self-publishing versus traditional publishing
Posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 by Ian TuttleIndividual Book Titles Published in the U.S., by Year
2009 totals: 288,355 books traditionally published, 764,448 books self-published. (Statistics from Bowker. Download full stats here).
3 Comments » | Posted in The Publishing Frontier | 
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So a 4:1 ratio in favour of self-published books.
How many of these books get read?
How many sell more than a 100 copies?
Good question Adelaide! I think it’s nice to see that traditional publishing is still holding steady (at least for the time being!). And I suspect that traditional publishers’ jobs will be increasingly focused on content filtering. With so many books available, people may start paying a premium to ensure they aren’t wasting their time and money on junk literature.
Here’s what I’d like to know: out of the 1,000 (or 10,000) top SELLING books in the past 20 years by units and dollars, what is the distribution between traditionally-published and self-published? That is what’s significant.