First 6 months of the new book ($48,921.15) // Notes and numbers // Is this your year to write one?

January 4, 2022 · living

When I was chatting with Sahil about his book, he said (slightly paraphrased):

I don’t care at all about the sales at launch. I care about the sales in 2025. 

Which I absolutely love. It’s the long-term view.

(Full convo with Sahil embedded below, or skip ahead for my notes and numbers.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c_66MoW0Pg

Most authors put far too much weight on launch performance.

Which makes a perverse sort of sense, since the average nonfiction bestseller hits peak sales within the first 3 months (due to active promotion) and then lose 95% of that peak within the year (due to a lack of recommendability), never to recover (source):

If you expect your book to die after launch, then you’re obviously going to focus pretty heavily on that launch window. But that’s optimizing for failure, because the only books that matter are the books that last.

As a result, I tend to ignore the first 3 months’ sales data for a new book, since those early months aren’t representative of the book’s future. I don’t let strong early sales excite me, nor do I allow weak early sales to upset me.

The data I care about is months 4-6, which is when I finally get to learn whether I’ve written something that will last. (And I don’t care about volume, but about organic growth rate.)

That six-month milestone has just passed for my most recent book, and apart from a slight blip in month 5, the longevity and recommendability are looking promising.

Here’s the Amazon breakdown thus far (with more deets and non-Amazon sales channels below):

The full breakdown is:

• Preorder: $4,042
• Month 1 royalties (Amazon): $2,430.71
• Month 2: $4,254.25
• Month 3: $5,028.21
• Month 4: $6,300.54
• Month 5: $5,645.12
• Month 6: $8,319.32
• Subscription (i.e., paid community atop the book): $12,901 ($1,729 MRR)

Which puts the running total at just shy of $49k (or $36k in “pure” royalties if you exclude the community). I write pretty slowly (and suffer quite a lot while doing it), so if the sales had started to decline after month three, I would have been a bit bummed.

But given that they seem to be growing, I’m optimistic.

My first book, The Mom Test, started out way more slowly than this (i.e., three years to regularly exceed $3k / mo), and that book has now done ~$600k in total royalties (and still growing), which is pretty meaningful.

This one seems to be on a much stronger trajectory.

December also had a couple other exciting milestones. It was the first month where this book sold more than 1,000 copies (1,101) and also the first month where it exceeded $10k in monthly earnings (royalties + subscription). Taken together, the three books are now selling more than 1,000 copies per week, which has been a target of mine for a while now.

So, I partly wanted to share how it’s been going (accountability and transparency and all that), and I partly wanted to contradict the common “wisdom” that books are bad business.

It’s true that most books don’t succeed as products (which obviously also makes the creation of them a bad business). But that’s only because most books are mistakenly built like art (i.e., in secret as an act of solitary genius) instead of like products (i.e., iteratively and humbly while in constant contact with real readers).

If you run a proper process, books are great: great for the income, great for the impact, and great for the intrinsic satisfaction of having written one. 

Anyway, I like them. And I hope that if you’ve ever felt the same, that this is the year you write yours. 

Maybe you’ll end up liking them too.

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