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Should You Write and Publish a Non-Fiction Book?
Should you write and publish a book? The answer to that question depends on what you are trying to achieve with that activity.
First, a few bits of data.
OK, so it’s official. The floodgates have opened. In 2021, the latest year for which we have data, 2.3M self-published books were added to the pile in the US. As recently as 2017, the number of self-published books produced annually just topped 1M.
I imagine the numbers will be even more astonishing for 2022, given the opportunity the pandemic offered some to finally write that book they had been meaning to write and never had the time.
One of the extraordinary aspects of book publishing is that new books are added to the old in a way that, say, toothpaste is not. Google Books did a study a little while ago and determined that there have been 130B books published since the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440. Someone who publishes a book today, then, is competing with those 130B other books, roughly speaking, many of which are still available in one form or another, for human attention. Toothpaste gets used up, or most of it does, whereas books can be read and re-read as long as they are cared for. So those 2.3M self-published books are part of an ever-growing depository of human wisdom and folly that will soon be in the…
