Teresa said:Those who do significantly better than that generally have a genius for promotion and a winning personality; they are also tireless in their efforts to promote their books.
No, there isn't a webite that deals with that - if you go into a bookshop and see a recent author who has, say, three different books on the shelves all the time, they are probably quite successful. If there are several copies of each title, certainly so. But do check more than one bookshop. They each vary.
Success depends on expectations for an individual book. Some are bought by a publisher expecting to sell 10,000 paperbacks, another expecting to sell 10,000 hardbacks and 50,000 paperbacks (advances paid to authors vary upon those expectations, of course, which are based on a mixture of publishers' knowledge of the market and subjective love of a book from a new novelist). So there is no template that covers everything, which is usually the case in publishing.
Is there a marketing book or the like out there that I can check out?
I guess that would also depend upon the genre and what type of fiction/non-fiction it is.
Karen
The problem with checking out the book stores in Toronto is that, for the most part they are all owned by one company and their mega-bookstores are ALL the same on the inside. They've done a great job at pushing out most of the independent bookstores in Toronto.
Karen
Yes, there are certainly fewer small, independent book shops here than there were twenty years ago. There have been discussions about this in publishing trade journals and elsewhere for at least ten years. In many towns and cities, it's an exact parallel with supermarkets pushing out small groceries...