Over 700,000,000 books are sold in the USA alone. And up to 4,000,000 new books are published each year between traditionally published books and self published.
We looked into how many of the published books actually sell and how much the average author can actually expect to earn and share the surprising statistics. We’ll start with the bad and end off on the bright side of things:
- On average a published book will sell only between 250 and 500 copies.
- About 30% of self published authors earn less than $500 royalties per year.
- About 20% of self published authors have never made any profits from their books.
- About 0.5% of all published books have sold more than 100,000 copies.
- About 90% of self published books will sell less than 100 times.
Here is the good news:
- Over 2 billion books are sold yearly worldwide. It is an enormous industry and growing rapidly.
- Harry Potter books have sold over 500,000,000 times.
- Over 1,000 US authors made over $100,000 last year on Amazon alone.
- Over 3,000 authors in the USA earn $25,000 on a yearly basis.
- 3% sold more than 5,000 copies in the first year.
- 7% sell more than 10,000 copies in the first year.
So as you can see becoming an author can be a viable option, but we would not recommend quitting your day job and writing full time. Rather starting at it as a second side line activity and building it up over time. But like any job or business, writing and publishing books will take time and dedication.
If you are an aspiring author and not sure where to start, a good company to look into is called Self Publishing Titans. They have lots of tools and resources that are used by more than 100,000 authors on a monthly basis. Corvin Van Stone the Founder and his wife Cleo have also self published books and have to date sold more than 150,000 copies.
