Having been on sale for just under a year and a half, I recently got the second sales report for my book and it’s done better than I hoped. Sure it’s not a seller in the region of JK Rowling or anything, but the sales figures are pretty respectable for a book of this nature, and people are still buying which is a good sign. However, I did wonder just how big the sales were in a physical sense.
- Would it fill up a bus?
- A double decker?
- Would it fill up the space in my office?
- What about my whole house?
I tried working out the volumes but couldn’t believe the figure that was staring back at me, so I gave up on calculating volumes and assumed I’d made a mistake; instead I went for the old ‘how big would it stretch if … " routine. What I discovered was:
- If I were to stack each and every copy of the book that was sold up until June of this year, one on top of each other, it would reach a height of 393 metres.
So, naturally I then went searching for something that was about that height and discovered that my tower of books would be just 20 metres taller than the Empire State Building (actually the Empire State’s top floor tower – there’s another 230 feet from the top floor to the top of the lightning rod).
Now I just need to go to New York to see for myself what that really means. And as for that JK Rowling, I think hers would basically equal the volume of all of downtown Manhattan!