There’s a parable in one of Kurt Vonnegut’s books about a craftsman of exquisite leather straps for horse buggies who was going out of business just as cars were becoming more common. Confused by the predicament he was in, he said something to the effect that it couldn’t be the quality of the straps he was making.

And so it is with writing books.

I’ve always wondered how many copies of an individual book was being sold whenever I heard the word “bestseller” or “bestselling” to describe it. Well, now I no longer need to wonder:

https://www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-book-sales-calculator/

Just type in the books rank, choose “book” or “ebook”, then click calculate, and you’ll know how many copies a book is currently selling. The site claims to have a degree of error of 6%, which they say is better than other calculators out there. All I can do is take their word for it.

Currently the No.1 bestselling book on amazon.com is Dr. Seuss’s Oh the Places You will Go. It has sold something like 80,000 copies this month alone, most likely by people who were shocked that some of his more “offensive” books would no longer be published. Lesson learned: all publicity is good publicity, but it doesn’t really help the writer all that much when he’s been dead for 30 years.

The first book in the YA fiction hit Magic Tree House series sells a hundred books a day. The series consists of about 50 books in total, plus non-fiction companion books, so Mary Pope Osborne, the authoress, is doing alright—maybe 100,000~150,000 books a month. Not bad at all.

Bad Feminist by Hatian-American intersectional lesbian feminist (enough boxes ticked there for ye?) sells about 25 copies a day on Amazon despite all the press and positive reviews she gets. Seems every reviewer out there wanted to say a good word about the book. Is it good? Dunno. I will say that it is certainly a sign of the times. If you want to get published by a major publisher then it doesn’t hurt being a minority queer. I can’t help but wonder if the readers are as excited about books like that as the publishers and reviewers are.

Trump’s ghostwritten The Fart o’ the Deal sells 5000 copies a month which isn’t bad considering how long ago it came out—1987.

My wife and children recently wrote to Nasu Masamoto, the author of a series of books for elementary school kids that was published from the late 70s to 2004. There are 50 volumes to the series which sold some 25,000,000 copies in Japan, Korea, and China. Recently, I’ve been asking my university students if they have heard of him or his books, but not a single one has. Amazing. In short, selling books is hard even with the wind in your sails, especially these days when people have their noses in their phones, their heads plugged into games and stupid videos.

According to another website, the average book in the US sells less than 200 copies per year, and less than 1000 books over its lifetime. A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in the average bookstore, especially if it is a book that is in a saturated genre.

I check out how my author friends were faring. The first novel by a friend published by an imprint of Harper’s is selling about one copy a month. Another friend’s highly promoted, highly reviewed, award-winning thriller published by Simon and Schuster sells about 5 ebooks a month on Amazon.

Pico Iyer, who doesn’t speak Japanese despite living here over a quarter of a century and whom many claim is an expert on Japan, but I have my doubts, sells about 80 copies of his Beginner’s Guide to Japan published by Vintage every month.

The book currently at 100 on Amazon’s bestselling list is a YouTube tie-up YA mystery that is selling about 9700 books a month. I have read or own 15 of those 100 books, many of which, like George Orwell’s 1984, are standards that are hard to bump out of the way on your pursuit of fame and fortune in writing.