So how are your book sales? - Kelly McCaughrain

The latest instalment in my series ‘Weird things people ask me since I wrote a book.’

This one is right up there with ‘so what are you working on now?’ in terms of making a writer reach for the nearest steak knife.

Just stop a second and think about what you’re actually asking here. What’s the subtext? as we writers say (we do this with your text messages too).

We know that what you mean is, how’s it going/are you ok/I’m interested in your life. The sane part of me gets that. But to the other 99% of me, what you’re actually asking is something along the lines of:

• How good a writer are you anyway?
• How much money do you make?
• Was it worth spending two/five/ten years writing that book I skim read on the train?

If I came up to you at a party and asked how much you make or what your last employee evaluation said, or why you haven’t been promoted recently, you’d probably be like

But if you want to know, the answers are all and any of the following:

1. I don’t know. I don’t sell the books personally out of a suitcase in my car and I don’t have an app on my phone that bings every time someone buys one from a shop. (if you think Facebook is destroying your self-esteem, just wait till that app is invented).

2. I have practically zero control over that so you’re really asking the wrong person.

3. I don’t care. Obviously I care, but only because people keep looking at me like it’s important and I don’t want to let anyone down. But it’s not why I wrote the book and for me the journey basically ended the day it was published. Writing the book was great. Caring about sales figures can only ruin that for me.

4. I’m still celebrating/recovering from the mind-blowing fact that I even wrote a book. Is that not enough for you? I have to be a bestseller? I have to be working on the sequel?

5. I don’t want to know. I think at some point the publisher might send me some deets on this but honestly I’m not looking forward to that. It’s not that I had mega hopes for a debut romcom from a Belfast nobody, but whatever the figure, it will:

a) be meaningless to me because I have no idea what is a normal amount of books for a Belfast nobody to sell and

b) could always be more so it’s not like getting an A on your report or anything.  

So I can’t give you numbers but I can tell you that there’s an inevitable trajectory for pretty much all books. They’re on the shelves for a while, then they’re in the back store for a while, then they’re orderable for a while, then they go away. Thanks to eBooks, things don’t technically go out of print anymore, but they’ll stop producing hardcopies sooner or later. You might get one print run, maybe two, maybe more, but it doesn’t go on forever. There are books I loved as a child that I’ve recently bought on eBay because they’re long out of print.

Remember this? I loved this!

How do I sum all that up in casual conversation? I usually say, ‘Don’t know, don’t wanna know,’ and then reach for the wine.

I’m not saying sales figures are meaningless. They mean a lot if you’re a publisher or a marketing person. They can mean you do or don’t get another publishing contract. But since we’ve pretty much established that making a living by writing is out of the question these days, maybe writers should come up with other ways of measuring success (see my last post). If we focus on sales figures, we might miss other things that also mean a lot. Like messages from readers. I think those have been the absolute highlight for me, they can literally make my day, and they’re the only thing that make it feel like that journey does go on and those characters still live, which really means a lot to me.

And can we just bear in mind that this way of working is actually a pretty recent thing? Writers did not used to have Amazon rankings and Good Reads reviews and Twitter conversations about their books by which to judge their own success.

How on earth did they manage? Well, as the always brilliant Anne Enright says:

“When I started out, information was hard to acquire. It took a year before you knew how a book had been received. There was no other way to work, except blind. There is no shame in thinking strategically about the public aspects of the business – this is not an immoral, soiling, or unartistic thing to do – but this is not where the real work happens.”

Kelly McCaughrain is the author of the YA novel Flying Tips for Flightless Birds. She has no idea how well it's selling.

She blogs about Writing, Gardening and VW Campervanning at weewideworld.blogspot.co.uk 

@KMcCaughrain