Are you a struggling book publisher? Here is a tip to boost your sales

Publishing books is hard. According to this analysis, more than half of all books published by the top 10 publishers in the US sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s not as bad as the claim you may have come across on social media that more than half of all books published in the US sell less than 12 copies, but it still is pretty miserable. Certainly, selling less than 1,000 copies means the publisher is taking a hit.

Assume you are a publisher who had a string of flops and is on the verge of bankruptcy. How can you save your business? Here is one possibility: Kill your authors. To be more precise, arrange for the premature Big Sleep (get it?) of your most famous authors first, followed by the young ones and if that is not enough to save your company, delete the rest.

Why be so radical? According to a study by Michela Ponzo and Vincenzo Scoppa, the probability of a book entering the bestseller lists roughly doubles after an author dies. The chart below shows how the probability of an author landing on the bestseller list jumps in the weeks after an author is reset. The probability declines every week the body has time to cool off, but at least you as the publisher will have made some money by then.

Likelihood of an author entering the bestseller lists before and after death

Source: Ponzo and Scoppa (2022)

According to their study, the chance of an author ending up on the bestseller list after death is about eight times higher if the author is famous (who cares about an author dying when nobody knows who that person was, to begin with?) and about twice as high if the bucket kicker is aged 65 or younger.

The problem with this strategy is that once you put an author six feet under, she isn’t going to produce any new material. Hence, you must constantly recruit new authors and promote them before they enter a death match to save your struggling publishing company. This gives me an idea for a novel about a bunch of authors put into a ring fighting for survival. I think I will call this novel “The Hunger Games”.