How Many Books Do You Need to Sell to Make £100,000?

The number swings wildly depending on your royalty rate and price point. So, how many books do you need to sell to make £100,000? If you are publishing your book through traditional paperback and earning its royalty, then you might have to sell almost 100,000 copies. However, if you are self-publishing your book on Amazon KDP paperback,  you will need to sell 20,000 copies. To identify how many books do you need to sell to make £100,000, compare the royalty rates with the volume of copies you sell.

Table 1: Copies Needed to Reach £100,000, by Format and Route

We made it easy for you to see how many books do you need to sell to make £100,000 using a brief table. You can see how the £100,000 target changes dramatically depending on where your royalty per copy sits. The rates are drawn from the typical UK royalty ranges covered by other guides.

Reading this table:

• For authors, making £100,000 from one book is almost next to impossible with traditional paperback publishing.
• It would take selling more copies than most UK titles ever achieve
• Self-publishing narrows the gap, since you keep a much larger share per sale
• But you’re also funding your own editing, cover design, and marketing to get there

Table 2: Making It Realistic, Spreading the Total Over Time

Let’s talk about the reality of how many books do you need to sell to make £100,000 in one launch month; it is not required to make it in one launch month. You can turn this impossible task into reality by spreading the same total across several years and multiple books.

Reading this table:

It is not a joke if you are wondering how many books do you need to sell to make £100,000. It is possible, but only with the right strategy:

• The last row is the realistic path most self-published authors actually take
• Selling many books each month and consistently improving the number carries the whole target.
• Read-through between books in a series helps get you there
• This puts far less pressure on any single launch

What These Numbers Don’t Include

Most authors forget, while searching, how many books do you need to sell to make £100,000, that you need to exclude some numbers. Meanwhile, Costs you need to exclude from the total amount include book editing, cover design, formatting, ISBNs, and marketing spend. The real-world numbers change based on authors’ assumptions that every copy sells at the full royalty rate. With no discounting, returns, or Kindle Unlimited page-reads end up dropping the selling cost of your booksj.

How Much Money Can You Make by Selling Books?

Skip this question for a second: how many books do you need to sell to make £100,000? Let’s break down how much money you can make by selling books.

In case you are publishing through traditional publishing, you will get an advance of a few thousand pounds for a debut, plus a royalty of roughly 5 to 15% of cover price. The cover price usually ranges from £1 to £2 per copy before you earn any advance.

Self-publishing pays no advance, but a higher per-copy royalty, often in the £2–£6 range depending on price and format, once the author covers printing and production costs.

How Many Books to Sell to Be a Millionaire?

There’s no fixed number — it depends entirely on the royalty rate and price. At £1–£2 per copy (a typical traditional royalty), reaching £1,000,000 would require several hundred thousand copies sold. At a higher self-published royalty, the number drops, but still typically requires hundreds of thousands of sales unless you’re also earning from speaking, coaching, or a large backlist of multiple titles. Reaching seven figures from book royalties alone is genuinely rare.

What Books Sell for a Lot of Money?

• This is a separate topic:  the collectible rare-book market, not new authorship.
• A complete Shakespeare First Folio (1623) sold at Christie’s in 2020 for just under $10 million, the record for any printed literary work
• Scarce first editions of 20th-century classics have also fetched six figures at auction.
• Exact prices vary by edition, condition, and auction, not a fixed value.
• If you own a book you think is valuable, get it assessed by a specialist rare book dealer or auction house, not a general price guide.

What Company Pays $200 per Book Read?

This refers to WordsRated, a research organisation that ran a paid “Bibliophile-at-large” reading role between 2022 and 2024, paying $200 per book analysed for a research project.

• A genuine, limited-run programme, not an ongoing income source
• Reports indicate it’s no longer active
• Not a reliable current method of making money from reading or selling books

How to Make Money Selling Books Online

So, we already explained the reality behind how many books do you need to sell to make £100,000 or more. Let’s look at how much money you can make by selling books online. You can choose from two paths basd on whether you are writing new books or trading existing ones:

For new authors:

• Self-publish through platforms like Amazon KDP, keeping roughly 60–70% royalty per sale after production costs
• Sell directly through your own website or newsletter to avoid platform fees entirely

For reselling existing books:

• List secondhand or rare copies on marketplaces like eBay, AbeBooks, or World of Books
• This is a different business model, closer to book arbitrage than authorship
• Profit depends on sourcing valuable copies cheaply, not on royalties

If you are curious to know about self-publishing your books on Amazon KDP, then learn from our guide. If you want to hire our professional book formatting or proofreading services, check out our publishing services at TheBookPublishing.co.uk.