Would You Make a $100,000 Bet?

Today I’ve decided to shift perspective and share how publishers think.

When an author like yourself gets a book deal, it’s because an editor at a publishing house — like Penguin or HarperCollins — has convinced their boss (a person who holds the actual title of Publisher or Editorial Director) and likely multiple other people (often in publicity, marketing, and sales) that your book is going to sell and make them a profit.

This is a really big hurdle for three reasons, all of which involve something surprising.

Math.

Let’s start with the publisher’s investment (reason #1).

An editor at Penguin Random House told me that they invest over $100,000 in every book they decide to publish. If your book sells for $28, that means you have to sell approximately 3,600 copies right?

Wrong. You are forgetting about the author’s advance, or what you get paid for the book. Let’s assume you get a six-figure advance because that’s what the authors I work with receive. Assuming that you receive $100,000 as your advance, now your book needs to sell over 7,000 copies to make a profit for everyone involved.

You might think, okay cool — I’ll get 7,000 people to follow me on LinkedIn! 

But here’s more math. Not everyone in your audience will buy your book (reason #2).

Based on what I’ve seen over the past three years from my clients, only 5% of your total audience will buy your book. So if you’re expecting 7,000 copies to be sold, then you need an audience that’s at least 20x that size — or 140,000 people. And that’s the minimum. 

That’s why reaching 100,000 people is the floor, not the ceiling.

And lastly, there’s one thing that’s totally out of your control. 

Previous sales numbers and experience for books like yours and authors like you. 

Yep more math — but also emotion and opinion, which can be harder to argue against. This is a wild card because it can swing strongly to both the positive and the negative. 

Let’s pretend you are a sales expert and have written a book proposal about how to make more money with your unique approach. An editor can have experience with sales books doing really, really well and decide that they want to acquire the rights to your book because of that — or the exact opposite. The same is true for literary agents choosing to represent you (or not). 

Ironically, this is the reason why some of the most successful books I’ve worked on were the hardest to get deals for. Because literary agents and editors had preconceived notions about how well that book would do that were based on the past, not what could, and would, happen.

And while you can’t control the subjective opinions of others — ever — what is in your control is the math. 

How many books you are able to sell, realistically, based on your audience, and how big that audience is. So that when the publisher calculates that $100,000 bet — the odds are in their and your favor.