piersanti wrote an essay “The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing” (updated in 2023.) Piersanti is a senior editor at Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Here are some of the points he made.
1. The number of books published each year has exploded. Ten times more books were published in 2019 than in 2007, when book sales peaked. So the total number of new titles being published each year in the US—self-published and traditionally published—is about 3 million.
According to Bowker, 282,500 new titles were published in the US in 2005.
Almost 2.3 million books were self-published in the US in 2021.
The good news is that more people are realizing their dream to write a book. The bad news is that the marketplace has become over-saturated.
Book sales are declining and flat-lining.
Book sales are tiny. The average book published today is selling less than 300 print copies over its lifetime in US retail. The average new book published today is selling fewer than 1,000 copies over its lifetime (even adding in sales of e-books, sales of audio, sales outside of the US, and sales outside of retail channels).
Most self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies.
A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore. Smaller bookstores can stock as few as 100 books up to 1,500 for a superstore.
Selling a new title is harder. Put another way, investing the same amount today to market a new book as was invested a few years ago will yield a smaller sales return.
Most books sell to author & publisher communities. “Everyone knows hundreds of interesting and useful books to read but has little time to read any. Therefore people are reading only books that their communities make important or even mandatory to read.”
Most marketing is done by authors.
9. No other industry has so many new product introductions.
10. The book publishing world is in a never-ending state of change.
The #1 Thing That Sells Books
In this new world, a new kind of marketing is necessary. I call it hand-to-hand action. Basically, this kind of marketing is about leveraging your people. It’s about building community. It’s about being willing to get visible, to stand up in public, to put yourself out there.
As the marketer Warren Givens said to me, Don’t get lost in the marketing. It’s one tool in the chest. People still care about real community and real relationships.
You Could Get Depressed About This
Or you could figure it out.
How?
How do you find your community? How do you build a community for your work?
If you have published a book or wish to publish one, start now finding and building a community for your work.
That’s what we’ll talk about tonight. It’s one of my favorite subjects. I hope you join me.
3 Recommendations from Julianne Wilson
WriP - Writing Practice
This is a twice weekly, free opportunity to keep those writing wheels greased. It is a “drop-in” practice, my gift of love to writing, that grew from my studies with Natalie Goldberg. I will have been leading the practice for 3 years as of March 11th! Monday and Thursday evenings, 7:30-8:40 pm Eastern US time. We have participants from around the country, as well as (currently) Australia and Ireland. Some are published authors, and some are working toward publication, but this is not a publication-oriented group. Rather, it is an opportunity to dive into focused freewriting as a means of self-understanding and keeping the flow of writing alive in our lives.
We do have a set of simple agreements that have enabled this practice to be an ongoing safe, brave, welcoming, and sacred space. The core of that is that there is no feedback given about what we write and read with one another—no praise, critique, or advice. This allows for incredibly raw, wild, and rich writing and sharing. A deep hearing of ourselves and one another.
If you are interested, email julianne.in.joy@gmail.com, and Julianne will send you the full description and agreements. In support of this practice, I send out one email each week as a reminder, often with writing inspirations. Some folks participate twice a week, some once a week, and others drop in as they are able. Julianne would delight to welcome you!
Love Letters - Liz Gilbert
A few months ago, Liz began a Substack group (free and paid subscriptions, both) focusing on a practice in which she’s engaged almost daily for the last 25 years. She writes letters to Unconditional Love and then pens what she hears in response as Love Letters to herself. Once a week she posts a blog/podcast on her substack where she reads one of her weekly letters, and also has a guest who reads one of their Love Letters. Julianne says she has listened to many of these and found in each one something that has moved, inspired, comforted, and/or uplifted her. You can check it out here:
The Art Of Enchantment —The Hagitude Sessions with Sharon Blackie
This substack (free or paid) includes podcasted interviews like the one below with Katherine May (author of Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious World, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, and The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman’s Walk in the Wild to Find her Way Home.). It was from their conversation that Julianne heard the phrase “Word Witches.” Here’s a link to that particular episode, from which you can link to others in the series:
Recommendation from Rebecca Reynolds Weil
“I've been following these posts and thought you might want to share with your students. They contain some really great, free, resources in each of the 'lessons'. This one is Lesson 4, but all the others are available as well and listed in the newsletter.”
