A Drop in a Book Bucket

Margin Notes is where various contributors offer their short takes, brief ruminations, spot reviews (book, film, art, even the Internet, god help us).

If you are interested in adding your voice, give the section a careful read and email us at hawaiireviewofbooks -at- gmail.com with Margin Notes and your topic in the subject line.

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When my new novel, Midnight, Water City was released on July 13, I was a happy camper.

I’d gotten very positive pre-pub reviews. I received great blurbs from writers I admire. My book was making lists. Publisher’s Weekly “9 Books of the Week.” Bustle’s “10 Great New Books to Read This Week.” Newsweek’s “21 Books to Read This Summer.” Buzzfeed’s “Best Books of July.” Gizmodo’s “51 New Sci-fi and Fantasy Books to Add to Your Reading List in July.” I was rocking and rolling.

But wait… 51 new books in July? Exclusively sci-fi and fantasy? I began to wonder. Just how many books came out the same day or month as mine? How many new books are released in a week, a month, or a year?

The answer is so many that no one really seems to definitively know. Wading through a rip of articles and blogs on the topic, I was pulled into a sea of sometimes conflicting, out-of-date, or unverified numbers. For example, according to a 2013 article in Forbes, 600,000 to 1,000,000 books a year are published in the U.S. alone. Yeah, I know—huge and huge margin of error. According to the International Publishers Association, in 2015, 339,000 titles were published in the U.S. (not counting self-publishing—if you count self-publishing, speculation is that number is in the millions). In his final book, Brief Answers to The Big Questions, Stephan Hawking said that “if you stacked the new books being published next to each other, at the present rate of production you would have to move at ninety miles an hour just to keep up with the end of the line.”

I’ll go with Hawking on this one because he was Hawking after all, and his answer feels about right. For example, if one digs further, and goes to, say, the Penguin Random House website, and clicks on “All Books in New Releases,” there are 5,118 results. There are 4,049 results for Simon & Schuster. Barnes & Noble lists 8,715 new releases. Amazon only lists a top 100 of new releases probably because if it listed all of theirs, including their self-publishing arm, Kindle Direct Publishing, hard drives would crash around the world. Maybe no one knows how many books are published in a day, week, month, or year because there are simply too many to keep track of. It’d be like trying to count splitting cells with a Fisher Price microscope and an abacus.

Looking for smaller numbers that I could wrap my head around, I encountered an interesting 2020 article in The Guardian. On September 3, 2020, almost 600 new books were published in the U.K. Um, what? Lockdown did push back the release dates of a number of titles, but 600, traditionally published literary titles in one day in just the U.K.? Of course, the first week of September is the kickoff for publishing’s biggest season. And this didn’t specifically answer my original question: how many books came out the same day or month as mine? But it delivered a sobering general answer. Way more than I thought.

Now, to be fair, the word “book” covers a lot of territory. A crossword puzzle book is, well, a book. As are adult coloring books, which I have never heard of, but are apparently all the rage. Then there are, of course, picture books, cookbooks, manga, textbooks, and coloring books for kids. Books on CD still exist. On Amazon, calendars count as books, too. Buy a pooping pooches 2021 calendar, and you’ll get Jeff Bezos that much closer to a second trip to space (by the way, is it just me, or does it feel like technology’s ultimate goal is to lure us to stay at home 24/7, while these tech magnates use the money to fly off to leave the mess they created behind?).

Back here on Earth, if you Google best new books 2021, you’ll get about 15,000,000,000 results. That’s more results than there are people, which should be surprising, but isn’t. And on page one of your search, you’ll get lists. Barnes & Noble. Vulture. Good Housekeeping. (Good Housekeeping? Is my personalized Google algorithm broken?). Esquire. The Esquire one is framed with repetitive ads for Breguet watches. I’ve bought books. I’ve bought watches. I can’t remember an instant when I bought both on the same day.

The most well-known list, is, of course, The New York Times bestseller list. How the Times generates the list is a trade secret and has not been without its criticisms in its near century-old history. All I can say is that the list looks believable to me. This week’s bestselling hardcovers include names like Brad Thor, Danielle Steel, Andy Weir, Bill Clinton, and James Patterson. Plus, even I’ve read two-and-a-half of this list of fifteen before I even saw it. Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library was picked for discussion by the Punahou Book Club. T.J. Newman’s Falling and Alex Michaelides’ The Maidens were offered to me by libro.fm, a wonderful audiobook app that partners with independent bookstores. Of the three authors, T.J. Newman is the debut novelist. She inked a two-book, seven-figure contract with Simon & Schuster and quit her job as a flight attendant months before her novel was released in July. Good for her.

There’s a well-known Chinese myth about how a determined, single-minded koi attempted to swim up a waterfall. After a hundred years of trying, it finally made it up and was transformed into a dragon. That’s kind of what being a novelist is like. A koi trying to swim up a waterfall. At the end of the day, I’m extremely grateful. I’ve made lists. However, I also know that being on a list guarantees nothing. A list will be replaced in a day, a week, a month, or year. They are simply replaced by more lists.

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Image by Michael Dziedzic.