By some measures, the book business is doing better than ever.
Last year, readers bought nearly 827 million print books, an increase of roughly 10% over 2020, and a record since NPD BookScan began tracking two decades ago.
But all is not as rosy as it seems. As book buyers have migrated online, it has gotten harder to sell books by new or lesser-known authors. With the exception of surprise runaway bestsellers ("Where the Crawdads Sing,” for example) and books by celebrities or brand-name authors (Matthew McConaughey, James Patterson), most writers fail to find a much of an audience. Of the 3.2 million titles that BookScan tracked in 2021, fewer than 1% sold more than 5,000 copies.