Spoiler alert: It depends.
It boggles me when I speak with authors who have never published a book, don’t have any sort of audience to market to, but they think their book idea is worth approaching a top 5 publisher with.
Wishing you get a top 5 book deal is awesome, but reality is another thing. Aspiring authors often forget that to land a book deal, you have to prove your book idea will make a publisher a lot of money. Publishers invest in book ideas and buy the rights to authors’ works.
In my blog post on how to prepare a book proposal for a publisher (or agent), I mentioned a magic number of 20,000 book copies. And that’s why I recommended that authors don’t even pitch to a large publishing house (or land an agent) unless they have 100K social media followers, website visitors, and email subscribers.
The bigger the publishing house, the bigger the sales expectations.
The top 5 publishing houses are looking at selling hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies. If you don’t have those numbers in terms of your online audience, it’s not impossible to land a book deal with one of them, but you’re going to need to prove you can sell copies. A LOT OF ‘EM.
I only recommend you go this route if you:
- are already well known in your field
- have an audience who will back you and buy your book
- have an agent who can pitch your book idea and land a deal
These publishers want their titles to land on The New York Times bestseller list, among others. And that’ll only happen if your readers buy 5000 copies the week your book launches (and subsequent weeks thereafter).
Smaller publishers have lower sales expectations.
I could feel my eyes widen and my hopes lift when I heard a medium-sized (according to her) Canadian publisher at the 1st Vancouver International Publishing Conference say that her company expects authors to sell a few thousand copies.
A few thousand…what is that? 2000? 5000? I should have asked her, but that made me hopeful. Five thousand is still a lot of copies, but holds a lot less pressure than 100K copies.
I’d like to get a book deal for the memoir I’m working on, but I’ll have to prove I can sell a few thousand copies. While I have 17K social media followers, 600 newsletter subscribers, and 50 blog visitors monthly, that doesn’t mean all of them will buy my book.
I sold a few hundred copies of Vegan Marketing Success Stories (even fewer of my first book), and publishing a double-niche book taught me a lot about marketing and self-publishing.
It makes sense now why I heard 20,000 copies as a magic number. It’s enough copies to make a small publisher happy, and a large publisher to say it was worth signing with an author.
I think back to a vegan author who launched a book in 2024 and posted a video saying they were depressed because they had no job and felt so much pressure to sell books. They weren’t signed with a top 5 publisher, but it was one of the top publishers in the vegan world.
The publisher had put the book on pre-sale nine months ahead of the launch date, which is WAY too early to be marketing a book, in my opinion.
The author is fairly well-known in the vegan world and has tons of followers, but again, followers don’t always translate to book sales, especially if your audience is already composed of vegans and you’re publishing a book targeted to non-vegans.
I bought the ebook for C$35, the same price the paperback was, just because I felt bad for the author. I would never buy an ebook for that much. It all seemed to work out for them, though. They landed a job and started smiling in their social media content again.
If you don’t have the confidence to sell 5000 books, maybe self-publishing or hybrid publishing is the better way to go.
On advances: Expect to sell the number of copies for each dollar you get paid.
Advances—payments to authors upon signing a deal, before a book is published—can be awesome. An advance offer from a publisher of any size is a nice stroke to the ego and gives you confidence that a company will invest in you and pay you for the time you need to write your book.
But again, the level of the advance correlates to sales expectations. Authors who don’t get an advance offer means a publisher wants to invest in your idea, but they don’t have high sales expectations.
This can be good, because even though you’re not getting paid for writing the book and spending time with editors, you’ll start earning royalties as soon as your book launches (note, publishers usually pay two to four times per year. I know, not a great pay frequency!).
If you earn a $100K or even a $1m advance, your publisher will expect you to sell 100K or 1 million copies.
Remember my client who got a six-figure advance to write her book in a few months? She’s sold 75K copies in the last 7 years, but is still 5000 to 7000 copies away from earning out her advance (80,000 to 85,000 copies). That means she has not yet received a penny in royalties despite hustling to speak on stages and top network news shows and podcasts, and mailing out copies to Patreon subscribers.
It’s worth considering turning down the offer of an advance to earn royalties faster.
There you have it, folks. There’s no single answer, but 5,000, 20,000, or 100,000 is the number, depending on your existing audience and the size of the publisher with whom you expect to land a deal. No publishing deal, no sales expectations.
Need a book coach, ghostwriter, or editor to help you publish your book so you can get it in the hands of readers? Read more about my services here and contact me if you’re ready to begin!
