Are too many books published every year? Those of us who love books might be tempted to say no. Those of us who write books might be tempted to say yes, if only because it means more competition for every reader.

And there’s disagreement on how many books are actually being published.

In his always-readable newsletter “Dear Head of Mine,” publishing industry figure Sean Delone asks, “Are too many books published?” and cites some numbers that, while large, take the wind out of much, much higher numbers cited by some sources.

Before I give you Delone’s numbers, consider these from Berrett-Koehler Publishers, which produces professional development books. In a post from April, Steven Piersanti, senior editor of Berrett-Koehler, throws out some alarming numbers in the post “Ten Awful Truths About Book Publishing”:

The number of books being published every year has exploded. According to the latest Bowker data (Publishers Weekly, March 23, 2026), 4.2 million books were published in 2025 in the United States. This is the number of titles that received an ISBN number from Bowker. And here is the truly shocking figure: the number of new titles published each year is 15 times greater than it was 20 years ago. According to Bowker, just 282,500 new titles were published in the U.S. in 2005 (Bowker Report, April 14, 2010). The number of traditionally published titles has more than doubled from 2005 to 2025, to 642,242. But the great growth has been in self-published titles, which account for 3.5 million of the 4.2 million titles published in 2025.

(I should note that I obtained 10 ISBNs from Bowker a couple of years ago and haven’t yet published 10 books, but that’s the benchmark cited as significant by Publishers Weekly.)

Piersanti goes on to note some fascinating figures but I won’t simply regurgitate them all now. I’ll post the link to his piece at the end of those post.

Delone cites significantly lower numbers. (Again, his newsletter is very worthwhile reading and you should subscribe.)

There’s an oft quoted statistic in the book world that millions of new books are published each year (the link says 4.2 million in 2025). Conservative estimates put the number of new books published in the US in the healthy 10,000s, that’s even if you just count the five major publishers. This, we know from the inside of the industry, is a nonsense number. A number that gets people to shout, “There are too many books!”. The truth is that a book editor, reviewer, or avid consumer intuitively knows the actual number of published books that matter, that are competing for their attention, is much smaller.

This is not to denigrate books whose sales are in the double or triple digits. In the year 2026, it should be obvious that financial success does not equal quality, nor intelligence, nor competency. Nor is money what we should rely upon as a scorekeeper for “success.” Book sales are, similarly, not a scoreboard that tells you which books are good and which are bad. Still, we must be reasonable and place the cut off for what books matter to the majority of readers. Let’s not get bogged down in methodology here, but the real number of books— if you cut off all the ones that have very small, specialized audiences—is about 3,000-6,000 new books a year across adult fiction and nonfiction. That’s still a lot of books! Yet, it is a number that your arms fit around, that’s a bit more fathomable than 1,000,000 or 50,000.

Even with 3,000-6,000 new books, discovery is exceedingly difficult. A lot of focus goes to the big bestsellers and then this creates a self-perpetuating gravity of reader recommendations that’s hard to pierce through, a feast or famine dynamic we’ve talked about before at Dear Head of Mine. We are entering the season when this becomes even more pronounced. Book publishing follows the standard retail seasonality of western civilization, so as we approach the fall season—known by retailers simply as the Christmas season—we expect the new releases, reviews, and shelf space to be focused primarily on big known-quantity bestsellers.

Delone goes on to talk about the publishing industry “midlist,” the neither-bestsellers and neither-ignored books, the latter well above the trees that fall in the forest with no one around.

Both sets of numbers spring from that same Publishers Weekly number, although the two different writers arrive at different “net” numbers.

So who to believe? Which set of numbers are accurate, 4 million-plus or 6,000?

It doesn’t really matter. As Delone notes, 6,000 is still a lot of books. For readers, it can make it difficult to cut through the clutter and find your next favorite read. For writers, that clutter is still there and you’re competing with it for readers, attention, sales and space on shelves.

I’m not going to propose a solution here. Ultimately, I do think publicity helps. My novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS wouldn’t have sold even the modest numbers they have without my efforts to publicize them and the tremendous help of booksellers, libraries, friends, family and fellow authors who help get the the very existence of the books out there. As much or little difference as social media makes, for example, I think word of mouth helps more.

If you’re a reader, the numbers can look daunting or delightful. I know for sure that even if I never buy another book, I’ll never run out of things to read. If you’re a writer, the thought of competing with every other book is intimidating or even disheartening.

For writers, in the midst of all that uncertainty, I can say only this: keep writing. You never know if the story or book you’re writing will connect with a reader, who will find momentary amusement, solid entertainment or even enlightenment from your work. Even if the reader has to find it from among more than four million other books or “only” 6,000.

(Photo at the top of this post from the Librarianologist Facebook page.)

Here’s a link to the “10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing” post:

https://ideas.bkconnection.com/10-awful-truths-about-publishing?shem=aimgspe,