Books don’t sell

Half of Amazon’s sales are books that are not in the top five thousand. Half!

It’s one thing to imagine people going for this new model of self-publishing (free or low cost, immediate, built-in access to a large market of readers, royalty upside) versus the vanity publishing model of yore (pseudo-hardcover, obscenely expensive, slow turnaround, and then author’s burden of marketing and sales, not to mention the requirement o

There are several: books don’t die anymore and disappear from the competition, and in fact, books that were thought to have died have been brought back to life in the digital no-inventory-necessary world. That adds further competition to face each new book as it is published and makes the challenge more difficult for each new commercial effort.

“The physical value of the book is something that cannot be replicated in digital form,” Riggio told me. “People love to collect books and to have them in their home and on their shelves. I would say it could never be identically replicated because of the value of books as physical objects in consumers’ minds.”13

What makes the book business different from all other businesses? In a single word: “granularity.” There are just so many more books than there are movies or TV shows or albums of music, and that effect alone would create massive differences in audience identification and marketing strategy. In figurative terms, Hollywood has always produced hundre