Everything You Wanted to Know about Book Sales (But Were Afraid to Ask) by Lincoln Michel.
From the post:
Publishing is the business of creating books and selling them to readers. And yet, for some reason we aren’t supposed to talk about the latter.
Most literary writers consider book sales a half-crass / half-mythological subject that is taboo to discuss.
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. But even then, the data we are given is almost completely useless for anyone interested in fiction and literature. 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. However, the growth was driven almost entirely by non-fiction sales… more specifically adult coloring books and YouTube celebrity memoirs. As great as adult coloring books may be, their sales figures tell us nothing about the sales of, say, literary fiction.
…
Lincoln’s account mirrors my experience (twice) with a small press decades ago.
While you (rightfully) think that every sane person on the planet will forego the rent in order to purchase your book, sadly your publisher is very unlikely to share that view.
One of the comments to this post reads:
…Writing is a calling but publishing is a business.
Quite so.
Don’t be discouraged by this account but do allow it to influence your expectations, at least about the economic rewards of publishing.
Just in case I get hit with the publishing bug again, good luck to us all!