Despondent over low sales? Look at the reality. What really are the odds of financial success? Then ask yourself why you are writing. If its to be a Zillionaire you’re in for a hard time. But if it’s for the love of writing that may be different. The previous post in this series is here – Self Publishing: the Reality of the Numbers
A Table of Betting Odds of Financial Success
If you assumed all e-books as equal and you wanted to place a bet on the number of copies a particular e-book would sell in the first 90 days these the odds you would get.
*The astute among us will realise the Percentile Rank column (which should add up to 100) actually adds up to 125. There is a reason for this. It tells us a great deal about the typical e-book promotion effort. More in a later post.
So from this you would guess that half of all e-book titles sell only 5 copies in the first 90 days. In fact it’s worse than that.
Most fiction e-books on Amazon sell fewer than 100 copies in their lifetime, with over half of those failing to ever cross the 10-copy threshold.
There are 4.8 million active English fiction titles on Amazon. Of that number only about 150 titles at any given time are selling at a rate which might eventually see more than a million sales.
Odds of Financial Success? Success is “Sticky”
Authors (generally) do not write just one e-book. In fact most e-book authors on Amazon have written 5. When you come to financially successful writers (aka people making significant money) it is often more than 25. There are virtually no authors making serious money who have published just one or two e-books.
And success is “sticky”. A successful author is likely to have multiple successful e-books. Not just one or two. So that extends the odds further.
If you draw up a table of authors (rather than individual e-books) then odds of any random author reaching a particular level of sales is as follows.
So Why Are the Odds so Steep and the Sales so Low?
These odds are so steep because the entry cost is zero. As I am sure you are aware, publishing on Amazon or B&N is not like traditional publishing. In traditional publishing there’s a “filter” (aka agents/editors). They remove 99% of proposed books before they hit the shelf. Amazon and B&N allow everything.
This ease of access creates a massive “denominator” of millions of books that have zero marketing budget. This pushes the odds of success for any randomly selected book into the thousands-to-one range.
The Future on KDP Amazon
The numbers are also growing. By 2030 the number of e-book titles is expected to go up by 70%. This will be heavily driven by AI created books. AI will remove a great deal of the plain old drudge associated with writing producing a book. Consequently it will become much easier to actually write produce one. The consequences of this is that even though reader engagement is likely to rise, the average number of sales per book will decrease even below the miserly numbers we see today. The median (i.e. the most common) sales volume will drop by about 60%.
Today (2026) Amazon has approximately 4.8 Million active fiction titles and 44 million assorted “works”. They are adding roughly 750,000 new fiction titles each year. This has accelerated and is still accelerating. Uploads to Amazon have tripled since 2022. While most of these will die a sudden death after the first 30 days (or less) I am sure you can see nothing is going to get easier.
So Why are you Writing? Love? Or Money?
Seriously. Why are you writing? Is it to become a Zillionaire? While it is nice to have that as a remote possibility, if that’s what’s driving you I’d suggest you are going to have hard time.
As time goes on the chances of success are not going to get any better. In fact if you limit yourself to Amazon even with a cunning game plan the chances are quite slim and probably getting worse by the day.
The market is crowded. Sales are hard to come by. It is unlikely you will breach 1000 copies on Amazon irrespective of how good your book is.
Unless that is, you indulge in extensive (and costly) marketing and cross e-book promotion by having a series of number of titles. Even then financial success is a very, very long way from being guaranteed. In fact you may end up losing money.
Add to that most authors I’ve met hate marketing (I loath it) and it often literally takes more time and effort than actually writing the damn thing.
But so what?
Do You Love Writing?
If so then 10 readers is success. As long as you have not got yourself locked into the delusion that you are bound to make it big and become a zillionaire then 10, 100 or 1000 is success and the more the merrier.
In which case, while Amazon is worthwhile (after all it’s free) other platforms may actually be more appropriate.
Be realistic. And remember – money isn’t everything.
The next post in this series is here Life and Death of a Fiction e-Book
Love and kisses
Chalkie xx