Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Usually when someone asks about the retail potential [of a book] they mean the number of books sold. But you are right to question the dollar sales as well (number of books x price). An even better way to look at this from the publisher's perspective is the PROFIT potential of the book -- the amount of profit the publisher can expect. After all, that's what really counts, and it is a function of the price, the number of books sold, and the cost/profit structure.

I think of market potential as the group of people who might be interested in what you're selling, and retail potential as a subset of this, based on the price/value tradeoff they perceive.

I am sure that the number of books sold will give you a useful metric - only there is another angle to this, and it is who is buying the book and why. Work that out, and you can derive some of the rest that the others are talking about.

The market is the total number of potential sales avenues: book sales, film rights, stage play adaptations, cartoon characters, sequels, merchandising, and so on. The retail potential of a book is its total sales potential over time in any given readership niche: its niche, how often it's reviewed and recommended, its genre, and story longevity, its following, its appeal. The higher all these things are, the more books are likely to be sold.