What are the chances your book will be a success? I looked into the numbers.

There are around eight billion people in the world. Around 4 million books are published every year (both traditionally and self-published and including all formats).

How common is it to write a book?

Of course, some authors release more than one book and some books are reissues of dead authors, but the number means roughly one person in two thousand writes a book . Only 3% of people who set out to write a book finish it. Less than one person in a thousand ever writes a book. If you’re writing one, your pool of competition is down to 4 million other people.

What proportion of books get published?

Between 1 and 2% of submitted manuscripts get traditionally published.

How many can you expect to sell?

in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. This is the general rule of thumb for success in publishing. And only a miniscule 500 titles sold over 100,000 copies (the little black dot in the top left corner).

So,

• the odds of you writing a book are 0.5%-1% of the whole world’s population. Around 8 million people have written a book.
• The odds of your book being traditionally published are around 1.5% of all submitted manuscripts.
• The odds of your book selling more than 5,000 copies are around 2% of all published books, and of selling more than 100,000 copies are 0.004%.

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