The Competition

Lately, like a lot of other people, I've been thinking about taking my urge to write more seriously -- as seriously, say, as my urge to take photographs. Inevitably, this poses the question: write what, exactly, and for whom? And, how many other people are thinking the same thing?

Perhaps as a way of avoiding any actual writing, I decided to look at the figures on the latter question. It sometimes seems like every third literate person in the country is either writing, contemplating, or putting off writing a novel (first man at party, "I'm writing a novel"; second man -- who happened to be Peter Cook -- "Really? Neither am I"). So, what is the competition really like, statistically?

It's harder to get good figures than you might think, but estimates of how many books are published in the UK each year vary between 70,000 and 100,000, of which about one tenth would be regarded as proper "fiction". So, between 7 and 10 thousand British novels are published, every year. Say, 8500.

We can apply the sound general principle that "90% of anything is rubbish" in two directions. First, of those 8500 published novels, let's say only 850 are really worth reading. I don't know about you, but identifying, getting hold of, and then reading 15 or more brand new novels every week is a little beyond my capacity. I'm just not keeping up -- last week I only read three! And none of those was published this or even last year!! Let's face it, even if only 85 are really worth reading, I'm never going to get round to reading them all. I still haven't read any Jane Austen.*

But, going the other way, let's assume that only 10% of submitted manuscripts get published (that's probably wildly over-generous). That's 85000 completed and submitted manuscripts. We could probably go further, and say that only 10% of aspiring novelists manage to complete and submit a manuscript -- that means there are probably 850 thousand dreamers out there, who have actually put pen to paper, but so far failed to complete and submit. God knows how many there are who haven't, but they don't count.

So, good news! If we accept a literate population in the UK of 52 million (80% of 65 million) then my initial impression (that every third literate person was attempting a novel) was completely wrong: only every sixtieth literate person in the UK seriously hopes to publish a novel.

Now we've got that sorted, only one thing remains to be determined. Have I actually got anything to say? The numbers on that seem to be harder to calculate.


* Shocking, but true. Talking of Jane Austen, if you want to see how blog comments can take on a life of their own, check out these comments on a very brief post "The Austen Kerfuffle" on the Language Hat blog (no relation) 18/11/2010. I have rarely seen so many evidently intelligent people making utter arses of themselves. Brilliant!