Posted on July 30, 2024 by John Scalzi
Yesterday’s announcement of a new 10-book deal with Tor included the following statement:
With 4.5 million books published in the United States, John Scalzi has become one of the most popular science fiction authors of his generation.
Let’s discard the “one of the most popular science fiction authors of his generation” part as PR hyperbole (I wrote that part, so that’s an easy one for me to discard) and focus on the “4.5 million copies in print in the U.S.”What does that number actually mean in terms of actual sales?
Now, let’s nerd out about this.
1. “In print” does not mean total sales. This is clear if you go to a bookstore and see my books on the shelves. On the shelves, by definition, means they haven’t sold yet. Since 2005, I’ve published 17 novels with Tor, none of which are out of print. So at any given time, there are (at least) tens of thousands of physical copies of my books on the shelves, waiting to be purchased. If they don’t sell and the bookstore wants space for more, they are returned to a warehouse owned by Macmillan (Tor’s parent company), where they are either sent again to another bookstore, remain unsold (i.e., sold at a steep discount at the end of publication), or pulped.
In the old days, it wasn’t at all uncommon for publishers to print large quantities of books, sell a small percentage of those print runs, and dispose of the remaining print runs simply as a cost of doing business or to turn them into paper pulp. But today printing and distribution technology has advanced enough that print runs correlate more accurately with sales. I recently had the opportunity to purchase the remains of one of the hardcover copies (which had moved into a paperback phase), and there were only a few dozen copies left in total, a pretty impressive estimate of Tor’s print runs.
(Plus, “in print” means different things for e-books than for physical books: for physical books it means the actual printed book, while for e-books it means there’s a digital file on a server available for sale. For e-books, the correlation between “copies in print” and “copies sold” is roughly 1:1.)
My professional life doesn’t overlap with the “print loads of copies” era of publishing. Tor has always been pretty conservative with my initial print runs (not stingy, just paying attention to previous sales and estimating from there), and then printing more as needed. Also, e-books have made up a significant percentage of my sales; there’s a reason I appear on the New York Times “Combined Fiction in Print & e-Book” bestseller list more often than the “Hardcover Fiction” list; that is, I suspect my “in print” and “total sales” numbers are pretty close, as they are for most authors these days.
So, taking into account both the number of copies printed but not sold that sit on bookstore shelves, and the number that have been overprinted or discarded since 2005, Tor has not sold 4.5 million books in the U.S. Of that 4.5 million, I’d say it’s probably 4.3 to 4.4 million. But still, not bad.
2. In the next section, we will use the estimate “4.4 million copies sold.”
Over 17 novels and 19 years, 4.4 million copies averages out to about 259,000 copies sold per novel, or about 231,000 copies sold per year. This tells me that the advance that Tor currently pays me on average per book ($261,000, rising to $300,000 when the new deal goes into effect) is pretty accurate in terms of my sales profile. This, I should say, isn’t all that surprising. Tor knows how many books I’ve sold for them, and as a general rule of thumb for book advances, publishers advance you what they think you’re likely to earn over the life of the book. Because writing actual royalty checks or directly depositing royalties is a bit of a pain. So, on average, my publishers are right on the mark with my advances. Well done, Tor accounting!
Of course, the reality of how many copies a novel sells, or how many copies an entire novel sells in a year, is much more complicated. Sadly, 2005’s Old Man’s War didn’t sell 230,000 copies, even though it came out on January 1st and could have sold literally the entire year. It sold at most 7,700 copies, because that was the end of the hardcover edition (OMW didn’t offer eBooks initially, and the first Kindle didn’t come out until 2007). Meanwhile, Tor’s press release notes that my last three books, The Last Emperox, The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Starter Villain, each “smashed the record for the fastest-selling Scalzi novel of all time.” So, I’m happy to say, my sales velocity is picking up as I go.
