Amazon book sales for Lulu self-publishers

I deliver as promised: here we are with the estimate of Amazon book sales of Lulu self-publishers. I have decided to limit my research to Amazon sales only as the information is relatively easy to get, and Amazon is Amazon anyway which means that the results are convincing - if you cannot sell a book on Amazon, then where in the world can you? Also, if a title is on Amazon, it means the author is willing to sell to the public, as opposite to some authors who have no such intention and publish just for their family, friends, etc.

I also have to mention that only Amazon knows the exact numbers of books sold, but it is possible to estimate the numbers based on public information available on Amazon.

As a sample, I looked at Amazon sales of 100 random titles published by Lulu in January 2007; they are a mix of all genres, languages, formats, etc. Now we are in July, so the sales should already gain some momentum for these books during the 6 months period.

The results of the estimate of Amazon book sales for Lulu self-publishers are as follows:

5% sell approximately one book a day
10% sell approximately one book a week
28% sell approximately one book a month
45% sold one book or two during the six months period
12% sold none...

So, as we can see approximately 57% of Lulu authors do not sell at all; we cannot consider one or two books during the half-year period as sales, agree? About 38% sell a book once a week or once a month - personally I would not consider these amounts as sales either, that estimates approximately 95% of books as non-selling. 5% as "the best selling authors" of this sample sell a book approximately once a day. How much money is “the best selling author” making with one book a day?

I agree that the sample could be more representative for 1,000 titles or better yet for all Lulu 8,000 titles currently selling on Amazon, broken into categories by genres, formats, prices, languages, etc. If one knows how to use Amazon stats, it can be done. It would be much more time consuming, but I believe the results will not differ much.

Now, is Lulu to blame? No. Whom? The authors. Or better yet, the authors' misconception of print-on-demand (POD) services. Authors often think that publishing with a POD automatically presumes selling books. Nope. Books do not sell themselves and PODs do not sell books, although some of them provide technical tools for selling as Lulu does putting their titles on Amazon.

AUTHORS SELL BOOKS! That means authors' marketing efforts and money (!) must be involved before and after the publication date. No other way to sell books for self-publishers whether they publish with a POD or another type of small press.

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