Few people have any idea how many new books there are every year. According to Steven Piersanti, Founder and Senior Editor at Berrett-Koehler Publishers, quoting a 2023 report in Publishers Weekly, 2.3 million books were self-published in the US in 2021. And a recent industry estimate is that each year “between 500,000 to 1 million . . . new titles are published through traditional publishers.” That means the total number of new books published every year is now about three million in the United States alone. So, you might think somebody must be making money from all that activity. Well, the facts, as Michael Castleman reveals in The Untold Story of Books, don’t support that. It turns out that practically nobody makes money from books. Only the biggest companies turn even modest profits, and they do so by paying their employees poorly. Many are subsidized by the major media companies that own them. And books contribute only a minuscule amount to Amazon’s growing wealth. Meanwhile, apart from a few superstar authors, the people who are making the least are ones who write all those books.
Few authors make much money from writing books
And things aren’t any better elsewhere in the world. It’s difficult to tell how many millions more new books appear in print every year in other countries. But there are robust publishing industries in China, Japan, and Europe. For example, Chinese publishers alone brought out some 500,000 new titles in 2022. And another 180,000 to 200,000 come out in the UK every year now. Chances are, though, that, with the exception of a handful of number one bestselling authors, nobody anywhere in the world is making much money from writing books.
The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing by Michael Castleman (2024) 264 pages ★★★★☆
The evolution of publishing as a business
The first 450 years
Over the six hundred years since Johannes Gutenberg published the first book in Europe, the relative relationship of authors and publishers has varied greatly. Castleman describes “three distinct epochs with three different economic strategies (‘business models’).” During the first 450 years through the end of the nineteenth century, it was an author-centric cottage industry, ‘author-centric’ because entrepreneurial writers formed its core. Publishers, as we know them, did not exist.” However, thinking of authors as “entrepreneurs” was misleading. In fact, it was several hundred years before some—emphasis on some—writers began to make a living from their craft. Nearly all writers paid printers to publish their work. And the printers
The 20th century
“During the late nineteenth century,” Castleman writes, “publishing industrialized, and literacy grew. Over several decades, Gutenberg-style hand-operated presses yielded to huge steam-driven machines that could print thousands of books in the blink of an eye. By World War I, industrial publishing produced the second book business, now called ‘traditional publishing,’ though it lasted only eighty of the book business’s six hundred years [until the end of the 20th century]. The new model was publisher-centric.” In other words, publishers called the shots. Even after writers earned the right to demand contracts and fixed royalties, it was many years before publishers yielded to the courts to allow writers to audit their books when they suspected their publishers were cheating them. And, since such audits cost a great deal of money, only a handful of supremely successful authors managed to arrange them.
The 21st century
“From 1970 through the millennium, publishing witnessed more than three hundred mergers. During that period, the number of ‘major’ publishers, the New York houses with familiar names, decreased from several dozen to just five, the Big Five.” Then, “around the millennium, the digital revolution launched the third book business. Computer technology—digital book design, desktop publishing, e-books, and print-on-demand—powered a streamlined model that once again dramatically reduced books’ unit cost” as industrial printing had done more than a century ago. And now, “publishing has become increasingly sales-and-distribution-centric, dominated by Amazon.”
No doubt you’re aware that some authors have grown rich from writing—and they’re all novelists. J. K. Rowling, Dan Brown, James Patterson, Danielle Steele, John Grisham, Stephen King, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Nora Roberts, Jeffrey Archer, and a handful of others have amassed fortunes from selling millions of copies of their novels. Perhaps a few thousand, even tens of thousands, have managed to support themselves and their families from writing books. (However, many of them may well have earned far more from selling movie rights or writing screenplays for Hollywood rather than from their publishers.) For the rest of us, writing books can have been only a sideline. And there are millions upon millions of us.
On a personal note
As you might be aware if you’ve been reading my reviews for awhile, I’m deeply involved in the world of books. But you probably don’t know the extent of that involvement. You know I review books—more than 2,200 of them since 2010—and that I’ve written some of my own. (Depending on how you might choose to count, the total number is about twenty if you include late editions in which I pretty much rewrote the whole book.) And they’re all nonfiction. In fact, I wrote almost all those books for professional audiences (nonprofit fundraisers and business executives). None have been novels that might have stood a million-to-one chance of making me money. And in reality I’ve never made more than $10,000 in a single year from book royalties.
By the way, those books appeared under the imprint of eight different publishers. So I’ve had broad experience in dealing with the publishing industry. But I’ve also edited a lot of books, sometimes for friends, and sometimes for publishers. Probably about two dozen to date. I also served for a year on the board of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, and I even ran my own tiny publishing venture more than thirty years ago, producing and selling not just a few of my own books but also several by other authors. So, yes, my connections to the publishing industry are robust, to say the least.
All told, I suspect I’ve lost money from writing and publishing books.
About the author
Amazon tells us that “Michael Castleman is a journalist and novelist, author of more than 2,000 newspaper, magazine, and Web articles, 14 consumer health books, and four mystery novels. . . For 35 years, he has been a prolific freelance medical journalist focused on optimal health, mainstream medicine, alternative therapies, nutrition, fitness, and sexuality. His nonfiction books have a combined total of more than 2.25 million copies in print.” Yet, as he discloses in this book, there have been many years when his income from his books has been vanishingly small, far below what might support him for a month, let alone a year.
Castleman holds an MA in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, where he later taught medical journalism. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, who is a family physician. They have two adult children.
For related reading
You’ll find other enlightening books at:
- My 10 favorite books about business history
- 20 top nonfiction books about history
- Gaining a global perspective on the world around us
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