Diary Entry #1: Early Numbers

A look at the first two weeks of my book launch

A few months ago, my wife found my diary from high school. Excuse me, my “captain’s log” from high school. That’s right. I, as a 15-year-old boy, didn’t want to think of myself as someone who kept a “diary,” so I called my diary my “captain’s log.” Because a brace-faced teenager cosplaying as a crew member of the Starship Enterprise is so much cooler than a person who calls their diary a diary. Had I really not heard of The Motorcycle Diaries? For fuck’s sake, Carlitos.

It’s okay, I’m no Che Guevara, either. For one thing, I’m terrified of motorcycles. And starting revolutions. And, if we’re talking modes of transportation, I don’t think The Honda Civic Diaries has quite the same ring to it.

I’m basically Che Guevara if Che Guevara was afraid of insects, birds, large crowds, most social situations, public speaking, and people in general.

The point is, it’s fine to call a diary a diary. And that’s more or less what this is. Over the next few months, I’m going to be documenting, mostly in real time, how things are going with trying to promote my self-published book, Spoilers.

As the name of this new section of the newsletter implies, it’s going to feature a lot of numbers. Too many numbers. More numbers than you could possibly need. Why?Maybe it’s because I was an engineer in a past life (and possibly in a future life depending on whether I can make this whole writing for a living thing work), but I find it helpful to have concrete data, and that seems to be sorely lacking in the publishing world. There’s a lot of general advice about book publishing (too much advice? more advice than you could possibly need?) and yet very few real-world examples (at least that I could find) of authors’ experiences with publishing backed with actual figures.

So I’m just going to put everything out there — all of the data relevant to self-publishing my book — and hope that someone else finds it helpful when they write their first book. If I had an agent, or a publicist, or anyone advising me, for that matter, they’d probably tell me this is a bad idea. “If the book flops, it’ll all be laid out in excruciating detail and no publisher will take a chance on you knowing for a fact that your books don’t sell.”

It’s possible. In fact, in all likelihood the book will flop. According to Berrett-Koehler Publishers, the average book today sells fewer than 300 copies over its lifetime, and that’s especially true for self-published books.

With that in mind, I’ll share how things are going so far in the first two weeks since my book was published.

But first, here are a couple numbers related to me as an author:

• 712 ← number of Instagram followers

• 493 ← number of TikTok followers

• 5,379 ← number of Twitter (I refuse to call it the other name) followers

• 441 ← number of Substack subscribers (That’s you! Thank you!)

• 1,000,000 ← I’ll get to this one in a minute

I’m sharing these numbers not as a brag (I have over 700 Instagram followers! I’m a picoinfluencer! Perhaps even a nanoinfluencer!) but because social media and newsletter followings are factors publishers consider when they look at your “platform” as an author.

“Platform” is publishing industry speak for “Has anyone heard of you?” and it’s something literary agents and publishers take into account when deciding how likely your book will be to sell well. In other words, if you’re Trevor Noah, your book is more likely to sell than if you’re, you know, me.

So, yeah, I don’t have a huge “following” and I kind of put all of my social media eggs in the Twitter basket, so you can imagine how well that’s been going for me. But I do have one ace up my sleeve, and that’s the last number: 1,000,000.

Over the past couple years, I’ve published a few pieces in McSweeney’s that have done pretty well. So back when I was pitching the idea for Spoilers to agents, I reached out to Chris Monks, the editor of McSweeney’s, and he was kind enough to pass along some stats related to some of the work I’ve published there. The idea being that I could brag about those stats to publishers in the hopes that they’d say something along the lines of “Well, he’s no Trevor Noah, but people seem to like some of his stuff in McSweeney’s, so let’s give this Spoilers book a shot.”

As you can see, Spoilers did not go the traditional publishing route, but that’s a post for another time.

So what does that 1,000,000 number represent? Basically, if you add up the number of page views my three most-read pieces in McSweeney’s have gotten, the total comes out to over 1 million. Which is WILD. It’s incomprehensible. It feels like someone else must have done it, because how could I have possibly gotten my work in front of over 1,000,000 people? That’s SO many zeros after that one. That’s the number that gives me the most hope about this book and about my career in general. I’m not quite making a consistent living as a writer yet, but it feels like there’s potential if I can get more work out there and find ways to improve as a writer.

Now, here are some numbers related to Spoilers:

• 168 ← number of copies ordered through crowdfunding (these can be thought of as pre-orders, but I’m separating these from the pre-orders that have come in through book vendors)

• 27 ← number of pre-orders through book vendors

• 95 ← number of copies sold since the launch on Oct. 2nd

• $3.50-$6.80 ← roughly how much I make per book depending on the seller

• 10,000 ← how many copies sold over the next year or two to make self-publishing books to start to feel like something that might make sense as a full-time job considering the ungodly number of hours I’ve spent writing, publishing, and marketing this book

• 1,000 ← my more realistic goal for how many copies I (think?) I can sell

If you add up the first three numbers, it comes out to 290. That’s the total number of copies of Spoilers that have been sold so far across print and digital. That’s almost 300! I’ve already almost beaten the average for books and it’s only been a few weeks! That’s amazing!

