As someone who has a full time job and has self-published a novel I wrote in my spare time, I do not think that supply of books is the issue. In fact, as I went through the process of learning how to self publish, I met many people who write in their free time, including people I know and friends of friends I don’t know. I was actually surprised by how many people there are who have either already self published or who have an unpublished book they work on in their spare time.
From my experience, the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read, and when they do read, it’s usually a super popular book all their friends have read or that Tim Ferris talked about. When I published my book, I was surprised by how many close friends and family bought the book to support me, but have never opened it. And it wasn’t until after I published my book and became more aware of the reading habits of those around me that I realized how little most people read these days. There are a handful of people who read 30-50 books, but if you were to take the median so those people don’t skew the average, I’d estimate that it’d come in around 1-2 books. Probably half of the people in my life don’t read a single book in an average year.
While I never wanted to make a living off my book, I’ll admit it was discouraging to see how few people read it cover to cover. I took Mark Dawson’s course and got all of the social ads, lead magnet, etc. setup. The ads did work, but I quickly found out that of the subset of people who do read a lot in the US, most are 60+ and want self-published books to be either $0.99 or free. I had multiple angry old ladies reach out to me through my Facebook ad complaining that they weren’t going to pay $2.99 for a self-published book and that it was upsetting I’d even try.
It wasn’t all bad and I did find readers who genuinely enjoyed my book and supporting self-published authors, but these type of people are a very small percent of the population. If the average person read 15 books per year and was ok paying $10 per book to support authors, I think you’d see a lot more self-published books. From my anecdotal experience, there are plenty of people who aspire to write, but we lack a supportive reading culture to fully cultivate authors (even part-time authors).
EDIT: I’ll also add that among the people in the median reading 1-2 books per year, most are listening to those books as audiobooks. I’m not one of those people who say listening to books isn’t reading, but for the average full length novel it costs about $10k to get an audiobook made, which is way outside the budget for anyone trying to publish books as a hobby. I paid for an audiobook to be made because I have the income and thought it’d be a fun experience (which it was!), but I will never make enough from the book to cover that expense
After graduating college at the age of 22, I've read between 20-50 books every year.
I'm often surprised at how far ahead of the bell curve I am. I am very rarely able to have a conversation about literature with people in real life. If I'm lucky enough to find someone that's read a recently published book I've also read then they often haven't read anything else by the same author. Or they haven't read the influences the author had for the book. Or they aren't aware of the genre trends the book took part in.
When I was younger I would read ten to twenty books a year, of all genres. As I've gotten older it's dropped to one to two, entirely history books. Part of the problem is discoverability. There's too much stuff, and places like Goodreads aren't good at sorting through them. Since most things get limited physical releases these days you don't find them at book stores or libraries like you used to. I also refuse to support Amazon in any way because I'd rather give the money to the authors directly. Problem with that is the only way to do that most of the time is with pre-orders or drops, and by the time I found out about these authors or that particular work those are long since over.
Goodreads discoverability seems pretty good to me. I'm constantly finding new books through their recommended algo, front page, curated lists and search. What else could they do to improve that?
For example, if I wanted find more beatnik related books (after reading On The Road) I search lists and find this fantastic community scored collection with more books than I'll ever want to read on the subject: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/89976.Beatniks
A big problem for me is I can't just open to a random page and start reading to see if it's worthwhile. I have to jump over to Google Books, and that can be iffy as to whether or not they have samples I can read. Google Books also isn't good about searching by title, and I often have to use the author's name in combination or search by ISBN, and I don't always have those. Google Books does have the useful facet of searching by release, so if a book's been re-released under a new publisher or with a new foreword or something it'll tell me that.
I maybe used to read 30+ books a year. (And subscribed to a lot of magazines.) I’m not sure I read many fewer words these days but I read far fewer books—maybe 5-10.
Self publishing causes a huge increase in noise since there are no barriers to getting published. So there's a big risk you'll pick up some garbage, but also vast supply which drives down prices. It also means new books on popular subjects can be quickly written, so unless you have some credentials the odds are stacked against you. So i think it comes down to marketing one way or another.
I plan to write a book one day, but mainly as an aid to establishing my credibility for courses I'll run, so marketing from the other direction.
I feel this. I write non-fiction in the tech industry. I start every project estimating the potential number of readers. My second book is the only one written for a particular profession. I calculated there were at least 20,000 people in the profession. Over 13 years it has sold about 2,000 copies.
