The stats are about the number of books people read in a year. I think it was Pew that did the survey and found that on average people in the US read about one book a year.
Authors don’t make careers on those people, but what it means is that out over every 100,000 people, they will buy 50,000 books in a year. That sounds like a lot but that’s just over 4000 books a month. About 2000 of those books will be romance novels. About 800 of them will be science fiction. The remaining 1200 will be everything else.
So, 800 Americans a month will buy a SF book out of every 100,000 people. Luckily that’s a big pool of about 3billion, so a lot of people will buy a book, but broken down by population, you can’t count on *any* sf readers living in your town if your town has too few people in it – and according to the US Census Bureau, 95% of municipalities in the US are under 25,000 people.
Bookstores aren’t a viable market for people like me who don’t have deep pockets and time to spend pushing titles into them.
Were your stats on who will buy a book (1 per year, 1 per quarter) for any book or just paper?
The stats are about the number of books people read in a year. I think it was Pew that did the survey and found that on average people in the US read about one book a year.
Authors don’t make careers on those people, but what it means is that out over every 100,000 people, they will buy 50,000 books in a year. That sounds like a lot but that’s just over 4000 books a month. About 2000 of those books will be romance novels. About 800 of them will be science fiction. The remaining 1200 will be everything else.
So, 800 Americans a month will buy a SF book out of every 100,000 people. Luckily that’s a big pool of about 3billion, so a lot of people will buy a book, but broken down by population, you can’t count on *any* sf readers living in your town if your town has too few people in it – and according to the US Census Bureau, 95% of municipalities in the US are under 25,000 people.
Bookstores aren’t a viable market for people like me who don’t have deep pockets and time to spend pushing titles into them.