Anyone for a mouth-watering chart or a graphic gourmand’s idea of gluttony? You are? Excellent. Let’s aim to answer some of life’s great questions, then. Who were the winners and losers in the bestseller world in 2014? Who ate all the pie (charts)? And who walked away with all your pocket money? Time to look back…
Category: The Numbers Behind Bestsellers
What Time Of The Year Should You Publish Your Novel?
I’ve been getting quite a few hits lately from search terms such as “when do I self-publish my novel?” and “when does a book need to be published for the Christmas market?” I already pontificated on the issue of self-publishing for Christmas in this post, but that only dealt with one time of year. Now I’d like to talk…
What Makes People Buy Self-Published Books?
In this post, I discussed the findings of a scientifically incontrovertible study (of myself) on the factors which influenced me when buying a self-published book. The findings surprised me (which surprised me, because I was surveying myself). I found that I knew what made me buy a self-published book when it was in front of…
Is the Bestseller Dead?
In this post back in the wilds of 2013, I explored (with the aid of some lovely data. And maybe some pretty shoddy guesswork, it has to be said) how many books an author has to sell in the English-speaking world to achieve bestseller status. In most countries, a bestseller is defined only by what…
Mathematical Mondays: The Effect of Blockbusters on Book Sales
…Exploring dubious theories by using real numbers to prove intangible arguments Today’s suspicious sum is for anyone currently fretting about whether the publication of their book might get eaten up, run over and spat on by the unfortunately simultaneous release of the blockbuster of the century. How Does A Runaway Blockbuster Affect Other Book Sales? Where: Sn = Normal/Achieveable Sales…
New! Mathematical Mondays
…Exploring dubious theories by using real numbers to prove intangible arguments. Today: Why You Should Be Writing A Book The Formula (Where y= number of books read by a regular reader in 1 year and P = population) How Many People Could Be Reading Your Book? I read between 20-40 books a year, depending on how long, literary,…
Self-Publishing in Ireland
So there I was, looking at lovely book production data, and… Merciful Hour! What happened in 2010? Did everyone in the country finally publish their book? All at the same time? According to Nielsen, the number of titles published in Ireland went from just over 2,000 in 2009 to almost 6,500 in 2010. That’s a 225%…
When is a book a Bestseller?
Gather round, kids. I have good news, and I have bad news. What constitutes a best seller? How does a book qualify for the moniker, and more to the point, for the modern author, what does it really mean to have written a bestseller? What is a bestseller? No points for stating the obvious, but a…
2012 Bestselling Book Data. Visualised
Or, as we in the business like to call it, “A Load of Charts”. It’s great seeing all the data like this. I could extract meaning from it all day and still not get bored. Bet you wish you were me. We are now, as promised, going to look at sales volumes, to see what they tell…
Naughtie Book Sales (and no. It’s not what you’re thinking)
Want naughty book sales? Have a look at 2012. This, however, is all about the Noughtie/Naughties: those transformational years in terms of self-publishing and e-publishing, from 2000-2009. In previous posts about book sales in the 1980s and 1990s, we saw that very few authors actually made it to #1 on the New York Times Bestseller…
Tara Sparling writes 