A good marketer always wants to know the competition. For aspiring authors, how much competition is there? The numbers are closely held and hard to pin down. However, I decided to take a stab at it.

In 2004, one source gives the number of books published in the U.S. as 190,000. For 2006, another source (citing BEA statistics) gives the number of books published in the U.S. as 172,000. Sounds like stiff competition so far, right? In fact, out of the 172,000 books, 93% sell fewer than 1,000 copies. A successful book should sell at least 5,000 copies to earn out a modest advance.

More recently another source indicates that in 2007, about 62,000 fiction books were published. This seems to suggest that more than half the earlier totals were mostly nonfiction with some other categories.

The numbers suggest that the number of books published by traditional publishers probably hasn’t changed much or has even declined in the past 6 years.

Self-published books count for a large number of total books published. They haven’t been included in the above numbers, but offer some competition. Lulu claims it publishes 4,000 books a week, which comes to an astounding 208,000 books a year! That’s just for one self-publisher. The vast majority of self-published books only sell a hundred or two hundred copies to the author’s friends and family. For fiction, self-publishing is useful if all you want to do is see your name in print. Most people shouldn’t consider it a money making venture since self-publishing costs anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 and up.

For more on self-publishing challenges, see http://reviews.cnet.com/self-publishing/

For new authors, these are sobering facts. I have seen estimates that between 700 and 1,000 people in the U.S. make their living as novelists. Some will write more than one novel per year. Let’s assume that 1,500 novels each year come from full-time novelists. That leaves 60,500 novels to be written by those not making their living as novelists. This is good news in that it means there’s some chance to break into the field. But not so good in terms of earnings or a long term career.

So where to go from here? I highly recommend any aspiring novelist join a writer’s association to learn about the industry. Also, think deeply on your writing goals.

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