Laura’s Blog

I was reading John Kremer’s Book Marketing Tip of the Week newsletter, and was astonished by the fact that over 1 million book titles were published in 2009.

The Books in Print database announced the following numbers for 2009:

Traditional (royalty) publishers – 288,355 titles

Here’s a further breakdown:

Fiction – 45,181 (down 15% since 2008)

Children’s books – 32,348

Sociology/Economics – 25,992

Religion – 19,310

Science – 15,428

Categories that grew include books about technology (+11%), science (+9%) and personal finance (+9).

The big category losers were cookery and language titles  (-16%) and travel (-5%).

In 2008, the production of print-on-demand books surpassed traditional book publishing for the first time In 2009, there were 764,448 self-published and print-on-demand titles (according to Bowker, this is an increase of 181% over 2008!).

For further research, visit Bowker.com