I recently got some information from Oxford University Press about book sales. Readers who wonder, “How much do philosophy books sell?” may find this interesting. I should note that Nietzsche books typically do well (by academic standards), since he has a multi-disciplinary audience of interested readers. I should note that many academic philosophy books (including very good ones) sell far fewer than 1,000 copies.

The 2001 Nietzsche (Oxford Readings in Philosophy) collection (co-edited with John Richardson) sold more than 2,600 copies (all paperback).

My 2004 edited volume The Future for Philosophy has sold (in electronic and paperback formats) nearly 1,500 copies. I couldn’t find figures for hardback sales, but that probably would add a few hundred (library purchases mostly).

The 2007 Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (co-edited with Michael Rosen) has sold about 1,250 copies in paperback and electronic formats (again, I could not find the hardback data, but that would probably only add a few hundred copies).

My 2007 book Naturalizing Jurisprudence (a collection of previously published papers, plus new material) has sold over 1,750 copies in hardback and paperback. (This book also appears in Spanish and Chinese translations, but I have no details on sales for those.)

The 2008 Nietzsche and Morality collection (co-edited with Neil Sinhababu) has sold more than 1,800 copies in all formats.

Finally, my 2019 monograph Moral Psychology with Nietzsche has sold almost 1,250 copies in all formats.

Of course, my best-selling book was the 2002 monograph Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2015), which has sold more than 10,000 copies in English, mostly in paperback. (This book also appears in Greek, Japanese and [soon] Chinese translations.) Until the movie rights are sold, however, I won’t be able to retire…

Now to put this in further perspective: as of 2005, Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) had sold a quarter-million copies in all languages!