Today is the official publication day for my book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals about Human Stupidity! Thanks to everyone who pre-ordered the book. For those interested in grabbing a copy, here’s the link to find your favorite bookseller.
My friends/family have been exceedingly supportive throughout this writing/publishing process, and have been peppering me with questions on how the process works. So with publication day upon me, I thought I would take a moment to peek behind the curtain to answer some of the most frequency asked questions about book publishing that I have been getting.
A lot of people want to know how best to support an author when it comes to buying their book; should they buy it directly from the author, order from Amazon, etc. Here’s the answer: The best thing you can do is order the book from a book retailer. Amazon is fine, but it’s even better to get it from an independent bookstore (like my local bookstore, The Curious Cat Tea & Books). Here’s why:
Usually authors are given a few copies of their book from the publisher (called author copies) which they are free to do with as they wish. Most authors give these books away to friends and family. Authors rarely sell author copies directly to customers as this would be both awkward and unhelpful since the publisher would not register these as sales. It’s the number of sales of new copies of the book via traditional channels (e.g., book stores, online retailers) that matter for two reasons: 1) they let the publisher know if the book is selling well enough to have been worth the investment, and 2) it lets those infamous bestseller lists know if the book is worthy of making the list.
For traditional book publishing (like the route I took for If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal via Little, Brown and Company), the publisher gives an author a monetary advance to write the book. This is money that the author gets to keep no matter how well the book sells. The author then receives a percentage of each book sold after publication. After book sales are tallied and after the publisher recoups all their expenses, if the book sells well enough that the author is owed more money than they were given for their advance, then the author could start earning royalties on future book sales. The majority of books (around 75% of books published via the traditional route) do not actually “earn out their advance” - that is, they don’t sell enough copies that the author is owed more than they were given for their advance. So for me at the moment, everyone is curious to see how well Nietzsche will sell in the coming days to figure out if there is a chance that I am lucky enough to be in the 25% of authors who do earn out their advance.
As for the bestseller list, this one is a bit more mysterious. Famous lists like the New York Times Bestseller List track how many copies of the book sell within a specific period (i.e., the previous week, Saturday to Sunday) to determine which books make the list. All those pre-orders count toward these numbers since they are processed on the first day of publication (today!). To make a bestseller list, you need to sell around 5,000 copies of the book in any given week. But exactly which sales are counted toward these 5,000 copies is a closely guarded secret. Not all sales and sellers are weighted equally. “The Times’s best-seller lists are based on a detailed analysis of book sales from a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week,” New York Times spokesperson Jordan Cohen told Vox.
Nobody is really sure which bookstores the NYT monitors when it comes to sales. I have heard/read that they weigh indie bookstores more heavily, but who knows if this is true. So if you want to help an author get on a bestseller list, you are probably better off buying a book from your local indie bookstore.
In any event, landing a book on the bestseller list is the goal of every author/publisher, although that isn’t necessarily always going to lead to earning out your advance. And even if a book never makes a bestseller list, it doesn’t mean it won’t be profitable in the end as sales accumulate over time.
Obviously I would love to have a bestseller, but I am not too terribly concerned about it. I am just beyond happy to have my book out in the world and in readers’ hands. As long as one person out there has their life brightened after reading the book, I will feel victorious. But if you do want to help rocket this book up a bestseller list, I certainly won’t dissuade you! The #1 thing you can do (after actually buying the book) is to rate it on Amazon or Goodreads. These ratings and reviews are what potential readers rely on to figure out if a book is worth reading (as you all know).
So thank you again to everyone for all of your support, and I hope you enjoy the book!
Happy reading!
-Justin
Congratulations, Justin! That’s awesome!
Barb
HAPPY PUBLICATION DAY! May your book sell som smör i solsken.