At Small Potatoes* Paul Bloom speculates on how to repeat in the book business the Moneyball baseball trick (which basically means paying close attention to statistics and making decisions based on that analysis) and concludes that you can’t. Book numbers are fuzzy numbers. He ends up suggesting that there’s really only one (OK, two) royal roads to financial success for a book writer: “Be the sort of person who gets invited to go on Oprah”, or “Write something people really like to read”.

Moneyball-style statistical analysis works because every baseball game is essentially the same as every other baseball game — obviously individual success or failure varies, but the structure is the same, everyone does the same things. This makes comparisons potentially useful. In book publishing every book is different — OK people open them and read words, but that’s not quite the same thing as three strikes and you’re out. A baseball team has one product — baseball, and is governed by a rule book detailing the way things may happen. A publishing house has hundreds or thousands of products, each one unique, and what worked with one of these products is in no way guaranteed, or is in no way even likely, to happen with another. What sells a book? People wanting to buy a book. What makes people want to buy a book? — too many individual reasons for any analysis to mean anything useful. Back to Mr Bloom’s two tricks.

In book promotion publishers have a list of steps you need to go through with each book. We all know that doing these things may not make any difference to sales in this particular instance, but we do them anyway, partly because you’ve gotta try and that’s what we’ve always done, partly because authors expect us to, and partly because every once in a while it actually does work. (See Book promotion and Promotion and marketing for some of the mechanics.)

“The social media companies have, essentially, tricked us into making content for them, with the promise of exposure”. Complains Carol Crampton as quoted in Helen Lewis’ The Bluestocking. Exposure is necessary, but unfortunately it’s not sufficient. Nevertheless, something’s afoot — the American Booksellers Association membership grew by 19% in 2025, with 605 new brick-and-mortar, pop-up, and mobile store members. The organization has grown 151% over the last six years. CEO Allison Hill says “the majority of stores also reported year-over-year increases in sales for 2025 over 2024.” Of the 605 new stores in 2025, 399 were bricks-and-mortar, 77 mobile, 106 popups, and 23 online. Total membership now stands at 3,417. Might this bookstore growth be because books are hot nowadays — to a large extent because of social media and the fashionability of many book influencers?

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* Thanks to John Samples for the link to the Paul Bloom piece.

Well, we all know it happens, and we hope that we are able to avoid harm by remaining alert and skeptical.

We have been hearing over the past couple of years about authors, specifically, being targeted by online or email scammers. Robert Gray investigates the issue with one author and one publisher at the May 7th Shelf Awareness issue.

Johanna Ingalls, editor at Akashic Books in Brooklyn instances an e-mail they received from a hopeful author, who was checking that the e-mail they had received from Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic, was indeed legitimate. It wasn’t.

“In it, a sophisticated bot (or this is what I assume it is) praises the author’s work and expresses interest in hearing about what they are currently working on,” Ingalls said. “The bot peppers in details from the author’s previous, self-published work, says everything an author would want to hear, offers to connect them with an agent, etc. As soon as we learned of this it seemed the flood gates opened. It seems we were able to stop the Johnny e-mails, but then ‘I’ started — or the sophisticated bot version of Johanna at Akashic Books started — ‘her’ outreach. From a made up e-mail address I can’t figure out how to take down (akashicbooks@johannaingalls.co.site), ‘I’ contact numerous authors daily with the same style e-mail — tons of praise, tons of details about a previous work by the author, etc. A former intern of ours has also been affected.”

Newbie authors are an easy target because their eagerness to be published may well push them into deals which turn out to be undesirable deals, and of course they’ve no idea of what a “real” publishing company might look like. The ultimate aim of the phishers is of course to extract a fee (or even better a credit card number) from the author in return for the service of bringing their book before the public. After all many a first-time author will strike a (perfectly legitimate and respectable) deal with a publishing services company offering editing, design, and even publishing services. But obviously getting an email from Publishing Services Company XYZ is a different cup of tea from getting a fake one from an imitation HarperCollins, Macmillan, Akashic or whomever. Vigilance is called for, but it’s almost not enough.

Here, from WriterBeware are accounts of scam invitations to authors to participate in book festivals, or to be interviewed on radio — both chains ultimately getting round to the point that of course you need to pay something for the honor on offer. (Link via Nate Hoffelder’s weekly Morning Coffee email round-up.)

