Some Sobering Statistics

A member of a writing group to which I belong directed us to a post by Bluenana last year in which she drew attention to a series of statistics from the June, 2007 Index to Harper's Magazine.

The ones that I found most interesting were these tracked by Nielsen BookScan:

Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. in 2006: 1,446,000
Number of those that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000
Number that sold more than 100,000: 483

Or, to put it another way:

Out of the 1,446,000 books released in 2006, 78% sold less than 99 copies while 22% sold more than 99 copies. Of that 22%, less than 1% sold more than 100,000 copies.

Sobering statistics. I'd like to know how many of that 78% were self-published books.

See Bluenana's post here.