Austen business is booming

Jane Austen “is on course to have her best year since 2009,” the UK publishing industry magazine The Bookseller reported recently. “In the first 28 weeks of 2025, more than 78,000 Austen novels were sold, compared to 64,000 last year and 60,000 the year before.”

It’s unclear to me whether those numbers account for worldwide sales or just a subset thereof. But however you slice it, it seems clear that Austen—or at least the many publishers who market her out-of-copyright work—is doing pretty good business in her 250^th birthday year.

But how good is that business, exactly? After all, the six-month sales numbers reported above cover six books—perhaps more, if you count Sanditon, Lady Susan, and other minor pieces. That works out to annual sales of something like 20,000 to 25,000 copies per title.

From one perspective, that’s not a lot. Using the above numbers, Austen is on track to sell 166,000 books this year, up from 120,000 two years ago. Traditionally published authors typically earn royalties of only a dollar or two per book, which suggests that a hypothetical still-alive-and-under-copyright Austen might be earning $240,000 to $332,000 a year—a very comfortable income, certainly, but not hedge-fund-manager territory.

On the other hand, not many new books sell as well as Austen’s old ones: Fewer than 7 percent of the 45,571 books published for the first time in 2022 sold 10,000 copies or more, according to a 2023 Substack post by Christian publisher Len Wilson, and nearly two-thirds sold fewer than 1,000 copies. By that standard, Austen is very successful, for a writer—and that’s not even counting the money from movie rights and merchandise licensing that an alive-and-well Austen would be entitled to.

But of course she’s not around to leverage her success into speaking fees and cushy teaching gigs, or to boost sales even further via indefatigable self-marketing—a witty, self-deprecating Instagram post inviting fans to celebrate her anniversary milestone, say, or a tabloid spread covering her visit to the set of the new Netflix adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

During the six years that she was a published author, Jane Austen earned about £684 from her writing, an amount that translates into something like $60,000 in today’s money, depending how you calculate.* Today, she makes a lot more money . . . for everyone else. It may have come to your attention already that the universe isn’t fair.

* For insight into the complexity of this question, take a look here, here, or here.