March 31, 2006
The other day I caught an archived video of a talk author Robert B. Parker gave. If you want to see it yourself, it's been archived on the Library of Congress, but there's a link to it on the Bouchercon.com website for the 2006 B-con, on the Guests of Honors page.

Anyway, at one point somebody asked him how many copies he had to sell to get on the bestseller lists. He shrugged and said he didn't know, then commented that he typically sold 150,000 in hardcover.

This was in 2004, and I have to say, I found that number very, very interesting. Because it seems low.

Parker routinely gets on the NYT bestseller list, though I think rarely to the top. It's an interesting phenomenon, too. USA Today from time to time puts little graphics on their book page comparing book sales of the bestsellers. Now, USA Today's list is interesting anyway because they don't divide between fiction and nonfiction, they just put top 50 selling books up in order, or if you go to their website, top 150.

But the point is often they'll use a bar graph and the #1 book will be 10. The #2 book with be about 6. The #3 book might be 2, and so on. That is to say, for every 10 books the #1 book sells, the #2 book sells only 6, and it decreases dramatically. In fact, if you think I'm exaggerating, I'm not. If anything, I'm soft-selling it. If Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" is #1 selling 10,000,000 copies, and something by Harlan Coben sells 1,500,000 copies at #2, and maybe Janet Evanovich comes along and sells 1,000,000, you can see these numbers going down in a hurry.

Somewhere on Tess Gerritsen's blog she actually talked about bestsellers and their money, which was pretty amazing. She talked about how the 10-15 numbers on the NYTBS list were probably making less than $1 million per book, and how 10-5 were probably a million or two, and the top five were too variable to predict. [NOTE: I went back to her blog and included much of it further on here; my off-the-top-of my head thing here wasn't quite accurate.]

Now, Parker undoubtedly sells millions in paperback, and has plenty of foreign sales and movie rights to go along with it. But I found the 150,000 in hardcover to be interesting--and a little daunting. The guy's published 50 novels, had several TV series and made-for-TV movies based on his books. He promotes. Even people who don't read him specifically, but read mysteries, know who the hell Spenser is. So you might think the numbers would be higher.

It's something to think about, anyway.

In fact, I just went back to Tess Gerritsen's blog and hunted down the post, which was from 11-8-05. I've included a bit of it here.

"But once we move out of first-book territory and on to authors who have a track record, then the book deals get to be a little more predictable. It's no secret that publishing is a business, and the goal is to make money. Or at the very least, to break even. If you follow the announced deals in PUBLISHERS WEEKLY or the online website PUBLISHERS MARKETPLACE, you'll start to get an inkling of what multi-published authors are getting. But you can also guess, knowing typical royalty rates, what an author is probably worth in real dollars. With major publishers, hardcover royalties tend to run around 12 - 15% and paperback royalties tend to be around 6- 10% of cover price. So a writer who's sold 25,000 hardcover copies has earned $75,000 in royalties in hardcover sales alone, and his next book deal should certainly reflect that. His next advance should be, at a bare minimum, $75,000. (And we're not even talking about paperback earnings yet, which will be on top of that.) More likely, the next advance will take into account continued growth, and will probably reach well into six figures.

But once you get into the stratosphere of NYT-bestselling authors, the numbers may no longer be anchored to real sales figures, but may soar much much higher. From my own observations of the business, authors who consistently place in the bottom third of the NYT list (Positions # 11 - 15) are worth at least a million dollars a book, North American rights. We're talking combined hard/soft deals here, since most publishers now retain paperback rights. If you consistently place #6-10, your deals go even higher, into multi-million dollar range. Once your books consistently place in the top third, the deals become wildly unpredictable, because now we're talking Harry Potter and Dan Brown territory. Eight-figure book deals are not out of the question.

Occasionally, you'll hear about a deal that makes you wonder what the publisher was smoking. I'm thinking of a multi-published author who recently landed a three-book, high-seven-figure deal despite never having landed, not even once, on the NYT hardcover list. (If you're wondering what "high-seven-figures means", here's a guideline to the secret code of deal announcements: "seven-figure deal" = a million bucks. "multi-million dollar deal" means 2-3 million dollars. "Substantial seven-figure deal" means 4-5 million dollars. "High-seven-figure deal" means anything from six to nine million dollars.") Did that deal, signed with an author who'd never hit the hardcover list, make monetary sense? Not one whit. And the truth is, if that author's next book doesn't sell like gangbusters, someone in that publishing house has a lot to answer for when the profit/loss numbers are tallied. But clearly they had great faith in the author's future, and were willing to roll the dice."


Hmmm,

And frankly, I have no idea whatsoever how many copies of a paperback original it would require to hit a bestseller list.

Best,
Mark Terry