Statistics on my books—sales numbers, word counts

Numbers for people to enjoy.

Nini with maidenhair fern.

This post is for the statistic lovers. First, I will provide the word counts for my books:

• ~15,500, you are a little bit happier than i am (poetry) (2006)

• ~56,000, Bed (stories) (2007)

• ~28,500, Eeeee Eee Eeee (novel) (2007)

• ~9,000, cognitive-behavioral therapy (poetry) (2008)

• ~19,000, shoplifting from american apparel (novella) (2009)

• ~54,000, Richard Yates (novel) (2010)

• ~80,000, Taipei (novel) (2013)

• ~80,000, Trip (nonfiction) (2018)

• ~80,000, Leave Society (novel) (2021)

• ~65,000 Reasons to Live (essays) (????)

I want to write shorter books, under 70k words, for a while. I would like to write a book under 50k words. I like short books.

Now on to the sales. My ex-girlfriend had BookScan due to her publishing job, and she gave me access once and I looked up hundreds of books. I like statistics. I have since I was small. I collected sports cards, Magic: The Gathering Cards, coins, pogs, and other things as a child. I like analyzing and comparing numbers.

Here were the sales numbers for my books in 2018 (this is a screenshot of BookScan):

All of my Melville House books are now out of print. My literary agent got the rights back earlier this year, and we’re going to try to get the publisher of my next book to also publish some of my backlist—the first five books listed in the above screenshot.

With Vintage, I have access to Penguin Random House’s “Author Portal.” Here, I can track my books’ sales. Here are the sales for my recent three books:

Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change has been my steadiest-selling book. I feel like people may be attracted to its cover. It has a lower percentage of ebook purchases than the other books, suggesting, to me, that people see the cover in stores and buy it. Or they see the title. People are interested in psychedelics.

I want more of my books to have my mandalas as the cover in the future. Here’s my most recent mandala, “death mandala”:

Thank you for reading my statistics post. If anyone has any statistics questions, I will answer them.