by Joelle Steele

Are you dreaming about making a fortune by writing a book? Do you dream of being the next John Grisham, Nicolas Sparks, Toni Morrison, Stephen King? Okay, time to come back down to planet earth. This is your reality check.

I love to write. I’ve been making my living as a writer since 1973. That’s a long, long time, and so much has happened along the way. My first 50 or so articles and my first five books were typed on a manual typewriter, the ones that followed on an IBM Selectric typewriter, and finally on a KayPro II computer with no hard drive. I’m on my fifteenth desktop computer now and I can do everything from writing my book to typesetting it, designing the cover, marketing it, etc. Ain’t technology great?

Well, yes it is. But there’s also a very serious downside to all this technology. Prior to about 2000 or so, the average number of books published in the U.S. was around 15,000 titles per year. Only about 1,500 (10%) were classified as fiction (which is considered a minority market because most people read non-fiction). A novel that sold 10,000 copies in the first year was said to be doing very well and an author could expect to receive about $5,000 over the lifetime of their book (a lifetime is 3-5 years). Million-sellers were rare and still are. They just get all the attention.

But, listen to this: As of 2016, there were more than 700,000 titles published or self-published in the U.S. That’s 50 times the number of titles from previous years! Of those 700,000 titles, 91,000 (13%) were classified as fiction. An average publishing house is expected to sell about 1,000 to 3,000 copies of a book in its lifetime, earning an author a total royalty of about $1,000 to $3,000 over the book’s lifetime. The average self-published novel sells less than 500 copies in its lifetime. Ebooks sell about 250-300 in their lifetime — not that they’re aren’t exceptions.

What’s going on here? It’s actually very simple. The biggest book buyers are libraries. An estimated 100 million people borrow rather than buy, and bigger libraries generally buy more than one copy of the most popular books. But, there are only about 119,000 libraries in the U.S., and each of these libraries can’t begin to buy and house all the books that are being published each year. And those 100 million borrowers are only able to read an extremely small percentage of the books published each year – if they’ve even heard of one-tenth of them.

In the U.S., an estimated 170 million people read books each year. About 95 million of them read 5-10 books per year and about 75 million read one or more books per month. Only 72,000 (42%) read fiction. This means that 42% of all readers are reading the 13% of books classified as fiction. As you can probably see, those 72,000 fiction readers cannot possibly read all or even many of those 91,000 fiction titles.

There are way too many books for libraries to buy and house, and too many books for even the most voracious readers to read. Publishers are struggling to stay alive. They rarely pay advances anymore, and they generally press the marketing duties onto their authors. Royalty rates of 10% on domestic retail rates and 12% on foreign or domestic second publishing runs have remained unchanged for almost 100 years. The cost of producing and marketing books has not kept up with the cost of living for writers.

Self-publishers are now the biggest share of the publishing market, mostly relying on ebook format, mostly in Kindle’s limited use “mobi” format (the rest of the world reads “epub” format). The majority of self-publishers can’t write their way out of a paper bag, and their works take up an abundance of space on the Internet that makes it hard to find high quality books. Even books published by mainstream publishers have diminished in quality in recent years.

Still want to be a writer? That’s up to you. Just remember that it’s a struggle to find well-written good books to read these days. They’re out there, and maybe yours is one of them, but it can be quite a challenge to find your readers and for them to find your books, regardless of whether you go with a royalty publisher or decide to self-publish. Either way, be prepared to devote a significant amount of time to marketing.