Update: I just returned (7/18) from a road trip and received, while I was gone, information calling some of my calculations here into question. So I am reviewing for accuracy and will be revising and reposting soon. My apologies for any fuzzy math.
Related post:
Perhaps you noticed, a few days ago, when the Hachette Book Group shouted out to the world that “bestselling author James Patterson has broken yet another record — this time with tremendous ebook sales.”
“To date, Patterson has sold 1,141,273 ebook units, making him the first novelist ever to surpass the 1,000,000 mark,” Hachette said in a July 6 press release. It’s great news for Patterson, for Hachette, and for ebook enthusiasts, to be sure. The story got picked up everywhere from the Huffington Post to the Los Angeles Times to Joe Konrath’s blog for writers.
It’s great news, even if it is not precisely correct.
What am I getting at?
Well, “there’s no third-party monitor of e-book sales, so Hachette used its own figures and checked other prominent authors,” ran the disclaimer that ran in both HuffPo and the LAT. “The publisher didn’t find any others who had cracked the million mark.”
Okay, fair enough, but I’m here to tell you that the Hachette would have been better served if it had said that Patterson is “the first American novelist” or “the first living novelist” or “the first English-language novelist” to surpass 1 million ebooks sold.
I suspect you get it by now, and would get it even if you hadn’t read the headline for this post.
According to estimated but educated calculations that I’ll share below, the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy has sold more ebooks in the Kindle Store alone since last December 21 than Patterson had sold in total at the time of the Hachette press release July 6.
Hachette could have asked Amazon, but Amazon does not share that kind of information. They could have asked Random House, but Random House might not have wanted to share that kind of information. And they could have asked Stieg Larsson…. Well, no, I guess they couldn’t have asked the late Mr. Larsson.
So, we’re left with the information that we can extrapolate from data that has already been reported by publishers, and data that is in the public domain through features such Amazon’s relatively new “Bestseller Archive” for the Kindle Store
, and some conservative models that I have been able to develop based on my experience with the sales and sales ranking of over a dozen of my own Kindle editions dating back to November 2007, the month that the Kindle was released. While those models include information that is confidential and proprietary, I am nonetheless able to use the models conservatively to inform a reliable picture of any Kindle book’s likely minimum sales over a specific period of time, but I’ll just use them internally here, and instead rely on these data points:
As we mentioned back on June 3, the popular subscription-based book industry website Publisher’s Marketplace reported that day “Knopf Doubleday spokesman Paul Bogaards says their internal figures show an approximate first week sell-through of 425,000 units–which includes 125,000 ebook editions” for the third Larsson book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
.The most conservative estimate of the Kindle Store’s share of those ebook sales for the week beginning May 24 would be at least 60 percent, or 75,000 units, given that Larsson’s books have never been carried in the iBooks Store.If we trend out Kindle Store sales for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest for the subsequent six weeks, based on the fact that its Kindle sales ranking was 1-1-2-1-1-1-1 for the first seven weeks of its sales life, the most conservative cumulative figure for this ebook’s sales over the seven weeks is 350,000 (or a total of 4.67 times its first week sales).However, as shown in the screenshot (above right) of the cumulative 2010 year-to-date Bestseller Archive for the Kindle Store, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest ranks only at #4 in the Kindle Store so far this year, trailing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
at #1, The Girl Who Played with Fire
at #2, and The Help
at #3. Based on this array, year-to-date ebook sales for The Girl Who Played with Fire can’t have been lower than 350,000 (and, probably, easily exceeded 400,000) and year-to-date ebook sales for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo can’t have been lower than 400,000 (and, probably, easily exceeded 500,000).Using all of this information as well as further modeling based on seasonality, growth of the installed based of Kindles, iPads and other Kindle-compatible devices, and implications of actual sales numbers for other titles at various rankings above and below the Stieg titles, I have arrived at the numbers shown here as an absolute conservative baseline for Kindle Store ebook sales of the three Stieg novels since December 21, 2009.
Although these are estimates, the overall effect of the calculations and the power of some of the triangulating influences are such that I can guarantee that Stieg’s ebook sales since December 21, 2009 in the Kindle Store have been at least 1.2 million, and that the actual figures are very close to, if a bit higher than, the following:
Total – 1,288,892
And I’m confident that James Patterson will be okay, even if he is the second author to scale the million-ebook mountain.
