Steven Piersanti, Senior Editor, Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Updated April 30th, 2026
- The number of books being published every year has exploded.
According to the latest Bowker data (Publishers Weekly, March 23, 2026), 4.2 million books were published in 2025 in the United States. This is the number of titles that received an ISBN number from Bowker. And here is the truly shocking figure: the number of new titles published each year is 15 times greater than it was 20 years ago. According to Bowker, just 282,500 new titles were published in the U.S. in 2005 (Bowker Report, April 14, 2010). The number of traditionally published titles has more than doubled from 2005 to 2025, to 642,242. But the great growth has been in self-published titles, which account for 3.5 million of the 4.2 million titles published in 2025.
- The book marketplace has become terribly oversaturated.
Not only were 4.2 million new titles published in 2025 in the U.S., most titles published in recent decades are still available for sale on Amazon.com and many other websites. Bowker’s Books in Print database lists 40 to 50 million active titles, and the marketplace simply cannot absorb all these books. The book marketplace is glutted and completely overstuffed. At the same time, people are getting more and more of their information from the internet, from social media, and from AI—taking away much of books’ market share.
- The book marketplace has shrunk in the past 20 years.
Total book industry revenues in the U.S. are no higher than they were twenty years ago, and, adjusted for inflation, they have shrunk. According to the Association of American Publishers, U.S. book industry revenues were approximately $32 billion in 2005 and approximately $33 billion in 2025—showing no growth. But if we adjust these numbers for the approximately 70 percent cumulative inflation in the U.S. between 2005 and 2025, then the U.S. book industry is much smaller than it was 20 years ago, despite the explosion of books published.
- Average book sales are shockingly small—and falling fast.
Combine the explosion in the number of books published with the flat or shrinking total sales and you get plummeting sales of each new title. According to BookScan—which tracks about 85 percent of bookstore, online, and other retail U.S. print sales of books (including Amazon.com)—only 762 million print books were sold in 2025 in the U.S. in all publishing categories combined, both fiction and nonfiction (Publishers Weekly, January 12, 2026). Thus, the average book published today is selling less than 300 print copies over its lifetime in U.S. retail channels. Even if ebook sales, audio sales, sales outside of the U.S., and sales outside of retail channels are added in, the average new book published today is selling much less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime in all formats and all markets. What is skewing these figures down are the tiny sales of most self-published books that have flooded the marketplace. However, sales of traditionally published books are also shockingly small. Kristen McLean, lead publishing industry analyst for BookScan, revealed findings from BookScan’s study of print retail sales in the U.S. of new titles by the top ten publishers in the U.S. trade market (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley). BookScan found that only 33.9 percent of these titles were selling more than 1,000 copies in their first year (Kristen McLean response to the blog “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies” by Lincoln Michel, September 4, 2022). A more recent study of BookScan data found that close to 90 percent of titles published by the Big Five trade publishers fail to reach 2,000 copies sold (“The Economic Realities of Traditional Publishing,” For the Writers, January 16, 2026).
- A book has far less than a 1 percent chance of being stocked in a particular bookstore.
For every available bookstore shelf space, there are 100 to 2,000 or more titles competing for that shelf space. Bookstores typically stock from 5,000 titles (small bookstores) to 150,000 titles (large superstores), which means that, even in large superstores, only a fraction of 1 percent of the 40+ million titles in Bowker’s Books in Print database can be included on bookstore shelves. And bookstores typically devote only 20 to 30 percent of titles on their shelves to new releases (and the rest to bestselling backlist and classic backlist titles), meaning that there are from 100 new releases (in superstores) to 2,000 new releases (in small bookstores) competing for every available shelf space for new releases.
- It is getting harder and harder every year to sell new titles.
