The OSR is Much, Much Bigger Than You Think

I recently came across a fascinating article, called 'No one buys books', which, while misleadingly titled (it should probably be 'people only buy certain types of books'), is well worth reading. The author basically read through all of the transcripts of a major antitrust trial involving the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. and gleaned from it some fascinating nuggets of information about the business model of publishers. I think I already knew that the publishing industry basically functions on the basis of publishing lots of loss-making books on the basis that one or two each year will be huge bestsellers and make megabucks. But I didn't realise quite the extent to which this is true. From the article:

The DOJ’s lawyer [the DOJ having brought the antitrust case] collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

The money is basically made from four categories: classics (The Lord of the Rings, etc.), kids' books (The Hungry Caterpillar, etc.), celeb biographies (Michelle Obama, etc.) and franchise authors (Stephen King, etc.). Everything else is almost certainly loss-making, and the numbers are surprisingly small even for books by major public figures:

Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, is no global pop star, but she has a significant social-media presence, with 3 million Twitter followers and another 1.3 million on Instagram. Yet her book, This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, which was published in May 2020, has sold just 26,000 copies across print, audio and e-book formats, according to her publisher. 

Tamika D. Mallory, a social activist with over a million Instagram followers, was paid over $1 million for a two-book deal. But her first book, State of Emergency, has sold just 26,000 print copies since it was published in May, according to BookScan. 

The journalist and media personality Piers Morgan had a weaker showing in the United States [than the UK]. Despite his followers on Twitter (8 million) and Instagram (1.8 million), Wake Up: Why the World Has Gone Nuts has sold just 5,650 U.S. print copies since it was published a year ago, according to BookScan.

Of course, the big takeaway is, to repeat, that most books don't really sell. In the US market:

[I]n 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies.

Yes, you read that correctly. And, yes, it means the OSR is much, much bigger than you think: Yoon-Suin, in the year it was published, sold far more copies than 96% of books put out by actual publishing companies in 2020. It really did. And you will be able to think of books recently put out after successful kickstarters that have sold, or will sell, far, far more copies than that, too.

Of, course, we are not Brandon Sanderson, who recently earned $42 million from a kickstarter campaign to self-publish four novels. (Perhaps The Great North....?) But I find it fascinating that the humble elfgame fare that we collectively vomit forth into the collective subconscious is actually, barring the big exceptions that make the publishing companies their actual money, more lucrative than the vast swathe of contemporary literary fiction. On the one hand, this says something depressing about the state of mainstream publishing and its ability to produce things that inspire people to read them. But on the other, it says something quite extraordinarily positive about our level of cultural influence in comparison to New York publishing houses.