Wonder why you’re having a difficult time getting your book noticed? I’ve been going through some of my old files (time to update and throw away) and came across a sheet showing 2006 Publishing Statistics as reported by Nielsen Bookscan. I’m not going to post all of the statistics in that report, but here are a few:

• 950,000 published books sold fewer than 99 copies
• 10 books sold more than 1 million copies
• The average book sold 500 copies
• Minimum number of titles sold in the US: 1,446,000

So, I looked to see what the statistics were for book sales nowadays. This is what I discovered for 2019:

According to data provided by ProQuest, by 2019 the total number of books published in the U.S. exceeded 4 million in that year alone. This included self-published books and commercially published books of all types.

A 2018 report from Statista https://rb.gy/jv3zxb had these interesting numbers.

• Number of self-published books released in 2018: 1,680,000
• Number of writers and authors in the U.S.: 44,240
• Average annual spending on books in the U.S. among adults: $25.42
• Of all genre books purchased highest percentage were: Mystery/suspense (10.13%) and romance (9.18%) followed by mystery/detective (5.51%).

All we can do is keep trying.