I like blog posts like this:
A question that comes up a fair bit on literature forums is: “How many books has Author X sold?”. Compared to TV, where audience figures are easily available, and movies, where box office figures are even more easily retrieved, book sales figures are virtually impossible to calculate for an interested member of the public.
And the post doesn’t even scratch the surface when you find the authors list at the bottom who he hasn’t found figures for and then Neil Gaiman and John Ringo pop up to add more to their already quite remarkable sales and Neil even shows how hard it is for him to know exactly how many people he’s reached from overseas sales.
I’m hoping that it’s a post that’s going to grow as it would be interesting from a reader point of view to know many people enjoy the same writers you do.
I guess as an anti-dote or a reality check it would be interesting to see what some of my other favourite but less known writers have sold as the average, is so I’ve read so it could be wrong, is low thousands.
But that’s the same with most creative things.