I have also written the only history of the IT security industry. I update it every year. It too only sells 2,000 copies per edition.
Definitely not a way to make a living.
> the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read,
I got back into reading, but its been an effort. Books are big and expensive, my library actually doesn't have stuff available often so I'm always on a wait list. Its hard tough to find time let alone quiet time to focus on a book. So many distractions around, roommates, city noise, neighbors making noise.
The thing is when I read more books, I’d pull out a book if I had a dead 15-30 minutes more or less anywhere. Nowadays it’s easier to default to Facebook, random links, etc. in those sorts of slots.
Most men, at any rate, wore a jacket almost everywhere (as in: suit jacket, sport coat, blazer) in the heyday of pulp fiction, when quite a few could make working-class wages pounding out words on a typewriter.
What do those jackets have? Big hip pockets. What fits perfectly in those, hardly even affecting the drape, with enough room to spare that they can slip in and out effortlessly? Slim little pulp fiction books. Hell, many are even big enough for a volume of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to fit OK. Can't cram a glossy in there, but pulps? Yep.
Plus, yes, there were no cell phones, but if you want to carry a book today, where do you put it, if you don't have a bag (and even if you do, that's not convenient, is it?)? Well, on your phone, as an ebook, since that fits in a jeans or trouser pocket, and practically no dead-tree books or e-readers do... oh but look, you have some notifications! And there goes the 15 minutes.
Women often carry purses. And who still reads? It's largely women. I'm sure there are other reasons, but—hmmmm.
Yeah, same, it’s about ergonomics and tendencies over a population, though. Hard to make a book as small as a cell phone that is really readable (it’d probably have to be spiral-bound, for one thing, or have ultra-tiny print crammed on the outer 2/3 of the pages), and lots of cell phones already barely fit in a trouser pocket.
I've been reading about 5-10 books a year for the last 10 years or so, after having not read anything of substance (outside of school) for some years prior to that.
Since my reading time is limited, I want to read books that are really good. I have to say, quite frankly, that many books just aren't that amazing (and I'm including both traditional and self-published in this). That makes me reluctant to pick up a book unless it's from an author I already know, comes with a really strong recommendation, or just has a superb opening. If a book doesn't have at least one of those three (or ideally two), I'm just not going to pick it up.
This is all anecdata, but my point is the demand side is more complicated. Even given the competition, the vast availability of both traditionally and self-published books doesn't guarantee that quality goes up, at least in aggregate.
At 5-10 books a year, there's also the "problem" that you've got more than a lifetime supply, just sticking to time-tested, very-likely-to-be-excellent classics. That's even true for relatively-modern genre fic and such, these days—it's not the 1960s anymore, you can fill shelves and shelves with good-reputation sci fi and fantasy. This is all true even if zero new books are published... ever.
The demand side is also that for people who do read their spending may be down. I used to buy roughly $400 in books a year. I now buy maybe 1 book a year and subscribe to kindle unlimited for everything else. I don't think I'm reading much less but authors are certainly making less per read, especially since 30% of my spend on KU goes to Amazon and any book that has a publisher still needs to give the publisher their cut out of the remaining 70%.
I think your $400 a year might be a bit of an outlier. Personally I would say the $140 I'm spending per year via KU is probably more than I was spending before. If you multiply this out by the number of people with KU subscriptions it wouldn't surprise me if that's actually more money flowing directly to authors than before.
I guess it depends how much you like paperbacks but they were fairly good at getting me to buy hardcovers because I wanted something right when it came out and didn't want to wait for a paperback. At $40/hardcover $400 is less than a book a month. A KU subscription is less money flowing into the system than someone buying 1 hardcover per quarter.
While there may be less demand for books, I am less sure of the corollary that there is less reading. I remember when Harry Potter was having its hey day, and the Amazon Kindle was first announced, there were stats showing that worldwide reading blipped up.
I suspect folks these days read faster, and read more words, than people past. Except it might be content like Hackernews, YouTube comments, X/Twitter and other doom scrollers, that make that up.
Less reading imho, is a symptom of increasing hours worked (which is also linked to lagging livable pay). The US has been increasing the hours worked. Less leisure time and less disposable income drives a host of negative effects.
I'm pretty sure it's just more options, mainly social media. Everyone I know has plenty of leisure time to browser stuff on their phone, but book reading is a distant thought for most.
