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"Book sales"
09/23/2002 Entry
Here is a little example to show how concentrated book sales are around just a handful of popular titles.
My father sent me a message this morning to let me know that his latest book, The Road to Stockholm, had a sales rank of 914 on Barnes and Noble's Web site. He then added that my mother knew that someone had just purchased three copies. It takes a mere few purchases to achieve such a low ranking. (The book usually hovers around 6,000 or 20,000.)
What does this tell us about the book industry then? Let's say 3-4 copies of this book are sold every day which would keep it in the top 1000 or would probably boost its sales rank even higher. Three to four book sales per day result in annual sales of about 1280 books but no more than about 1460 books. So a book would sell less than 1,500 a year and would still rank in the top few hundred among all books sold.
To be fair, I do not have data on how many books Barnes and Noble carries and makes part of the ranking system. Nonetheless, I find the above a good example of how concentrated the book market is. A handful of books sell millions of copies. Then very quickly we reach titles that rank fairly high but are only selling a few thousand copies.
(I realize there are other problems with this analysis. I am looking at BN.com only and am not including data from Amazon.com. I also do not know where libraries purchase their copies and where that would show up in rankings. I am not accounting for lots of other transactions either. I also do not have information on whether ten other people also purchased the book this one day, but I find that unlikely. Despite all these limitations, I thought this example worthy of a comment.)
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