What's it like to sell 50,000 books? Secrets of publishing explained.

Now that my book has been on sale a little while, people have started asking questions about sales. For example, folks ask, “What’s it like to sell fifty thousand books?” Some think bigger, with, “What’s it like to sell five hundred thousand books?” I’ve never done either, but I’ve studied the process and I’d like to share some insights that I’ve gained.

I'll tell you secret about book sales and me . . . The most books I've ever sold personally at one time is EIGHT, to a lady today. We've got them on the counter at Robison Service, but for eight copies I had to go out back and break open a fresh case. Luckily the hound dogs hadn't chewed her case like they did the one last week.

Let's talk timing . . . once a reader picks up a book and heads to the register to buy it, the typical transaction takes about a minute and a half. That’s the time a customer spends standing in line, handing over the book, handing over the money or credit card, taking the receipt and finally taking the book and heading for the door.

So what does that mean?

For fifty thousand books to get sold, you (the bookseller) would stand behind the register seventy five thousand minutes. If you started selling books – one transaction at a time – on January 1, you’d hit 50,000 sometime in late August. Provided you never got sick, and never left the cash register, 8 hours a day.

It’s a boring job, but someone’s got to do it. At least, they have to do it if they want to claim they sold fifty thousand books to the public. Sounds harder than you thought, eh?

I hope that illustration makes clear that anyone who boasts of selling fifty thousand books is probably lying or at best, exaggerating, no matter what bookstore they come from. I never made that claim myself, and I never worked in a bookstore. But I watch, listen, and make notes.

There is an easy way to sell fifty thousand books . . . get a job as a national account sales rep with Random House. They sell books by the millions to the big boys . . .Wal Mart, Target, B&N, Costco. Some of those reps sell fifty thousand books in a morning, during the Christmas season.

But to a guy who peddles books one at a time, in the rough and tumble streets, that's cheating.

How about the handling of fifty thousand books? Have you ever pondered what such a book stack looks like?

Look Me in the Eye is a fairly typical hardcover book, seven by ten inches, and an inch and a half thick. No big deal – you stuff it in your bag, or backpack, or you just carry it. But that’s ONE BOOK. What happens when there’s more?

Random House packs books like mine twelve to a case. A case is ten by fourteen by eight inches, and about ten pounds. Three such cases are about the size and weight of one of the giant sacks of dog food in my garage. It’s a handful, but most people can carry three cases of books. You could do it, but if you’re like most people, you’d move my books two cases at a time.

That’s only 24 copies, though. What about the rest?

When the publisher ships books like mine to a distributor, they load them on a forklift pallet. Depending on how high they load the pallet, the can fit 480 to 720 books per pallet. You can’t carry a pallet. It weights about a quarter-ton. You move pallets short distances with pallet jacks, and long distances with forklift trucks.

You move pallets really long distances inside trailer trucks. A forty five foot trailer can carry twenty pallets of books. Loaded to the max, that’s 14,400 copies to the truckload. If you’ve got a full size pickup, you could carry a single pallet load of Look Me in the Eye in back.

So there you have it. Fifty thousand copies of my book are three and a half trailer truck loads. But that’s bulk packed. However, that’s not how books go to customers. Retail booksellers like Amazon pack books in big boxes with cushions so they don’t get damaged in shipping. And then they ship them, one and two at a time. When Amazon repacks those 50,000 copies, they swell in volume to fill ten trailer trucks, or 100 UPS trucks. That’s the magic of packaging. All to get the books to you.

50,000 books is an abstraction to most of us. One hundred UPS trucks full of book boxes is real.

And 500,000 books? We could be talking railcar loads, except books aren’t shipped by rail. That’s some serious space.

I hope you’ll keep these figures in mind, the next time someone bandies about quotes like, “fifty thousand books!”