Still, it’s far away from 1,000 and even farther from 10,000. According to that same study by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, only 33.9% of books sell more than 1,000 copies in their first year, and only 6.7% sell more than 10,000. So reaching either of those milestones means majorly beating the odds.

I should say, quickly, that I don’t want to make it sound like not hitting either of those goals makes my book a “flop.” The fact that the book exists is already a success in and of itself, and I’m super proud of it. It’s incredibly rare to be able to make a living just from writing books, so it’s not like that’s the only barometer for “success.” I’m just trying to lay out all of the numbers to explain the economic reality of publishing and whether or not it’s something that makes sense for you.

Because all the work I’ve done on this book over the past year has essentially meant working full-time on it (which meant only working part-time at my other jobs), so it’s potentially tough to justify writing more books this way unless I can keep those numbers trickling upwards. And even though it’s still early days, there are some scary signs for what’s ahead:

I’ve been manually tracking the number of book sales per day, because, as we’ve established, I’m a huge nerd. But, more importantly, I wanted to track what promotional tactics have worked and which ones haven’t. For example, I know that having an excerpt of my book run in McSweeney’s led to at least 20 or so sales that day — that’s great information!

Unfortunately, my printer, Ingram, gives me INFURIATINGLY little information about where sales are actually coming from (I do know I’ve sold 3 copies in Germany and the rest in the U.S. so that something, I guess). Also, as far as I can tell, vendors like Bookshop.org don’t let you set up multiple URLs for your book in order to see where traffic is coming from, something that was incredibly helpful when running my Kickstarter campaign (I’ll do a dedicated post about Kickstarter in the next few weeks).

[Btw, if I am wrong about any of the above information, or anything else I’ve written about, please let me know in the comments! I want these posts to be accurate.]

So some of this data isn’t super useful. I have NO IDEA where those sales on Oct. 10th came from, for instance. And while I know the interviews I’ve done for different podcasts, Substacks, and publications have all been incredibly helpful for getting the word out, I don’t have as clear of a sense of how that press translated to sales.

Another quick aside: I feel like this post makes it sound like I’m obsessed with trying to sell my book and it’s all about the money for me. But promoting my work is the part I HATE about being a writer. It fucking blows. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve really enjoyed talking with other writers through the interviews and podcasts I’ve done. But doing all of the logistical work to promote my book has been a HUGE pain in the ass. Not to mention the countless people I’ve reached out to who just ignored me (I get it, we all get shit tons of emails), which makes it feel like I’m doing tons of work for nothing.

I also hate the fact that I’m dependent on my writing to make a living. It sometimes feels like I played myself when I quit my engineering job to pursue writing, because now what used to be fun comes with all of this added pressure, and it feels like the work I do now has to be commercially successful instead of just good. I know that’s just the deal when it comes to creative work, but still, it fucking sucks.

That’s part of why I’m sharing all of this data, because I think the economics of book publishing (and writing in general) are so bleak that it’s useful to arm yourself with as many tools and as much data as you can. It’s hard enough to develop the talent you need to write well. But if you can navigate the economic side of things and maximize the time you spend dealing with all of that stuff, then at least you have a fighting chance of making this creative stuff work. So my thinking goes.

So here’s the central issue for me: I’ve written some stuff that has been read by a good number of people, but how do I find those people to let them all know that I wrote a book? And, crucially, if I do find them, will they give a shit? These are the two questions I’m trying to answer for myself. On one hand, 10,000 copies seems like a lot of books to sell. But if just 1% of the people who have read my most popular work bought my book, that’s 10,000 right there. So it seems theoretically possible. Maybe. Honestly, I have no idea. That’s what this diary is all about, answering questions. Questions like:

So follow along if you find it at all interesting, and if not, I’m totally cool with that. In fact, because this is it’s own section, you can unsubscribe from it at any time without unsubscribing from Shades of Greaves, and it won’t hurt my feelings even a little bit. We all get shit tons of email and I don’t want to send you stuff you don’t want to read.

Here’s a guide on how to adjust what sections you subscribe to.

For those who plan to stick around, I’ll be talking next about in-person book events (hope to see you on Monday, NYC!) and then about crowdfunding. And if there’s anything questions that come up from this post, or things you’d like me to talk about in a future post, let me know in the comments. I check them, and dammit, I respond!

So keep an eye out for more exciting entries in…The Captain’s Log.

I can’t even say that shit with a straight face.

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