Sometimes it’s better not to know the statistics of this and that. For example, if I had a particularly nasty cancer I wouldn’t want to know how many people survived (or didn’t) my specific curse. I would just want to know that people had survived, and I could too.
That holds with being published. People get published. So can you (if you aren’t already). So if you aren’t into statistics, stop reading.
If you are into statistics, the good news is that I recently heard that 200,000 books are published per year in the United States. Here is info from UNESCO that cites 172,000 books published in the U.S. during 2005, so the 200,000 figure that I’ve heard is pretty close. (Maybe the 200,000 number is counting self-published books.)
Check out the number of books published by other countries on the list. For example England published 206,000 books in 2005 and Vietnam published 5,581. (Okay, this is really a side note, but did you know that Vietnam doesn’t have copyright laws? That’s why they have photocopied books for sale on the streets, reproductions of the Mona Lisa for sale in sidewalk shops, and pirated movies, CDs, and software for sale just about everywhere. Pretty wild.)
I’ve also heard, but I haven’t been able to verify this yet, that approximately 20,000 of the titles published in the U.S. each year are fiction and out of those, 200 were by first-time novelist. Have you read any statistics that corroborate this information? What do you think of these statistics? Depressing? Or encouraging?
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