There were more than twice as many adult nonfiction books than adult fiction books sold in both 2019 and 2020 in the US, according to Publishers Weekly.
Those figures are only for print books, on ebooks fiction massively outsells non-fiction, which is where the 17.7 percent drop in adult fiction sales in print are coming from in your figures. http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/e-book-fans-d...
It is hard to get good figures overall, but if you include both print and ebook, it seems to be about 60% fiction and 40% non fiction.
Sadly, I don't have hard numbers here. Just going with sources such as this[1]. Basically, the fiction market is growing by about 40% currently. To my (admittedly layman) eyes, that is pretty impressive growth.
I think there's probably a lot more trash today. There's a lot more of everything.
The number of books published each year in the US has grown by something like 300x over the past one hundred years, if you only count traditional publishing (and not print-on-demand).
The number of books published annually is somewhere between one million and ten million, depending on how they're counted. Self-published? ebooks? Audiobooks? Etc.
For the most part. There are outliers, especially in non-fiction the ones that makes it onto the bestseller lists at all are often very topical and so hard to predict runaway successes happen. And at least this year thrillers are also doing poorly.
Of the 20 best selling print books for adults so far in H1 2023 according to publishers weekly and Bookscan (so these are not total sales numbers, but they're pretty representative):
Romance: 11 out of 20. The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th 9th, 11th, 19th were all romance by Colleen Hoover alone (2nd and 3rd sold 885k and 882k each).
Non-fiction: 3 out of 20, including the 1st (prince Harry's biography; about 1.8m until end H1)
Non-genre fiction: 3 out of 20
Historical fiction: 1 out of 20
The first and only fantasy novel is the 11th: A Court of Thorns and Roses, which at 350k until end H1 is a breakaway success in fantasy.
Thrillers: 1
The number for e-books could very well shift that somewhat, but if you follow some writers on social media, you'll see romance readers churn through romance novels at an absolutely ridiculous rate.
The thing is the key demographics for fantasy and scifi don't read many books. As part of that demographics who does read, it's very noticeable how much of an outlier I am, and I still read a tiny fraction of what a relatively typical romance reader reads.
EDIT:
> As is often remarked the nerds won.
This is true, but not in books: Bertelsmann owns Penguin Random House and has a market cap of ~15bn Euro, and that also includes e.g. RTL and a bunch of non-publishing assets.
Electronic Arts has a market cap of $35bn. Activision has a market cap of $74bn.
"We" won through scifi and fantasy in other media far outdistancing books.
> The demand for books in the US is also disproportionately driven by women. Surveys over at least the last couple decades have consistently found that American women are more likely to read books than American men, especially when it comes to fiction.
It's in the article, with citations. I just accepted that as a given, from my own anecdotal experience.
Women account for 80% of fiction sales in the US, UK, and Canada [0].
The stats mentioned show that women are more likely to read at least one book by 5% margin, but they buy many more books. The sales show how much more they buy.
Most American households buy around 1 book a year.
Roughly 50% of books are sold to just 2-3% of the market.
There's a power law at work (with, admittedly, a cut-off at the high end). I know quite a few folks who typically buy and read 50-150 novels a year. To make a runaway best-seller, you need to reach out to the 1-book-a-year folks, but to stay in business you've got to keep the 50-books-a-year people happy, because those are your core market.
Regularly reading fiction for entertainment is, these days, a niche market.
Thus my source perfectly illustrated the point I was making. 72% of adults are reading every year, and most are reading several books, this isn't some elitist niche.
If you take 5 books per 1000 people over 20 years, that's 100 books per 1000 people. Of course, many of the same writers are on their 2nd+ novels so 1 in 10 seems unlikely, but I could see 1 in 20 people having a book published in their lifetime if everyone keeps publishing at the same rate they did in 2007
The New York Times Bestseller list covers a population much larger than that. Yet:
"""To make the list, it is estimated that novels sell from 1,000 to 10,000 copies per week, depending on competition. Median sales fluctuate between 4,000 and 8,000 in fiction, and 2,000–6,000 in nonfiction. The majority of New York Times bestselling books sell from 10,000 to 100,000 copies in their first year.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Best_Seller...
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