There are several reasons why this is true. First, many book categories have become entirely saturated, with a surplus of books on every topic. Second, each new title is competing with millions of other titles available for sale, while other media are claiming more and more of people’s attention. Third, sales of new titles are garnering an ever-smaller share of book publishing revenues. In 2005, new titles accounted for 48 percent of retail book sales in the U.S., but by 2021, new titles had shrunk to only 32 percent of retail book sales (Publishers Weekly, April 19, 2022, citing BookScan figures). Recent publishing reports indicate that new titles have fallen to around 25 percent of retail book sales. And, fourth, in a crowded marketplace, brands stand out, and the book marketplace is becoming more and more winner-take-all, with a small number of high-profile books and authors claiming a huge share of sales. For example, in 2025, one self-help blockbuster, The Let Them Theory, “essentially carr[ied] the entire self-help category” according to a BookScan industry analyst (New York Times, December 30, 2025). Result: investing the same amount today to market a new book as was invested five or ten years ago will probably yield a far smaller sales return today.
- Most books today are selling only to the authors’ and publishers’ communities.
Everyone in the potential audiences for a book already knows of hundreds more interesting books than they have time to read. Therefore, people are reading only books that their communities consider important or even mandatory to read. There is no general audience for most nonfiction books, and chasing after such a mirage is usually far less effective than connecting with one’s communities. Whereas the holy grail of book publishing for many years has been “discoverability” (providing ways for people to learn about books), this no longer is a sufficient driver of book sales because knowing about books that fit one’s interests doesn’t clear the bar for people’s decisions about whether to purchase and read a book, for all the reasons discussed above.
- Most book marketing today is done by authors, not by publishers.
Publishers have managed to stay afloat in this worsening marketplace by shifting more and more marketing responsibility to authors—to cut costs and prop up sales. In recognition of this reality, most book proposals from experienced authors now have an extensive section (often ten to thirty pages) on the authors’ marketing platform and what the authors will do to publicize and market the books. Publishers still fulfill important roles in helping craft books to succeed and making books available in hundreds or thousands of sales channels, but whether the books move in those channels depends primarily on how authors support their books.
- No other industry has so many new-product introductions.
Every new book is a new product, needing to be acquired, developed, reworked, designed, produced, named, manufactured, packaged, priced, introduced, marketed, warehoused, and sold. Yet the average new book generates only $10,000 to $50,000 in sales, which needs to cover all of these new-product introduction expenses—leaving only small amounts available for each area of expense. This—more than anything—limits how much publishers can invest in any one new book and in its marketing campaign.
- New and old book publishing models are collapsing, and many book publishing companies are struggling to survive.
In Berrett-Koehler’s case, many of our competitors have completely withdrawn from the business book marketplace, or scaled down their publishing programs, or been sold, or declared bankruptcy. A major driver of these changes is that over the past few years AI engines have replaced books as where most people go when they need focused and extensive information about particular topics. One of the biggest recent growth areas of nonfiction publishing—generating advanced analytics to determine what topics people were searching for help on and then rapidly publishing books on those topics—has collapsed in the past few years because most people today are finding immediate and surprisingly detailed and helpful responses to their information searches through AI, obviating the necessity for them to purchase a book. Similarly, book selling models built around increasing discoverability of titles don’t work nearly as well as these models once worked, for the reasons explained above.
STRATEGIES FOR RESPONDING TO “THE 10 AWFUL TRUTHS”
1. Authors must increasingly build a business around their books. The books generate leads and customers for the business, and the business supports marketing of the books and helps drive book sales.
2. The main financial benefits of books to most authors today are increasing their speaking, consulting, coaching, and training income rather than book royalties or advances. Books can help authors build their brand, gain clients, and raise their fees. This is spelled out in this article: https://bkauthors.org/what-is-the-roi-of-writing-a-nonfiction-book/
3. The game is now pass-along sales, pre-orders, and bulk sales.
4. Events/immersion experiences replace traditional publicity in moving the needle. Learning about a book through publicity or social media is often not enough to influence people to purchase and read the book. The bar for engagement is now much higher than discoverability.
5. Leverage the authors’ and publishers’ communities.
6. In a crowded market, brands stand out.
7. Master rapidly evolving digital channels for sales, marketing, and community building.
8. Learn to use AI extensively and ethically in book marketing.
9. Build books around a compelling, simple message.
10. Front-load the main ideas in books and keep books short.
