A book of mine sold poorly. It’s a good book, it took months, and the sales figures would embarrass anybody who measures these things the obvious way. It’s also been useful for years, in ways that never appeared on a royalty statement. That combination confuses people, because sales is the number everybody reaches for. It’s available, it’s precise, it updates daily, and it feels like the answer to whether a book worked. For most professionals writing a book about what they know, it’s close to irrelevant. The confusion causes real damage. People commission a book, watch the sales, conclude it failed, and never write another. Meanwhile the book is sitting in catalogs, being handed to people, and doing the job it was for.
I’ve got strong feelings about this. I tell clients at the start that they’re very unlikely to make their money back through book sales, and that the real return comes from making the book the foundation of their marketing. When an author forgets that and starts refreshing a sales dashboard, they can talk themselves out of a book that was doing its job the whole time.
There’s a version of this where the book really did fail. It exists and it’s less common than the number suggests. So it’s worth being precise about what a book that nobody buys still gives you, and what it doesn’t.
Work out what you want a book to produce before you pick the number you’ll judge it by, because sales is the easiest number and rarely the right one.
What does a poorly selling book still produce?
A record, and the record doesn’t care about volume.
A published book generates catalog entries, retailer listings and library holdings whether it sells five copies or five thousand. Those records are what a stranger finds when they check you, and what a machine finds when it tries to establish who you are. Books with modest sales and books with strong sales produce identical entries. The systems reading them don’t have your sales figures and wouldn’t weight them heavily if they did.
So the part of a book that makes you checkable is fully delivered on publication day.
Does a book that sells few copies still matter?
It does, and the few readers it reaches are the point. There are usually more of them than you think. If a book sold two hundred copies, it was read by some number of people who are, by definition, interested in a narrow subject you happen to be an expert in. That’s a better-qualified group than almost anything else you could have reached. Some of them are in your market. A few of them will contact you, or recommend you, or hand the book to somebody who does. The arithmetic on a professional services book isn’t the arithmetic on a trade book. Two engagements is a return most authors never get from selling ten thousand copies of anything. A client’s book raised $30 million in venture capital. Nobody would judge that book by its royalty statement, and I don’t see why anybody should judge theirs that way either.
What does writing a book do for you besides sell copies?
It settles what you think.
Writing a book about your own method forces a level of precision that ordinary practice never demands. You have to decide what you believe, in order, with the exceptions named, and defend it against somebody asking why.
People come out of that process explaining themselves better in every context. Pitches get sharper. Talks get better. The answer to what do you do stops being a paragraph.
That happens whether anybody buys the book or not, and I’d argue it’s worth the whole project on its own.
When has a book failed?
When nobody who mattered ever saw it.
That’s the failure that counts and it looks the same as low sales from the outside. A book that reached no one in your market, generated no conversations, and was never handed to anybody hasn’t underperformed. It didn’t participate.
That outcome almost always comes down to distribution. Nobody sent copies to named people. Nobody spoke about it. It was published and then left alone.
The fix is unglamorous and it works. Fifty copies, fifty specific people, a reason for each.
Why does the sales number feel so authoritative?
Because it’s the only one that arrives without being asked for. Everything else on the list requires you to notice something. Sales appear in a dashboard, daily, without effort, attached to a chart. That availability is doing all the work and it’s nothing to do with relevance. There’s also a comparison problem. Sales is the one book number the outside world understands, so it’s the one people ask about, and answering with anything else sounds like an excuse.
That social pressure is real and it makes authors judge their own book by a standard they never set for it.
What is the ego cost of modest book sales?
Nobody says it out loud, and it stops people writing a second book. Modest sales feel like a public verdict, even when nothing public happened. The author knows the number and assumes everybody else does too, and the assumption is wrong. Almost nobody knows how any book sold.
What people notice is that you wrote one. That’s the entire external signal, and it’s identical whether the book sold two hundred copies or twenty thousand.
Authors who understand that write a second book. Authors who took the number personally usually don’t, and they lose the book that would normally have been their better one.
That second-book loss costs more than any bad sales figure. The first book taught the author how the process works, and the next one would usually have made the argument they were only circling the first time.
Does a book still work for you if the book is bad?
No, and it would be convenient to leave that out.
Everything here assumes the book is competent. A poorly argued, badly structured book generates the same catalog records and does the opposite work when somebody reads it, because the reader now has evidence about how you think. Bad books are easier to produce than they used to be, and the worst thing an author can do is publish one. A catalog record for a weak book is permanent evidence against the person whose name is on it. The argument is that a good book with poor sales is a success measured wrongly. It’s not that sales don’t matter because the book might be bad.
If you’re unsure which you have, ask three people in your field to read it and tell you what it argues. If they cannot, sales were never the problem.
What should you measure instead of a book’s sales?
Three things, none of them daily.
Whether people who contact you have already read something of yours. Whether the conversations start further in than they used to. And whether your name comes up in rooms you’re not in. You find that out by accident, and you should write it down when you do.
All three are slow, imprecise and unsatisfying. They’re also the ones connected to why you wrote it. Sales is a real number. It just measures something most professional authors never wanted from their book, and I wish more of them would stop letting it grade their work.
What should you do differently on the next one?
Decide the distribution before you decide the title.
Most books are commissioned with a clear idea of the content and no idea at all of who will physically receive a copy. That order is backwards, because the second question changes the first.
Build the list first. Fifty to a hundred named people who should have this book, with a note next to each about why. Clients, former clients, referrers, people at organizations you want to work with, people who speak where you want to speak. Then write the book those people would finish. The list is the specification.
I think it’s a waste, and an avoidable one, when a good professional book gets written off by its own author over a sales figure while the fifty people who should have received a copy never got one.
