Amazon Author Central

Today Amazon rolled out a new service for authors. They list the weekly U.S. sales for each of your books (they admit that their method is probably only counting about 70% of your actual sales, but it’s a nice start). They also give you a jigsaw-puzzly map of the U.S., and you can scroll over any part of it and it will give you the sales for that region.

To give an example, Prince of Networks sold 34 copies last month according to Amazon (not so bad for a philosophy book that’s a year and a half old). 8 were sold in New York, 2 apiece in Detroit, Los Angeles, Seattle/Tacoma, and Syracuse. The rest are a smattering of 1 sale apiece in various parts of the country. (I’ve also learned from this exercise that Miami and Las Vegas are two cities where people seem not to buy books.)

This leads to a more general reflection about academic book market sizes. I had coffee this evening with Bruce Ferguson, my Dean. He used to be Dean of Arts at Columbia, and knew Edward Said personally. He told me that Said used to say that the potential audience for a typical academic is around 3,500 people, and it’s simply a matter of reaching those people.

True, once in awhile some Marshall McLuhan or Derrida will break through to a gigantic audience, but as a general rule your potential academic audience is not going to be huge. Your books will probably sell 200-some copies to libraries and (if you’re lucky) 100-some to individuals. Maybe a bit more than that if you write something that really strikes a nerve. Recently a publisher, using Nielsen information, showed me Latour’s sales figures, and while they’re a lot higher than mine, they’re really not that high if you compare him with novelists. And keep in mind, Latour according to the Times Higher Education Supplement is the ninth most cited academic in the humanities. And even he doesn’t sell many books. It’s simply the case that not many people buy academic books.

In fact, that’s the surest sign of someone who knows very little about academic books– people who assume I’ve made a lot of money off of my seven books. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! The lifetime royalties on all the books combined so far are significantly less than one year’s university salary, I can tell you that much.

The only person I know who actually lives off royalties is CHINA MIÉVILLE, and that proves my point. He writes science fiction/fantasy novels and has a very large following. I doubt he’s earning much of anything from his Marxist book on international law. If you want to earn enough as a writer to need no other job, academic books are not the right project for you.

At Penn State I was talking with two older graduate students. They told me the biggest surprise they experienced was that they always used to assume that you get paid for publishing a journal article. My response at the time was: “You mean, you don’t?”