Should you write and publish a book?  The answer to that question depends on what you are trying to achieve with that activity.

First, a few bits of data.

OK, so it’s official.  The floodgates have opened.  In 2021, the latest year for which we have data, 2.3M self-published books were added to the pile in the US.  As recently as 2017, the number of self-published books produced annually just topped 1M.

I imagine the numbers will be even more astonishing for 2022, given the opportunity the pandemic offered some to finally write that book they had been meaning to write and never had the time.

One of the extraordinary aspects of book publishing is that new books are added to the old in a way that, say, toothpaste is not.  Google Books did a study a little while ago and determined that there have been 130B books published since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440.  Someone who publishes a book today, then, is competing with those 130B other books, roughly speaking, many of which are still available in one form or another, for human attention.  Toothpaste gets used up, or most of it does, whereas books can be read and re-read as long as they are cared for.  So those 2.3M self-published books are part of an ever-growing depository of human wisdom and folly that will soon be in the trillions of tomes.

Because self-published books tend to sell for less than traditionally published books, perhaps, the total sales for these traditional publishers were $12.65B, down from $13.51B the year before.  That’s on somewhere between 500,000 and 1 M books published in that category.

In the non-fiction world, the world where many readers of this blog live, the average book sells less than 250 copies per year, and 3,000 in the “lifetime” of the book.

So, while accurate numbers are very hard to come by, we can conclude that more and more books are being self-published, while the sales of traditionally published books have been and continue to decline slowly year on year.

Thus, if you want to think about selling a book as a way to make money, you’d better spend a good deal of time figuring out who your audience is and how you are going to persuade them to buy your book.

It’s not necessarily obvious.  Billie Eilish, the wildly popular singer, sold her memoir to a traditional publisher for millions of dollars, and proceeded to sell about 64,000 copies, well above average for a non-fiction book, but horribly disappointing for the publisher who, based on the advance, was hoping to sell a couple million copies anyway.  Why did someone with a social media following of 109M fans on Instagram, for one, sell so few books?  This is one of the mysteries of the book world, akin to the magic formula that makes a movie a runaway success:  no one knows it.

Most people write books not to be sold, but rather to capture an idea, or some intellectual property, or a story, or a memoir.  These are good reasons to write a book, if not a plan to sell it.  Books are a splendid technology, and the best repository of human culture yet devised.  Years ago, when I was researching for my PhD, I held a book in my hand that was 500 years old and looked like it had been published yesterday.  It was in perfect condition.  Books last.  And they are a way for humans to talk to the future, as well as of course the present.

So should you consider adding your book to the enormous pile of books already written and published?  My considered answer is yes, if you have something to say, because that book may be, one day, the only record of your time on earth, your experiences, and your voice.

My mother was an amazing storyteller, and I miss her unique voice in this world every day.  She died with her book unwritten, despite my best efforts to get her to write it.  Don’t deprive the world of your voice.  Write your book.  Don’t expect to sell a million copies.  But don’t let that stop you.  A book is a beautiful way to capture a bit of permanence in a transitory world.