My son sent me a story/article the other day which shared the stats from a DOJ case regarding Penguin wanting to buy Simon and Shuster. The deal was killed because of monopoly issues. Penguin has 37% of the market and Shuster has 11%, a merger would dominate the market. So there remain five large publishers, instead of four.
Beyond that, the DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies. In occurred in 2020, when everyone was sitting at home due to Covid only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies.
These are published statistics and people continue to write and self-publish, hoping to not lose money. I just had a client announce that he is publishing his own book in 2024, it was at the editor when we reviewed his 2023 taxes.