I do suspect that the “enshittification” of the online world will probably end up meaning that we all eventually desert it. It’s getting to the point — maybe it’s already there — where we look on almost any email or message coming from an address we don’t recognize as a potential malign weapon. Let’s hope (assume) we’ll come up with something else which works better. The decay in our current system is being greatly helped along by AI-assisted nonsense. AI is already involved in compiling these phishing emails to aspiring writers. Surely there will come a moment when we say to ourselves “All this hassle over authenticity is just not worth the efficiency of online communication. I give up.” Maybe by then someone will have come up with something better than good old-fashioned letter-writing (if the postal service still exists by then — apparently they just cancelled it in Denmark), but even that we might come to love. Why did we tear out all those analog phone lines?

See also Scam sites.

In Wes Enzinna’s piece at The Baffler about author earnings, author Wallace Stegner (1909-93) is quoted as describing the job of self-supporting novelist as “the profession that doesn’t exist”.

The fact that authors mostly don’t earn a fortune can’t be news to anyone who is interested enough in the book business to be reading this blog. This is not any plot by plutocrats to defraud innocent idealists: it’s just the fact that not many books sell very many copies, and if you’re getting a couple of bucks off each one, when you add it all together you’re not going to end up rich. If you have the knack and the luck, and work at it, publishing multiple volumes each year, you can definitely make a decent living, but real wealth is the province of few traditionally published writers.

Mr Enzinna slips in a bit of knife, telling us “People at all levels of the publishing industry, meanwhile, are mostly mum on money matters, perhaps even more so in private than public.” Come off it! Remarks like this suggesting subterfuge and concealment are just the result of lazy thinking. Surprise, surprise, publishing workers regard their authors’ sales, hence incomes, as confidential information, and even if they know what author X is earning they’re not likely to blab it to a reporter. Almost everyone in every profession is “mum on money matters”; nobody goes around disclosing what anybody else earns.

The plot of a recent episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries (is it a mystery why I’m watching a New Zealand television series?) features an author who’s presented as successful, but is revealed to have, years earlier, stolen a plot from a local writer. Now of course I suppose there are plots which could be valuable, but you’ve still got to write the damned book! Even the most exciting story wouldn’t be worth enough to become a motive for murder, so after the author is found with a paperknife in his back, the detectives needn’t have bothered with that line of enquiry. But of course everyone knows that successful books are wildly profitable, so of course the Brokenwood script writers knew that it could have been a motive.

It is undeniable that every now and then a book gets made into a successful movie resulting in a big payment to the author. I’ve no way of knowing, but I doubt if this is an annual occurrence for any individual novelist: I’d bet it’s more of a once in a lifetime event. When it happens, we hear about it, and hearing about it we internalize the “fact” that authors make a lot of money.

The other relevant “fact” that we may learn about is when an author lands a big advance against royalties for their upcoming book. We never hear about the thousands of authors who get no advance, or only get a small advance — but this group forms the vast majority, and when I say vast majority I’m talking about 99.99% of authors. We never see headlines to the effect that “XYZ’s latest novel attracts a modest advance”. The only advances that get reported are the biggest advances — ‘cos someone involved wants to boast — so, following our news sources, we all know that advances are always big.

Unsurprisingly it’s not possible to know just how much the average author makes. It’s not possible to know what the average publishing employee makes. (The definition of “average” is in any case almost impossible.) Surveys get made — of publishing salaries too — but as we all know the outcome depends on the input. You can be pretty sure “the average author” didn’t respond to the survey even if they got the form. Mr Enzinna presents as evidence “According to the Authors Guild’s most recent income survey, which queried 5,699 book authors in 2023, the median book-related income for traditionally published trade authors was between $15,000 and $18,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total climbed to a measly $23,329. Fifty-six percent of the respondents relied on side jobs to survive.” (I think we can probably assume that most of the other forty-four percent relied on a gainfully employed spouse, an inheritance, or a full-time job which required them to write in the evenings.) Again, no way to know, but that “measly $23,329” seems high for an average, unless you’re publishing multiple books every year. I think we can assume low-earning authors tend not to share their income with survey takers. I certainly won’t be building any economic arguments based on a sample of 5,699.*

In a post entitled author incomes last year I quoted Thad McIlroy’s estimate for the median for traditionally published authors at $6,000-$8,000. Makes $23,329 look a good deal less measly. But of course, one could die of exhaustion saying that the average earnings of writers is impossible to know. We just have no data: maybe it is a profession that doesn’t exist.

Numbers from the self-publishing business are hard to find, but the rate of financial success is no doubt a bit higher here than in traditional publishing. But here, I would argue, the job of author shades into the job of publisher, so comparison, even if we had data, would not be relevant. (It would be relevant if, as an author, you are motivated primarily by money! And of course, if you have the talent — and are up for the publishing mechanics side of the enterprise.)

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* In 2025 there were four million individual books published. Now more than one of these may well have been written by one author, but I think we might all agree that 5,699 is a pretty measly sample size.