With 365 New Books Published Hourly Can Authors Still Buck Lottery Odds

 

The odds of winning the lottery are one in 292 million fir Powerball and a slightly worse one in 302 billion for Mega Millions. But that does not stop millions of people from spending over 100 billion dollars this year for a slim shot at a pipe dream. Writers should be able to relate, for the odds of getting a book published and getting it to become a sales success are quite slim as well.

Over three million books were published last year, according to a recent Publishers Weekly article. That equates to roughly 8,767 new books released into the marketplace every day. This includes weekends, holidays, and snow days. That is 365 books per hour – or one new book every 10 seconds. If it took you a minute to get this far into my blog post, six books just got added to the competition.

It breaks down to 563,000 books coming from traditional publishers and 2.637 million from the self-published class, which includes hybrid publishers. That is a ton of books. Don’t forget, the year before that saw three million books produced. And the decades prior to that saw tens of millions of more books published. In the digital era, nothing goes out of print.

However, just because getting an ISBN and making a book available for sale on Amazon as a print-on-demand product, an e-book, or an audiobook technically qualifies you to say your book is published, it is another thing to say it is marketed. The number of books actively marketed shrinks that three million number to well below one million. Still, that is a lot of books.

Now, to what degree one markets — for how long, spending how much effort or money, and how smartly one does it, further cuts down the number of active books by probably another two-thirds. Still, that lives you competing with 350,000 books, or almost 1,000 new titles a day.

Of those 350,000 books that are marketed effectively, there still may be deficiencies plaguing them. One could be the book’s price. It might be too high. Or maybe the title stinks or the cover is ugly. Or worse, the book is mediocre or even bad. Yes, books can be marketed effectively, even if they have warts, but eventually word-of-mouth catches on to sink a book if the criticisms are rampant.

So, what is the take-away here? The marketplace is flooded with books, many of which do not get marketed much or effectively. Of those that get the time and money to be marketed properly, many of those books aren’t that good. The great book with a great marketing campaign still has a chance to breakthrough.

I have said it across many of my 5000 blog posts over 13.5 years: For a book to have a chance at success, it must be marketed. Your book could have a cure for cancer, but it won’t get discovered without marketing it intentionally and forcefully. A so-so book outsells a great book if it is marketed better, but a very good book marketed aggressively and wisely will have the best chance to succeed.

Don’t be daunted by the number of books out there. Merely let the fact that you have competition provoke you to take marketing seriously and give it your all to find a path to your targeted readership.

Do You Need Book Marketing & PR Help?

Brian Feinblum, the founder of this award-winning blog, with over 3.9 million page views, can be reached at brianfeinblum@gmail.com  He is available to help authors like you to promote your story, sell your book, and grow your brand. He has over 30 years of experience in successfully helping thousands of authors in all genres. Let him be your advocate, teacher, and motivator!

 

About Brian Feinblum

Brian Feinblum should be followed on www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2024. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully).  This award-winning blog has generated over four million pageviews. With 5,000+ posts over the past dozen years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” For the past three decades, including 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and director of publicity positions at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler. He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.