Publishing: The Odds Are Slim

I don’t usually talk doom and gloom, but right now, any way you publish, the odds of success are slim. Whether an author is traditionally, small press, or indie published, the market is crowded.

According to Steven Piersanti at Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 3 million books are being published each year, 10 times the number of books published annually twenty years ago. Yet, people are still buying books at the same rate. It’s getting harder and harder to stand out.

Book sales dropped drastically in 2020, and while they’ve bounced back, they’re still below their pre-pandemic rates. Since publishing typically buys this year’s books two to three years ago, the pandemic just hit publishing. Literary agents have left the industry in droves and most publishers aren’t taking a lot of chances.

The indie-published authors are hustling like no other, but all authors are doing a lot of their own promo work. If you can’t make your own buzz, the odds of your book launch stumbling out the gate are high.

Now, I haven’t ruled out indie-publishing my stories myself. But first, I’d have to write more than one story in a single universe. My research shows that indie authors with romance or mysteries do best, and that’s not what I’m writing, but series often find better traction than standalone novels.

All that said, that’s not where I am. I’m back in the query trenches! I’m sending letters to agents, asking them to take a chance on my book. Traditional publishing would give me a step up in terms of distribution, and of course, there’s that lovely external validation.

I have been in the query trenches before. With my first manuscript, I got several requests from agents for more pages. Yet, after rejections, I took time off to revise that manuscript with the help of a mentor and re-entered the query trenches a year into the pandemic to nothing but form letter rejections. It might have been that I’d already queried the best matches, but I am inclined to believe anecdotal evidence from myself and my friends that request rates have dropped. Significantly.

(Hey, if I can’t believe in my own writing, and that’s why I’ve heard crickets, why should anyone else?)

This doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I have writer friends who have found agents within the last year, and writer friends who have published new books — several of them debut authors! Some were indie-published and some were traditionally published. People are selling books. People are buying books.

While the odds may be slim, they’re a whole lot better when I put my story out there than when I leave it sitting in a folder on my Google Drive.

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Where do you buy your books? When was the last time you tried a new author?
And: Best of luck to all of my writer friends trying to build an audience.