NextRead

This has been an interesting week for facts and figures.

Let’s take a look at the Man Booker. The Telegraph reports some earlier sales of the Man Booker Shortlist (the longlist was announced on 7th August):

Literary life - Telegraph
The sales figures, before the announcement, according to Nielsen BookScan, were similarly extreme.

Up to 18 August the McEwan (published in April) had sold 99,660 copies whereas the Barker (May) had sold 499 copies.

As for the other four: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (March) had sold 1,519 copies, Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (June) 880 copies, Anne Enright’s The Gathering (May) 834 copies and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (March) a mere 231 copies.

And The Bookseller reports a massive reprint for the winner, The Gathering. 

theBookseller.com
The Gathering had sold 3,306 through Bookscan to 13th of October, but imprint Jonathan Cape says it has sold in 35,000 copies worldwide. Cape is printing an additional 50,000 copies this week, which it anticipates will be in the shops by the end of the week. Asked if The Gathering could equal last year’s winner Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, which has sold 140,000 copies in all editions, Random House Group sales director Gary Pryor said: “Absolutely. We’re thrilled that The Gathering has won. The Man Booker is always going to give a boost and we have had orders pouring in.”

And #7 of the marvellous Deathray contains a letter from John Jarrold giving rough sales figures of 6,500 for the hardback of The Court of Air, plus it mentions the indirect sequel, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, set in the same universe. He also mentions the fact that far too many fantasy debuts sell less than 1,000 copies[in the UK, I assume].

The Guardian’s Blake Morrison, who btw has just had his wonderful book When did you last see your father released as a film, made this ’shock’ revelation:

Blake Morrison wonders, after the Booker Prize, how writers keep going when fiction sales are so low | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Books
Let’s suppose that a realistic sale for a literary novel these days is 2,000 copies in hardback and 8,000 in paperback. At current cover prices, that will generate royalties of around £9,000. Serialisations, film or television options and sales of foreign rights might push earnings up to £12,000. But this isn’t annual income, it’s the proceeds from the three or four years spent writing the novel. Two recent surveys have found that 60% of British authors earn less than £10,000 a year - and that median earnings are less than a quarter of the national wage. You wonder how they, and publishers and agents, keep going.

The minimum wage in the UK is now £5.52 in case you were wondering.

And more from The Bookseller:

theBookseller.com
Last week, online book retailers and suppliers put emergency contingency plans in place in the face of the postal strike. Websites of traditional high street retailers were also affected as well as customer orders. However, the disruption did not dent the market growth. Total revenue through the TCM for the seven days to 13th October was £38.5m, up 1% on the previous week.

The seven-day period also saw the average selling price of the 4.4m titles sold hit its highest point to date this year £8.79.

The top 50 is looking more like a Christmas chart week-by-week with some recognisable names proving popular once again with the book-buying public. The 2008 edition of Guinness World Records maintains its position at the top of the charts with sales of 37,060 last week. Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express (Chatto) and the tie-in edition of Ian McEwan’s Atonement (Vintage), are also top five non-movers, but are joined by Martina Cole’s latest thriller Faces (Headline) and the paperback edition of Jeremy Clarkson’s Christmas 2006 bestseller, And Another Thing (Penguin).

If you’ve made it this far and wondering what the point is, well I want to know how many copies do you need to sell in order to make a decent living as a writer. One answer could be:

Macmillan New Writing About
But the fact is, the model of publishing we are practising is rather old-fashioned: we read manuscripts sent to us by authors and, if we like the novel and think we can sell enough copies to make it worthwhile for everyone, we publish it. Our terms are standard and straightforward: we pay a royalty of 20% on net sales; we retain world rights and share any rights revenue 50/50, and we reserve the option to publish the author’s second novel under the same terms as the first.

(To put the royalty figure in context, assuming the average discount at which a book sells is 50%: if 200 copies are sold the author gets about £260; if 1000 copies are sold the author gets about £1300; and if 10,000 are sold the author gets about £13,000.)

The good is that Macmillan New Writing is transparent in it’s figures. The bad thing is that they are £14.99 hardbacks. And most books are 6.99/7.99 paperbacks.

So after all this I’m still non the wiser about how successful a novelist needs to be before making decent £20,000 plus a real in royalties? Though writing critically acclaimed literary doesn’t seem to be the way to go unless you win a prize or two.