By the numbers

An inside peek at a minor trade book debut

Goooooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!

This week, I thought I’d do something I wish more people would do: share some of the numbers involved in my latest publishing experience. In the past year, there have been quite a few Substack posts about things like book publication numbers, like this viral one from

Elle Griffin

(and responses to it like this one from

Brooke Warner

or this piece in Slate by

Lincoln Michel

, adapted from a Substack post). Posts like these tend to get attention because there are thousands of people like there who are desperate to know what really goes on in publishing—and I’m one of them!

It’s hard to get that kind of data from a reliable source, though there are plenty of useful newsletters and sites out there. So I thought I’d share just a few of the actual numbers related to my latest book, a short biography of Geoffrey Chaucer for the general reader.

This was not my first book, but it was my first ‘trade’ book (i.e. not for my usual academic audience), though from a relatively small press. I shared the short book proposal I used in this PBP post, and the first PBP ‘How to Write a Book’ online workshop was on the trade book publishing experience (you can read a summary of what went down at that workshop here).

Anyway, let’s dive into some numbers, shall we?