So, in my quest to become a traditionally published author I stumbled upon a rather disturbing statistic - the average book published today will sell less than 200 copies. That's it. Am I the only one who finds this crazy?
Granted, the number of books published each year has exploded to well over a million titles, which has no doubt been a factor, but let's look at some numbers.
Let's start with the biggest pool we can - seven billion people on this planet. Now we start filtering it. Even if you just limit it to the number of people in the US (assuming you are an English writing author, and excluding other predominately English speaking countries), you've got 316 million potentials. Literacy rates are arguable, but I've seen around 186 million with at least a basic literacy rate.
There's your number - 186 million. Yet, my book will most likely only land in the hands of 200 of them. That's less than 0.0001%. One in 930,000. I haven't done the math, but my feeling is there's a better chance someone will win the lottery while being attacked by a shark than they will purchase my book.
I think I'm going to throw up.
