This is deeply unrealistic. Let’s look at some numbers: • According to the best estimates, the average nonfiction book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 2,000 copies over its lifetime. • The competition for sales is fierce. Bowker estimates that in 2015, there were about 1 million new books published (that is total books, not just nonfiction). • Other estimates put the number at about 300,000 books pub- lished—just in America.4 • This is in addition to the 13 million+ that are already in print (again, all types of books). • There is large supply, but not a big market. The total market of nonfiction book sales is only 256 million print copies sold in 2013 in America, and that includes all adult nonfiction catego- ries combined. That’s a little under one book per person sold in America. • According to BookScan, only about 250 books per year reach 100,000 copies sold.5 • The books that sell 1 million per year is even fewer, probably around 20 (and almost all of those are fiction). • The list of books that have sold 10 million copies in history is so small there is a Wikipedia page about them. The facts are clear: very, very few books sell a lot of copies. The reality is, if you sell even 10,000 copies of a nonfiction book, that is very good, and you should be very happy with that. For most nonfiction authors, the return on time invested is horren- dous if you measure it only in terms of the expected value of book sales. It’s basically the same thing as saying that your retirement 4 “Books Published per Country per Year.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, September 14, 2019. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year. 5 Kremer, John. Quora.com. John Kremer, August 24, 2015. https://www.quora.com/Books/ Books-How-many-people-each-year-write-a-book-that-gets-100-000-copies-sold. 364 · ThE SCriBE METhOD