How many copies of my book "Land is a Big Deal" will get sold in the first month?

Ṁ732

resolved Nov 16

ALL

0.6%

< 100

29%

101-500

31%

501-750

751-1000

1001-1500

11%

1501-2000

10%

2000+

I wrote a book. It's called "Land is a Big Deal":
www.landisabigdeal.com

It's based on my series of posts on Georgism on Astral Codex Ten:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really

I believe Scott said that the articles collectively received 300,000+ views.

Some facts:

The book is published by a very small publisher (literally the second book they've published)
It's my first book.
I don't have an amazingly organized plan for promotion but I got a lot of great endorsements from some famous people.

I'll post some ranges, pick the one you think is most likely.

Resolution will count all book sales sold across all formats (Book, Audio Book, eBook) and stop counting one month after the book is published October 15, 2022. It will include all preorders made before then.

Further context, this comment from a lady from NPD bookscan on what the most common sales figures for books are:
https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen/comment/8883524

Money quote: "roughly 66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks."

So roll it all together and make your guess about how well you think I will do relative to those odds.

Sep 25, 10:46pm: Also here's what twitter thinks:
https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1574231191741497345

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It also occurs to me this sort of market is one in which I am immensely privileged with insider information as we get closer to resolution -- any thoughts on how that should guide norms going forwards?

@LarsDoucet I'm entirely fine with insider information — imho, the purpose of the market is to convey knowledge, not necessarily be "fair".

It's an issue if this is performed exploitatively, but in general, the more information embedded in the price, the better.

So far we've sold about 300 copies in the first month. On the other hand, the book was quite instrumental in helping me fundraise for my new startup, so it was definitely worth it.

I'll make another market in a bit to predict how many sales it will make by the end of the first year.

@LarsDoucet Any idea how Amazon + etc inclusion would help? Buying from a small, independent publisher may have limited the reach.

Overall, surprised! I bought two copies! 🙂

@andrew We are on Amazon now! Though it took us a while to get ramped up on there -- it only went live a few weeks ago. Also, AFAIK, we just got approved for Audible. So that was a bit of a clumsy rollout. Overall we sold maybe 10-15% on 3rd party platforms compared to direct from the publisher.