I'm not sure who this might interest, but there are always a few people who ask the sorts of questions that are partly answered in the diagram below.
These are sales from Voyager (UK + New Zealand + Australia) and Ace (US + Canada), plus whatever either of them can sell around the world in English.
I'm published in nearly 30 languages, but the majority of my sales are in English and are shown below.
It's surprising that, with a population five times that of the UK, the US only buy a similar number of my books.
Sales data up to 2025 - UK (blue) + US (red)
US data lacks audio sales for first 3 trilogies
US total = 1,619,000 (+ unknown US audiobooks for first 3 trilogies)
English total = 3,335,000 (+ unknown US audiobooks for first 3 trilogies)
Note:
- You always expect sales to decline across a trilogy.
- The longer a trilogy has been out, the more time it has had to make sales - though most will happen early on.
- The third book of the Library trilogy had only been out 6 months when these numbers came in, and was not yet out in paperback.
We could draw a line through the lot which agrees with a roughly 6:1 ratio between sales and Goodreads ratings.
If we look at sales (in English) vs number of ratings we get this graph:
This agrees with my old study where the ratio was ~ 8:1. Back then there were far fewer Goodreads users. More recently the ratio has been closer to 4:1, so having a 6:1 ratio averaged over those 14 years makes sense.
Looking at the more recent books (closer to the origin on this graph and including TBTWB a bit further along) you can see a lot of support for a 4:1 ratio more recently.
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