librarian13579 said:
In general, people care about sales when they are invested in a company's future. We are interested in the success of companies that provide us with art (like movies, TV, and games) because receiving new experiences in the future fundamentally depends on their products selling well. If a product is driven by an individual creator (like books or music), or it's a generic commodity that's serves a function (like cars, power tools, snowmobiles), there isn't nearly the same level of interest, because new products (or functionally equivalent products) will release regardless of how the old ones perform. For example, authors will continue to write, regardless how one of their books may or may not sell. So, we don't have a vested interest in how books perform sales-wise because we know we'll always get new books from an author we like no matter what. In another example, people don't care nearly as much about car sales because people buy a single car and own it for 10 years. If Toyota goes out of business 2 years in that's a shame, but we still have 8 years left on our current car, and we can easily buy another car from Honda which is just as good (if not better). But there isn't really an equivalent when Intelligent Systems goes out of business, because then we'll probably never see Advance Wars or Fire Emblem games ever again...and those products are unique IPs that we get very attached to. I think there is more of an obligation for those type of companies to release their sales data as a courtesy to their fans. |
So it's a courtesy? I get that but again, it's more a personal principle.
And as an aspiring author I just have to say that the bolded is so bafflingly untrue. Not only will authors scale back or stop their writing if it makes them no money, but the overwhelming majority of quality books are published by publishing houses who will, yes, publish low sellers for a time but that will stop. You can't perpetually underperform on the market and expect, say, Random House to continue to spend large ammounts of money to put your books on shelves. And independent publishing isn't cheap if you want to have a shot in the market. You definitely can't keep doing that if your sales are poor. Authors aren't inhumans who live on creative fulfillment, we're human beings who also have to make a living. And writing takes time and effort that if it isn't making money can only be allowed to take up so much of our days.
