BETWEEN THE LINES

Book Talk by Joe


Millionaire Authors

One can easily get the wrong impression from Dan Brown, bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code, about how much money there is to be made as an author.

The hardcover edition of The Da Vinci Code has sold about 40 million copies worldwide. Although I have no special knowledge about his contract with his publisher, you don't have to be a math major to conclude that Mr. Brown has be-come a very wealthy man as a direct result of The Da Vinci Code. And I'm not even counting the royalties he will receive for the recently released paperback edition, nor what the movie rights are worth to him.

Clearly, Dan Brown is the exception, not the rule.

Although some authors are indeed making a lot of money, most are not. A book needs to generate sales of approximately 300,000 copies in order to make its author a millionaire. Unfortunately, the average print run for a book is only 3,000 copies.

According to Publishers Weekly, about 150,000 new books are published each year, with 100,000 or so coming from large and small publishers (the rest are self-published or published-on-demand). Typically, only 50 hardcover novels will sell more than 300,000 copies. Only 25 trade paperbacks, both fiction and non-fiction, will sell that many copies. And only 10 mass market paperbacks will achieve this level of sales.

So, what about the other 99,915 authors that are published each year? Many of these authors have a large backlist of previously published titles, and although they do not make anywhere close to a million dollars on any one book, the ongo-ing royalties from this backlist are enough to generate a decent living - as an author.

As a bookseller, I find it is easy to identify the bestselling authors after they become bestsellers. But the really fun and exciting part of what I do is to try to identify those books that are flying below the radar of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, those gems that not only deserve to be published but also deserve shelf space in a bookstore. Books like Give Your Heart to the Hawks by Win Blevins, Tennessee Music by Peter Zimmerman, and, of course, Never Say Die by Kris Neri, to name a very few from the thousands of worthy books to read. Bestseller or not.