This is an excerpt of Joe Biel’s 8th book, A People’s Guide to Publishing, in stores in December 2018 with preorders shipping in August!
In 1970, there were about 3,000 indie publishers. By 2006, there were 82,000. Today there are hundreds of thousands of specialized independents, and probably over a million if you include bedroom operations. Even with so many presses, that’s still an average annual sales of $120,000 per publishing house. In 2016, 66% of book sales were from independent publishers, so we are now selling more books than the majors! While The Big Five, major publishing houses that dominate the industry, have lost 27% of their market share since 2012, small presses continue to grow and find new opportunities at a manageable scale.
There has never been a better time to become an independent publisher.
Still, there are over 500 new books published every single hour with millions of new books being released every year, and tens of millions of books already in print. There are more books in print today than at any point in history. At the same time, conventional book outlets (collectively known as “the book trade”) like Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Amazon, independent bookstores, and libraries have neither grown, shrunk, nor added capacity in any significant way for the past 40 years. Instead, they…