From About Place Journal
Our next issue invites you to consider and reimagine all things West. Send us your prose, poetry, and visual art that conceives of the West beyond its conventional and colonialized framework to help us decenter traditional subjects and propagandized histories of this region.
Full call for submissions and link to submit:https://aboutplacejournal.org/submissions/
Editors: Jasmine Elizabeth Smith & Matty Layne Glasgow
Assistant Editors: Jake Skeets & Ashanti Anderson
Submissions due by: March 10, 2024
Photo: Receded elements of the disappearing Great Salt Lake
Photo Credit: Matty Layne Glasgow
From ASLE
Bart Welling let me know that he is still curating proposals for the Green Fire gathering in Jacksonville, Florida in May. But you have to hurry.
"Green Fire: Energy Stories Beyond Extraction"
University of North Florida
May 16-19, 2024
Call for Individual and Panel Proposals
The concept of energy has a history that long pre-dates any dreams of resource extraction or electrification. Cultures around the world have viewed different energies, plural, as living forces. Depending on the context, the word “energy” might call up images of interconnected beings, landforms, species, and worldviews. Phases of existence have even been understood in terms of energy, since spirits of the dead are often thought to exert their energies on behalf of, or in opposition to, the living.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s explanation of the Potawatomi word puhpowee—“the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight”—pertains to conceptions of energy in many different Indigenous cultures. According to this paradigm, humans are just one of the many types of life-forms inhabiting a “world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything.” Kimmerer stresses that humans have the responsibility to regulate our personal energies in reciprocal relationships with the energies of the nonhumans with whom we share the world.
Aldo Leopold’s famous description of the “fierce green fire” leaving the eyes of a mother wolf he helped kill, along with his definition of land as “a fountain of energy” rather than mere property, shows how similar ideas have taken shape in Western cultures.
We invite proposals—for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and creative forms of dialogue—addressing what ecocriticism, the energy humanities, and other disciplines can do to help change the current situation. Scholars in any discipline are welcome to apply.
If you have a burning idea, contact Bart Welling as soon as possible at greenfireASLE@gmail.com.
A few things:
1: I've been thinking about publishing and books and how little books sell in comparison to, I guess, in years past, but I've been thinking about it in terms of other art. Mostly so I can wrap my brain around getting art (writing) out into the world but realizing I won't be The Next Big Thing and a millionaire because of it. Most artists and photographers (the latter moreso before everyone had digital at their fingertips) sold originals and then various prints, giclée, open or limited edition, etc to bulk up sales between originals being sold. You can't sell to everyone, or even millions of people, unless you get a license agreement with a consumable goods company. So, why do authors and writers think we need to be selling thousands or millions of books? I mean, I know why---$$--but what if we worked like other artists do? 500 print edition and that's it! This is me just brainstorming, trying to appease the realities of being a writer now and really for all of modern publishing history. I guess that's why we have magazine and online submissions for an outlet for our writing, too. Most of the artists I know who even attempt to make a living from it do things like make their art into stickers, t-shirts, leggings and the like because it's just another venue to sell art. Anyway...I'm now rambling.
2: Community--this one is trickier as social media becomes a hoop jumping contest and the perils of phone addiction and dopamine seeking from those forms become so difficult that some of us are looking for other ways to build community. Substack is great but even it has its addictive sides. Figuring out how to have community offline can be hard, too, because you have to find the time to meet up in person, communicate with other people (often via a phone or computer) and juggle all the things as well.
I guess you can say, I'm in the stages of ruminating all of what you mentioned and accepting that reach is miniscule often and being ok with that.
I'm definitely interested in your marketing seminar but can't make it tonight due to other conflicts and will sign up next time you offer it.
Janisse, I have learned a lot of enormously helpful things from you in the past year, but community building is I think, the most important one. And you are a master at that. Thank you so much for your inspiration and guidance.