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Authors often don't estimate the number of sales a publisher makes in an accurate way because the news stories are about the bestsellers. I have close contacts in publishing who tell me most debut novels with a major publisher sell about 500. Most other books sell between 1,000 - 3,000 copies. When you think a book needs to sell more than 450 copies to start breaking even you will see that it's not the easiest business to make money in. The major publishers do have the bestsellers and they have the ebooks that are selling well too. But the publishing industry as a whole has many publishers working at break even levels, and even for the large publishers many books make a loss or just about break even. Ebooks do take work. They aren't just easy files to upload that are the same as the print book. And, contrary to rumour, publishers do have a team of editors and proofreaders working on each book, and use this team again when it's converted to ebook format.
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