Reckoning Season
How many copies will a book sell?
It’s January, which means it’s time for my annual sale on annual subscriptions: 50% off, or just $15 bucks for a year. Thanks for your support!
Also in January: my book proposal course, starting on the 20th; it’ll be the best inauguration counter programming.
A quirk of Arcadia Publishing is that their fiscal year begins April 1st, not, as Belt used to havie it, December 31, or even June 30, my unfortunately often finance-coded birthday. What this means is that this month I am mentally operating in two overlapping calendars: my mental one, which has just started, and the budgetary one, which begins in a few months, and for which I need to do all sorts of things like budget and project.
When I first started haphazardly publishing, the idea that one could project sales of a new book was absurd to me. It was like doing business plans for a not-yet-launched endeavor (which I also had to do): who the hell knows? It’s fairy dust; it’s random squiggles. One of the most surprising and least energizing realizations I’ve had over the past few years is that yes, actually, one can project sales pretty accurately. Absurdly, the make believe numbers that we entered into spreadsheets last year have been fairly accurate, and Belt has pretty much spent and sold what we projected we would spend and sell during our first three quarters with Arcadia. I find this fact, which should be enabling, somewhat enervating. There should surprises! Each book is its own little start-up; shouldn’t each chart its own idiosyncratic course?
To be fair, there were some outliers. The biggest came on the heels of a national news story, the annointing of J.D. Vance, which led to a slew of articles about and sales of Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, and pumped up our backlist sales projections. On the frontlist, Chicago House Music, by Marguerite Howard, exceeded the numbers I put in the spreadsheet. A few others also sold more than I expected, and some fell short. But overall everything tracked. Weird!
My task now is to do the same for our next slate of titles, the dozen or so we will publish between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026 (you can find many of them—and pre-order your faves—here). Let’s see if one or more breaks out of its Excel cell, just to keep things interesting (related, the Lions will win the Super Bowl).
As a still-young press—ten years ago we had only published two books—with each passing year our backlist expands by a significant percentage. That’s what happens when you add twelve titles to a list of 100 or so. Watching the behavior of the backlist remains one of my favorite activities, and it continues to surprise me even after the frontlist becomes more predictable. There are a core set of titles that continue to sell heartily, year after year. They may not have exceeded projections when they were new, but they do now that they are “old”. The backlist is the key to the viability of any house, a fact that most in publishing understand well and few outside it realize. Even just one strong selling, decades-old title can keep a press in the black year after year.
It’s the frontlist that costs, though, so I’ll be working on figuring out how much we will need to spend on editing, proofing, typesetting, design, marketing, publicity, and the like for the twelve or so titles we are bringing to market this year next fiscal year. Maybe those expenses will be offset by a surprise surge in a backlist title unrelated to the Trump administration (pawpaws could become the next avocado toast).
Come along with me this year as I check my work against the predictions of last year, and weigh in on the (hopefully unpredictable) publishing scandals and debates that will come our way. Feel free to join me in leisure reading pursuits; I spent the first days of January reading a biography of Cleopatra, and found immersing myself in ancient history a great way to slide into the new administration ((things were really bad then!), so I might just continue reading about corrupt empires that fell prior to 0 for the next few years. It’s easier than one might have thought it would be to predict.
Me too! I was waiting for the wisdom about the factors or characteristics that determine how a book sells, and then the numbers: this cozy mystery will do about 7,000, for example. How many copies will a book sell.
The answer might be classified, but I'm so curious to know how you project a book's sales. Or, at the very least, how much you vary those projections from book to book and why.