That said, it’s no secret that the majority of my sales come from my backlist. Old Man’s War may have only sold ~7,700 copies in its first year, but sales skyrocketed after it came out in paperback in 2006 and have remained essentially constant every year for almost 20 years. It is, without a doubt, my bestselling title throughout my entire publishing career. This will also translate into continued sales for the remaining books in the OMW series, and when the seventh book in the series is released in 2025, sales will likely increase again for all six previous books in the series.
Now they sell well right out of the box, which is great, but selling the backlist – where the publisher’s overhead is already priced in and the title is generating a net profit – is what makes publishers happier than anything. Again, all my Tor novels are still in print and selling well – sales vary, but they’re all doing well. The annual sales numbers for the backlist will grow the more books I write for them.
That means my novels don’t sell the same every time, and I don’t sell the same numbers every year — “average” isn’t helpful here — but adding it all up, it’s pretty clear (to me, at least) that I’m being fairly compensated by Tor in terms of advances, and that Tor is getting a fair return in advances for me.
3. It’s also important to note that the figures Tor provided above represent a floor, not a ceiling, of my sales (and print runs). For example, the majority of my audiobooks are published on Audible, and those sales aren’t included in Tor’s estimates. Audible has been very good to me in terms of marketing and sales (hell, they even produced a TV ad for Starter Villain), and I’m happy that my audiobook sales, especially my recent novels, can be directly compared to my print/eBook sales.
Similarly, foreign language sales are not included in Tor’s figures, because the company does not publish my work in any language other than English. Most of my novels have been translated, but I’m not sure whether the foreign language versions make big sales individually (it’s hard to sell a lot of books in Latvia, for example, which has a population of only 1.8 million), but they add up to a lot. At the moment, my work is published in three dozen languages, which I’m always happy about (thanks, foreign language publishers!).
I also have some writing outside of Tor. This includes, but is not limited to, non-fiction, novellas, specialty titles, collections, anthologies, and individually sold short stories released primarily through Subterranean Press. Fun fact: for a while, my best-seller wasn’t a novel, but Book of the Dumb, a 2003 collection of humorous stories about real people doing unfortunate things. It sold 150,000 copies in the two years since it was released, and it’s still available (why?), so sales are probably still growing very slowly. SubPress titles, while mostly limited in print, are available indefinitely as e-books. I’m happy to say that some titles, especially the “Dispatcher” series, are selling well.
In terms of “sales,” titles that are offered as part of a subscription service add further confusion. For example, audio versions of the “Dispatcher” novellas are part of Audible’s subscription service, so they’re free for Audible Plus members to listen to, but they’re also for sale. I know that these works have sold well enough to be New York Times bestsellers in the audio fiction category, and have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, but I’m not sure what the ratio of sales to subscription listens is. Similarly, Amazon sent me a nice little trophy to celebrate my short story “Slow Time Between the Stars” getting 250,000 readers, but it’s free for Amazon Prime subscribers to read. Do those 250,000 readers count as sales? Does it mean the story is “in print”? Who knows? I was paid for all my work. That’s the important part.
Perhaps those and sales could be covered under another umbrella metric, “published readership,” which means readers have access to works for which they have received compensation from a publisher, and who have paid for them either directly (through sales) or indirectly (through subscriptions). The “published readership” metric would also cover many of my foreign language audio titles that are accessible through subscription services rather than sold individually.
4. What does it all add up to? Again, Tor’s 4.5 million “printed” figure is a floor, not an upper limit. Without bothering my agent by having her cross-check each and every international print run and sales number, or digging through records for my pre-2008 non-fiction titles (which were represented by another agent who is no longer with me), I can conservatively estimate that my total sales, worldwide, across all genres and formats, are nearly double Tor’s “printed” estimate. Adding subscribers and listeners to the “published” estimate easily adds another million or so.
So, total sales/printed copies over 19 years might be 10 million, and that seems like a pretty accurate number to me for a variety of reasons.
That’s… pretty good. And unless I get eaten by a bear, hit by a bus, or infected with brain worms, I’ve got at least 15 more years before I finish my last novel and retire living off royalties. That’s more than enough time to add to those numbers.
I’ll do that when I get back from Worldcon this year.
— JS
