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stats
Does anybody have an idea where I might find reliable statistics on how many people living in the US right now have actually had fiction published? I'd be interested in that figure for other countries as well, but I'd really like to know about the US. Ideally I'd like to know how many people have published
-- one novel
-- more than one novel
-- one short story
-- multiple short stories (in collected volumes, too) but no novels
-- multiple short stories and one or more novels
For my purposes, I'd exclude self-published work. Now, these figures might not be available from anybody, anywhere, but I'll continue to wonder. There so much in the publishing business which happens out of sight, in an ignore-that-man-behind-the-curtain way.
January 31, 2005 01:31 PM
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Reliable is the operative word, of course, but anecdotally, my publisher claims that about one half of 1% of novels written (that is, complete mss. that, for good or ill, are out there circulating) get picked up. This results in approximately 20,000 novels published each year. He also says that only 10% of those who write one book ever publish a second. I can't imagine what the statistics might be if you include short stories in the equation -- that's a figure it seems it might be extremely difficult to unearth.
Posted by: Karen at January 31, 2005 04:21 PM
So if we take this figure your publisher came up with, that would mean that in any given year, twenty thousand different people had a novel published. Twenty thousand people said to friends and relatives, hey, my novel is being published this week; or, well, my novel isn't doing so well as I hoped; or, my novel got a great review in the Cincinnati Tribune.
In one way, twenty thousand novels sounds like a HUGE number. Who could read that many? In another way, getting a novel published is like winning the lottery. It's that relativity thing, I guess.
Posted by: sara at January 31, 2005 04:58 PM