How Do You Even Sell a Book Anymore?

There’s a misleading nugget about book sales that’s gone viral twice in the past fifteen months: the notion that, of all the trade titles published in a year, half sell fewer than a dozen copies. The statistic was originally floated in 2022, during the trial for the proposed (and later blocked) merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Even as it surfaced, people queried the figure—Jane Friedman, who reports on the industry, noted that there was no source given during the relevant testimony—but the statistic was too juicy not to travel. Was the industry really that bad at doing business? Many implicated by the dirty dozen—largely writers but also publishers—alternately quaked and failed to hide their smugness.