The complaint that there are too many books is not a new one. “My son, be warned by them: of making many books there is no end,” reads one line in Ecclesiastes, written at least 2,000 years before the invention of the printing press.
Now the bestselling author Bill Bryson has added his voice to the millennia-old chorus. There are 200,000 books published annually in the UK alone, “more books than you could possibly read,” the writer of Notes from a Small Island told the Times. He is not sure that the growth in self-publishing, in particular, is “a healthy development”. He said he gets sent “a lot of self-published books, and most of the time it is just some anonymous person’s life, and it is of no interest.”
Bryson is not wrong that self-publishing has contributed significantly to book slop mountain. More than 2.6 million books were self-published in 2023 – many of which are uploaded to the dominant platform, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing – and they can’t all be masterpieces. Nevertheless, the idea that self-publishing is the preserve of hopeless hobbyists producing books no one wants to read is at least a decade out of date. The romance author Colleen Hoover built her audience through self-publishing and has now sold around 20m books. Sarah J Maas, the world’s bestselling author in 2024, started publishing her “romantasy” fiction on FictionPress.com when she was 16. Freida McFadden, the hugely successful psychological thriller writer, claims to make 60% of her income via KDP and has continued to self-publish even as mainstream publishers seek her out.
“There has been this suspicion of self-published authors from the beginning,” says Kathryn Taussig of Storm, one of a new breed of digital-first publishers that are capitalising on what she describes as a “revolution” in self-publishing. “There is a perception that the quality is lacking. But you only have to look at the bestseller charts.”
Indeed, self-publishing has allowed authors to provide precisely the sort of books that people want to read, argues Natalie Butlin, creative insights director at Bookouture, the UK’s leading digital publisher (which is now a part of Hachette). “There are self-published authors who are making millions but you wouldn’t have heard of them,” she says. The model has been particularly successful in catering to fans of genres that have been overlooked by mainstream publishers (for example, LGBTQ+ romances and romantasy) or trends that are deemed to have passed (such as psychological thrillers, or dystopian young adult fiction).
Multimillion-sellers are outliers, of course – but then again, so is Bryson within the world of traditional publishing. Butlin thinks the real benefit of self-publishing is that it allows writers to make comfortable incomes at the middle of the market. A 2023 survey of 2,000 self-published authors by the Alliance of Independent Authors found that almost half exceeded $20,000 in revenue and 28% earned more than $50,000 – far more than the vast majority of traditionally published authors. “If you can write a book that people want to read and you package it well, you can make £25-30,000 per book,” says Butlin. “It’s really not an unreasonable expectation.” Meanwhile, traditionally published authors will receive an advance payment, usually paid in instalments: on signing the contract, after submitting the final manuscript, and on publication. Advance amounts vary a lot depending on the author, but typically a debut author can expect to receive between £5,000 and £10,000 in total. After that, many authors never see any money again – royalties are only paid after the advance amount has been made back through book sales.
The self-publishing model is of course only possible thanks to digital technology. Most self-publishing concerns ebooks (print-on-demand services are relatively niche) and the real engine is Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s subscription service, which allows readers to download 20 titles at a time for £9.49 per month, paying authors based on the number of pages read – a model that shares features with YouTube’s minutes-watched revenue system.
The most successful self-published authors have become highly savvy in their pursuit of pages-read, says Taussig – in many cases employing precisely the same freelance editors, cover artists, and formatting tools as traditional publishers. But their real advantage, she says, is the “feedback loop” they can enter into with their readers. “These writers are really listening to what their readers are saying almost in real time. They think about which characters their readers respond to and how to include them more. It’s a two-way street in a way that traditional publishing isn’t. It’s why they’ve been so successful. And they get to keep so much more of the money they’ve made.”
The other side of that coin is plummeting author revenues in the traditional industry. The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society reported in 2022 that the median income of full-time authors had fallen by around 60% since 2006, to just £7,000 a year. Ross Raisin, an acclaimed British novelist, recently described the deflating experience of publishing his fourth novel, A Hunger, to positive reviews – only to be told by a major high street book chain that they “didn’t have space” for it on their shelves.
Indeed, it could be argued that it’s the “big five” mainstream publishers – Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan – who are more guilty of overproduction. Butlin began her career as a literary agent but became disillusioned that publishing wasn’t learning the lessons from the music industry, which had been completely disrupted by digital technology. She felt that self-publishing offered more opportunities. “Traditional publishers spend most of their marketing budget on the books that have received the largest advances and almost nothing on the books that don’t – so most books don’t really get a chance,” she says. “You can make a relatively sensible guess on what will sell but it’s still essentially gambling.” Publishers will end up with a few enormous hits that cover the losses, but what it means is that many authors end up feeling like it’s their fault when their books don’t sell.
James McConnachie, editor of the Author, the journal run by the Society of Authors, the UK’s largest writer’s body, paints a similar picture. “Far more books are published than could ever succeed,” he says. “This is chiefly a natural result of readers being unpredictable. No one can publish only bestsellers, so the publishing industry is inevitably wedded to a model of overproduction. Too many publishers buy lots of books and publish them relatively cheaply, underinvesting in editing or marketing while outsourcing much of the risk to authors.”
The trouble is, the model sort of works for the publishers, says McConnachie. “The industry is not broken,” he says, pointing to the extremely healthy profits of the big five publishers. “But the model does rely on the imbalance between the author and publisher share. That’s one reason for the growth in self-publishing. It can feel like you get a fairer share, especially when advances and royalty rates are so low, and traditional authors are doing much of the marketing anyway.”
Still, self-publishing is far from a cure-all. It thrives in commercial fiction but literary fiction and children’s fiction – which rely more on physical books and critical acclaim – have yet to find a niche. It’s good at providing what readers want but not what might challenge them – there are also plenty of poorly edited, algorithm-chasing titles designed to exploit fleeting trends on KDP. Though it’s not as if traditional publishers aren’t guilty of churning out seasonal, trend-driven books either: we have HarperCollins to thank for The Pumpkin Spice Café series.
More seriously, no one I speak to has a convincing answer about what happens when Amazon does what tech platforms invariably do, which is squeeze its customers for more money. McConnachie feels that the industry is already rife with unfairness. “It’s a bit like being a YouTuber. Everyone thinks they are going to be one of the few who makes a lot of money. In truth, the vast majority just feed the machine while the channel – Amazon, in this case – makes a fortune out of exploiting the long tail.”
For now, though, it hardly seems like a terrible thing that there are different ways for authors to make money. “It’s making traditional publishing work harder,” says Isobel Akenhead, publishing director at independent press Boldwood Books. “They can’t be complacent because they’re no longer the gatekeepers. They’re not just competing with other publishers. They’re competing with authors who don’t necessarily need them any more. I think it’s a brilliant thing. There are more diverse voices, more working-class writers, more people who wouldn’t pass the publishing gates, finding readers.”
There are always going to be people who think there are too many books – but it’s not as if anyone is forcing anyone to read them.
