Why do so many people want to publish books?
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I read a statistic in the Author’s Guild Bulletin the other day that blew my mind: today, approximately the same number of books published every year as there were during the entire 20th century. A huge reason for this surge is, of course, self-publishing — 2.6 million books were self published in 2023 alone, and between 500k-1m books were traditionally published in the same time frame.
That means about 3 million people every year send a new book out into the world and cross their fingers that people will want to read it. I’m talking about all genres (from novels to memoir to cookbooks to kid lit) and all types of publishing (trad, self, hybrid), but still. That is so many books. Every year.
This makes it incredibly difficult for any one book to break out, and next to impossible if you don’t have a publisher backing you—ie, paying for marketing, pitching you to media, sending ARCs to bookstores and libraries, putting you on panels on festivals and conventions, getting your in bookstores, helping organize events, as well as editing, proofreading, copyediting, using market research to help design covers, fonts, titles, etc. But I digress.
Michael Castleman, the author of the AG piece I mentioned above, found a silver lining to what is essentially very bad news (that we are sellers in an oversaturated market, trying to sell snow to penguins). What he said was:
“Only 20 percent of new titles sell 100 copies. On the other hand, if your book sells 100, it’s in the top 20 percent. Sell 1,000, you’re in the top 6 percent.
“Understand Amazon rankings. Amazon lists around 15 million trade titles in English (plus 2 million more every year). It’s distressing when one’s book ranks, say, No. 1,578,291. But books with rankings better (i.e., lower) than 1,500,000 are selling in the top 10 percent of Amazon’s vast catalogue. If your book ranks better than No.150,000, you’re in the top 1 percent.”
In other words, when you put in context, your sales numbers aren’t as bad as you think they are!
But wait. Am I supposed to feel good about that?