When Is a Book a “Hit”?
In a country of 340 million people, the raw numbers are misleading. Out of more than a million books released each year, most never sell more than a few hundred copies. For self-published authors, 250 copies lifetime sales is average. Even for traditional publishing, most titles don’t break 1,000–5,000 copies.
So yes, selling 10,000 books is a hit for almost any author outside of the megastar tier. For a small press or indie writer, it’s career-changing. For a Big Five publisher, it’s “respectable,” though not necessarily a bestseller. And if those 10,000 copies sell fast, it can land a book on a list like the New York Times depending on competition that week.
📖 1970s–1980s: A Stronger Midlist
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Publishing was more consolidated, and midlist authors (those who weren’t blockbusters but sold steadily) could expect 20,000–40,000 copies of a hardcover and more in paperback.
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Advances were better, and publishers invested in nurturing careers over time.
📖 1990s: Chain Stores and Mass-Market Paperbacks
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Big-box booksellers (Borders, Barnes & Noble) and huge print runs meant that even “average” titles sold decently.
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A midlist paperback could still push 10,000–50,000 copies fairly reliably.
📖 2000s: Amazon & Online Disruption
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Online sales and later eBooks broke the traditional distribution model.
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Print runs shrank. Shelf space in physical stores became harder to get unless you were already a star.
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Midlist sales started collapsing — 5,000 copies was becoming the new “solid” number.
📖 2010s: Self-Publishing Boom
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With Kindle Direct Publishing and other platforms, millions of new titles flooded the market.
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The average sales curve fell sharply: most books (self-pub or traditional) now sell under 1,000 copies lifetime.
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“Success” was quietly redefined: selling 5,000 copies was considered strong, and 10,000 made you exceptional in most niches.
📖 2020s: Current Landscape
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The flood of new titles has only grown — Bowker reported over 4 million ISBNs were registered in 2022.
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Discoverability is the key issue; competition is massive.
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Today, even big publishers often count 10,000 sales as a solid win for a debut or midlist book. For indies, 1,000+ is rare and celebrated.
✅ The drop happened gradually between the late 1990s and mid-2010s, as chain stores collapsed, Amazon rewired the market, and self-publishing massively expanded the pool of available titles. What once looked modest now counts as a genuine success because the denominator (number of books competing) exploded while attention spans and shelf space shrank.
Anti-Intellectual Intellectualism
There’s a cultural mindset worth naming: anti-intellectual intellectualism. It shows up in people who are educated enough to argue against education, convinced that skimming daily news headlines makes them better informed than specialists, while resisting the humility deeper study requires.
This is not a lack of intelligence but a rejection of expertise. Credentials are reframed as corruption. Headlines become “evidence.” Skimming stands in for mastery. It’s a way of having just enough education to scorn the very idea of education.
How Many Americans Fit This?
The numbers tell a story.
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Gallup (2023): only 36% of Americans had confidence in higher education, down from 57% in 2015.
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Pew: roughly a third of Americans say colleges have a negative effect on the country.
That distrust isn’t limited to the uneducated. A chunk of the college-educated also dismiss higher ed as elitist or ideological, yet present themselves as more insightful than the “ivory tower.”
By rough estimate, about 10–15% of Americans could be described as fitting the “anti-intellectual intellectual” mold. That’s tens of millions of people. A minority, but a noisy and influential one.
The Skim-and-Shout Era
Pew Research has found that many Americans admit they consume news only casually or by skimming, yet describe themselves as “well informed.” Social media rewards confidence over depth, and that turns fragments and memes into strong, immovable positions.
The performance of knowledge replaces knowledge itself.
This actually also gets into the workforce as well as too much available information. When you're working 80 hours a week, or 60, or 40, you have a family, possibly, it's a lot to deal with. We need downtime to process and when we don't get that, we have to do the only thing available to most of us...dumb down.
We are at the point we've been expecting for decades, a need to slow not pick up speed. To work less per week (and per day) not more. Not 6 days a week, not 10 hour days, but 4 day weeks. We NEED at least 3 day weekends. We need at least no more than 6 hour days of work.
We’ve reached the point many of us anticipated decades ago—the moment to slow down, not speed up. The future of work shouldn’t be six-day weeks or ten-hour shifts. It should mean four-day weeks, six-hour days at most, and at least three-day weekends. That’s what we need now. Consider cutting hours by half—it would double the number of jobs available while giving people back their lives.
Even back in the 1970s it was clear this day was coming: automation promised to take on the workload, robots were meant to handle the repetitive jobs, and AI would eventually free us even further—for the higher experiences of being human.
So why haven’t we arrived there? Who’s holding us back from this better life? Toxic capitalism. Corporations clinging to outdated measures of productivity. A culture that confuses exhaustion with virtue. AI and robotics already make a shorter workweek not just possible, but practical—if those in power would open their eyes. The tools to liberate us are already here, yet the will to use them for human benefit has been stolen by leaders who serve shareholders over people. What’s missing isn’t capability—it’s courage.
But enough about that...for now.
A Long American Tradition
Suspicion of higher education isn’t new. Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life traced how hostility to “book learning” has been a recurring theme in U.S. culture. From religious populism to political movements, there’s always been an undercurrent that treats expertise as a threat rather than a resource.
What’s new today is the speed and scale of amplification. Social media has given anti-intellectual intellectualism a megaphone, letting opinion without study travel further than scholarship with evidence.
Religion and Anti-Intellectualism in America
Religion has always been entwined with American anti-intellectualism, and that’s still true today. For many, faith provides community and meaning, but it can also reinforce suspicion of secular expertise. In the U.S., certain strands of Christianity frame universities as hostile to belief, science as an enemy of scripture, and intellectual inquiry as a distraction from “truth.”
This doesn’t describe all religious Americans—many scientists, doctors, and educators are devout—but the cultural pull is powerful. It allows congregations to celebrate certainty over questioning, to privilege conviction over evidence, and to treat higher education as dangerous indoctrination rather than a tool for understanding. In this way, religion can act as a cultural amplifier of anti-intellectualism, giving it both moral weight and political force in American life today.
Depth vs. Skimming
Books rarely sell in big numbers, but 10,000 copies still matter. Education produces humility when it works, but when rejected, it fuels confidence without comprehension. America is big enough that even a minority who skim and sneer can shape politics and culture. And the old tension between expertise and populism isn’t going away — it just looks different now, in the age of headlines and hashtags.
