How Many Books Do You Need To Sell To Make A Living?

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To make $100,000 a year from books, you need roughly 14,000 to 49,000 ebook sales a year, or 12,000 to 39,000 paperback sales, depending on your price. For any other income, divide it by the royalty you make on each sale. One book rarely gets you there, so you need a series of books in every format, set up properly to sell. The rest of this post covers the sums, the mistakes that hold most authors back and why more books help.

How many sales do you need to make a living?

Take the yearly income you need and divide it by the royalty you earn per sale. That is the number of sales you need each year.

For example, $30,000 a year at $3 a sale is 10,000 sales a year, or about 833 a month. Spread across 50 books, that is about 17 sales a month for each book, which looks a lot more reachable than one big seller. The $3 is only an example. Your royalty depends on your price and the store.

Here is what sets the royalty on Amazon:

Those rates come from KDP’s own pages: eBook royalty options, eBook list price requirements and paperback royalties. Check them before you price a book, because KDP changes the price bands from time to time. The 70% band on Amazon.com was widened to $2.99 to $12.99 from 7-Jul-26, according to KDP’s page.

How many books do you need to sell to make $100,000 a year?

Divide $100,000 by your royalty per sale. This works it out with KDP’s rules on Amazon.com, from the pages linked above. The ebook royalty is 70% of the list price minus delivery cost, which KDP gives as about $0.06 a sale on average. The paperback royalty is 60% of the list price, less what it costs KDP to print the book, which for a 200-page black-ink book in regular trim is $1.00 plus $0.012 a page, so $3.40 (KDP paperback printing cost).

Royalties are rounded to the cent. These figures are before tax and before what you spend on ads, covers and editing, so the money you keep is less. Sales outside the 70% countries, VAT and delivery costs on bigger files change the royalty a little.

For a million dollars, multiply the right-hand column by ten: about 290,000 sales of a $4.99 ebook, or about 179,000 of a $14.99 paperback. To work out your own number, put your income goal and prices into my book sales calculator.

Spread over a year, 29,000 ebook sales is about 80 a day. That is why I say one book rarely does it. With 20 books it is about 4 sales a day for each, and a mix of ebook and paperback sales lands between the rows above. What authors really sell is a different question, covered in how many books self-published authors sell, and the first months are in what a teenage author can expect to make in three months.

What counts as making a living?

It depends on your costs. For a rough floor, the US federal poverty guideline for a single person in 2026 is $15,960 a year (HHS poverty guidelines). Use your own monthly costs for your own target.

Most authors are far below that. The Authors Guild’s 2023 survey, covering 2022 income, found a median book income of $2,000 across all authors and $10,000 for full-time authors (Authors Guild, key takeaways from the 2023 author income survey). So the honest answer to “can I live off one book?” is almost always no.

Why do most authors make so few sales?

Most authors publishing on Amazon have no idea how to sell and market their book properly. They may have great books and a market that would buy them, but the books aren’t set up to make the sales. The usual mistakes:

1. They pick topics or keywords people don’t want to buy, or markets so crowded that nobody looks at their book.
2. Their cover, title and description are weak.
3. The book is formatted poorly.
4. They have no plan to get reviews.
5. They don’t run ads against the book.

Each of these mistakes costs the author earnings on that book.

Even with all of that fixed, a single book rarely supports you. There are exceptions, and sometimes you get lucky on the first try, but plan on a series.

How did I start, and what changed?

When I first started self-publishing, I wasn’t trying to make a living. I wanted to know whether it was possible to make any sales at all. I published a random book on a subject I was interested in, then another. I made a few sales here and there, nothing fancy, so I assumed it was hard to make a living from books.

That was a reasonable assumption, since I wasn’t earning enough to live off them. After I studied, and read books, blogs and listened to podcasts, I began to understand that you can win at the self-publishing game, and that you can live off your books.

Why do more books and more formats help?

I have published 230 books, and the royalties put me well above the poverty line. I make sure the books are available as ebooks on Kindle, and in other formats too: Amazon paperback and hardcover, IngramSpark paperback and hardcover, hardcovers on Lulu, and audiobooks on ACX and Audible. When a reader is ready to buy, the book is there wherever they like to read.

On any given day I don’t know which of my 230 books will sell on which platform. That is the benefit. The more books you have, the more options readers have to buy one or more of them. Many books on Amazon make just a couple of sales a year, and a catalog of books in every format works against that. For more on formats, see more money with paperbacks or ebooks. If you wonder how many titles to aim for, read how many books should I self-publish.

If you want help setting up your books to sell, see self-publishing coaching with Chris. Have you found it possible to make a living from your books alone? Let me know in the comments.

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