Yeah, I really doubt people would read much more if they worked less. You need a combination of literacy and a longer attention span, and these qualities are strengthened by reading more often. If you go forever without reading a book, it's harder to read through long books with advanced language that you used to be able to read effortlessly—and this is not because you don't understand the language, but because you lack the willpower to continue, since it's a bit mentally tiring to if you've fallen out of practice. At least, that's my experience, having gone through long stretches of time without reading.
So, based on my own experience, I think most people who don't read actually wouldn't be able to read more given more time. They would need to practice reading books that are easy on their level (both literacy level and attention-span level), and gradually advance to longer and more difficult books to read.
As much as I dislike publishers gatekeeping what gets read, It's a big ask to commit several hours to a self-published book. This is one thing I like about Japanese light novels, I can look up the release calendar and pick out a few that look interesting. They are a relatively quick read and only around $7 (about half that if you live in Japan).
I feel it's not so much that people don't read, it's that people don't read books anymore in lieu of other mediums (most prominently social media) or methods (eg: watching television, playing games with a story component).
We all do plenty of reading in our lives, after all.
This is not true at all. The empirical evidence shows the exact opposite: Americans tend to read far more than almost all other countries.
This "we Americans are a bunch of ignorant louts who don't read" narrative is a distressingly persistent misconception illustrating self-hating biases popular with certain segments of Americans. Fortunately, it is entirely false.
What does the data say?
* According to the chart on page 14 of [4], the US is ranked about #8 or #9 in the world (of 200+ countries) in terms of "books published per capita."
* The US "title production per capita," or "books published per 1 million inhabitants," is about 1,000 -- not the very highest in the entire world, but pretty high.[3]
* Over 25% of all books sold in the entire world are sold in the United States, which has about 4% of the world's population. [1]
* More books are published in the US than in any other country but China, which has about 4x the population of the US. [1][2]
* In 2016, the US was by far the largest book publishing market in the world by market value, larger even than China. [4]
A message to all of the vigilantes on HN: I'm sorry that the GOT text ended up in the repo. I actually worked on this project about a month ago and after showing it to a few friends, they convinced me to share it. I didn't think about what I had committed to the repository when I made it public and shared it. This is the first project I have ever shared on HN, so I didn't expect so many people to see it.
I actually tried to remove the text within the first few hours of posting (I was not even home or with my computer), but I removed the text in a separate branch and when I merged it into master it created duplicates of every commit instead of removing the text from the git history. Someone put up an issue on Github later that night and I fixed my mistake early the next morning.
I own all of the ASOIAF books both in paperback and ebook and pay for an HBO subscription for the sole purpose of watching GOT for 6-10 weeks per year.
Ya, I'm going to continue to tune it and try to get a more coherent plot. I think that I will have to (at a minimum) make the sequence length really long, which will make training time even slower.
From my experience, the issue in the US is on the demand side. People here hardly read, and when they do read, it’s usually a super popular book all their friends have read or that Tim Ferris talked about. When I published my book, I was surprised by how many close friends and family bought the book to support me, but have never opened it. And it wasn’t until after I published my book and became more aware of the reading habits of those around me that I realized how little most people read these days. There are a handful of people who read 30-50 books, but if you were to take the median so those people don’t skew the average, I’d estimate that it’d come in around 1-2 books. Probably half of the people in my life don’t read a single book in an average year.
While I never wanted to make a living off my book, I’ll admit it was discouraging to see how few people read it cover to cover. I took Mark Dawson’s course and got all of the social ads, lead magnet, etc. setup. The ads did work, but I quickly found out that of the subset of people who do read a lot in the US, most are 60+ and want self-published books to be either $0.99 or free. I had multiple angry old ladies reach out to me through my Facebook ad complaining that they weren’t going to pay $2.99 for a self-published book and that it was upsetting I’d even try.
It wasn’t all bad and I did find readers who genuinely enjoyed my book and supporting self-published authors, but these type of people are a very small percent of the population. If the average person read 15 books per year and was ok paying $10 per book to support authors, I think you’d see a lot more self-published books. From my anecdotal experience, there are plenty of people who aspire to write, but we lack a supportive reading culture to fully cultivate authors (even part-time authors).
EDIT: I’ll also add that among the people in the median reading 1-2 books per year, most are listening to those books as audiobooks. I’m not one of those people who say listening to books isn’t reading, but for the average full length novel it costs about $10k to get an audiobook made, which is way outside the budget for anyone trying to publish books as a hobby. I paid for an audiobook to be made because I have the income and thought it’d be a fun experience (which it was!), but I will never make enough from the book to cover that expense