> There's no limit to how many books the famous author can sell
There is, of course. The book is interesting within a particular range of cultures, and depends on good translations to be popular outside its native language area.
So, for a hyper-successful book, like "Harry Potter", the potentially interested audience is "merely" a few billion people, and "merely" a few hundred million are potential buyers of the book. 600M books sold worldwide, counting all the books in the series.
Selling 2x as much is highly unlikely, and 10x as much, completely unrealistic. The number of New Testament copies printed since 1450s is estimated to be below 7 billion.
Yes, and the number of atoms in the observable universe is also finite.
I obviously didn't mean it literally. The point is that they don't need to do any personal action per sale. Selling 10x as much does not make them 10x as much tired, while e.g. a lumberjack gets much more tired if he has to cut down 10x as many trees in a week.
This is different from in-person performances, where again giving more concerts is more effort, though giving the concert in a bigger stadium for 5x as many people is again not more effort.
The point is the scalability, or in other words low marginal cost of sales. It becomes a commodity.
Most regular jobs that people do also don't scale. Even in software, custom one-off software for a particular company is still the rule, not the shrinkwrap or public SaaS.
In a more profane context, it's like the difference between a prostitute and an OnlyFans performer. The prostitute with the most clients won't have 100x as many as the average, while orders of magnitude difference in subscribers is common on OnlyFans.
There is, of course. The book is interesting within a particular range of cultures, and depends on good translations to be popular outside its native language area.
So, for a hyper-successful book, like "Harry Potter", the potentially interested audience is "merely" a few billion people, and "merely" a few hundred million are potential buyers of the book. 600M books sold worldwide, counting all the books in the series.
Selling 2x as much is highly unlikely, and 10x as much, completely unrealistic. The number of New Testament copies printed since 1450s is estimated to be below 7 billion.