According to an article in The Authors Guild, “Both publishers and booksellers celebrated the news that print book sales were up 9.1 percent last year [2021]. According to Publishers Weekly, booksellers sold 825.7 million books in 2021, up from 757.9 million in 2020. A huge increase in fiction units sold led the way, with young adult fiction sales jumping 30.7 percent, adult fiction up 25.5 percent, and children’s fiction up 9.6 percent, respectively. All told, print book sales have risen more than 18 percent since the start of the pandemic in early 2020.”

BookScan reported that 609 million books were sold in 2019, and the average U.S. book was selling less than 200 copies per year and less than 1,000 over its lifetime. That being said, a ProQuest Bowker Report cited in a Berrett-Koehler Publishers post in June of 2020 notes that the number of self-published books increased by 264% in the five years preceding 2019, with more than 4 million being self-published in 2019 alone. And that was before the pandemic. And it’s not the fault of ebooks or audio books, whose declining share represented 27% of trade book sales in 2019. The article also notes that a book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore. And mega-bestsellers and backlists continue to gain share at the expense of less well-known authors penning new books.

For authors, this is a pretty grim picture. For book publishers, it’s not that great either. Many authors are taking matters into their own hands, marketing their books themselves rather than depending on publishers to do so. Marketing investments made by publishers are delivering much less return than they used to, meaning they are much more selective in how they spend marketing dollars. As if that were not enough, there is growing competition for books from all kinds of other media, from the old standby, broadcast/cable television, to gaming, streaming, and other online activities.