CL Pauwels at Large

The Brevity staff tabulating our returns from Amazon Smile

More and more, the business of book sales is something authors need to understand. Whether you’re self-publishing and doing all your own publicity and promotion, or a mid-lister at a Big Five publisher, doing almost all your own publicity and promotion, or a successful best-seller urged by your publisher to do more publicity and promotion, it helps to know what numbers are out there and what they mean.

Headlines like The novel is dead!Reading lives again!E-books are killing print!Print is not dead! conjure up the image of a zombie literature army without a compass, lurching toward the latest pronouncement.

At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel discusses the problem of sales number murkiness:

This lack of knowledge leads to plenty of confusion for writers when they do sell a book. Are they selling well? What constitutes good sales? Should…