I bought a secular book the other day about the science behind habit formation, thinking it would be useful for my dissertation. I had never heard of the author but his website said the book had sold 500,000 copies since it was first published in 2013.
In the publishing world, that is a phenomenal number. It can be hard to interpret the book market statistics because there are lots of moving parts, but it seems safe to say the majority of books published each year sell less than 1,000 copies each.
Only 2% sell more than 50,000.
So, half a million is impressive! Wildly successful.
But what surprised me most was the quality of the writing.
Honestly, it is not great. [I am intentionally not using the author's name or the book's title here because there is no need for me to diss either.]
Those purchases were not on account of the sparkling prose.
So why did half a million people buy the book? The logical conclusion is that many are truly interested in the topic.
I think we all aspire to be disciplined and we are looking for someone to tell us how to do it.
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