A Penny for Your Thoughts

… and Your Momentary Attention?

According to UNESCO, approximately two million books are published worldwide each year.[i] Some of these books will be reprints of old books, some will be self-published, and some will not be produced by the traditional publishing houses. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable figure. To put that into perspective, Google estimated in 2010 that there were some 129 million books in existence worldwide, which means that the stock of human knowledge is increasing at a staggering pace.[ii]

In the UK alone, approximately 185,000 titles registered an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) in 2018. This would mean that on average about 20 titles were released every hour in the UK over the course of the year. When you factor in the size of the population, the UK would have one of the highest numbers of published books, per inhabitant, anywhere in the world. Whilst on one measure, it may be a cause for celebration that so many people are reading, writing and publishing; on another measure, we may have a severe case of over saturation of books. 

The average person apparently reads between one and five books per year.[iii] In light of the vast number of new books released each year, one might well ask how it is possible for a new author to get any interest in, or reaction to, their book! It’s a question I, like any new author, has grappled with as A Constitution of the People nears its release date. In my case it’s less about sales and more about the thoughts and ideas in the book which I (and, thankfully, others who have kindly reviewed it) believe can have a genuine contribution to policy debates in the UK, Bosnia and elsewhere. But returning to sales and recognition (might we all harbour some desire for it at some level?), there are some further challenges.

Apparently, the average book – in the US, at least – is now selling less than 200 copies per year and less than 1,000 copies over its lifetime (and the figures are likely to be somewhat similar in the UK).[iv] A book has far less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookshop: apparently, for every book on a shop shelf, there are 100 to 1,000 or more titles competing for that shelf space.[v] Furthermore, brand name authors and books take a large share of that crowded market-place and the limited media space.[vi]

So, what to do? The, oft-quoted, English idiom says, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. The idiom is traced back to George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860):

"Why, it's one o' the books I bought at Partridge's sale. 'They was all bound alike - it's a good binding, you see - and I thought they'd be all good books. There's Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying' among 'em; I read in it often of a Sunday" (Mr Tulliver felt somehow a familiarity with that great writer because his name was Jeremy); "and there's a lot more of 'em, sermons mostly, I think ; but they've all got the same covers, and I thought they were all o' one sample, as you may say. But it seems one mustn't judge by th' outside. This is a puzzlin' world."

This is a puzzling world: today, of course, books are not bound all-alike and, whilst we repeatedly use the idiom, we still judge a book by its cover (perhaps the diversity in covers give us more reason to). And publishers, authors, and readers all know it! In the competition for attention, in an already frenzied attention-seeking world, how does one stand out and ensure that, of the four or five books (max) the average person will read in a year, yours will be one of them?  

I wish I knew the answer, but what I can say is that a lot of consideration and thought goes into a cover: the title, the colours that are used, the font and typeface, the selection of an image or an icon for the book, the endorsements that are included, the scope of the blurb, the detail in the author’s bio, the considerations on design-restriction if the book is a part of a series, the possible reaction of the intended audience […] you get the picture. All of these factors are important in a number of ways: to make the book stand out, to deliver its core message, to satisfy the publisher’s commercial interests, to please the author, and ultimately to engage a prospective reader. 

The cover is the first window for the outside world into the ideas within a book. When, through successive iterations, the cover is finalised there is always a lingering question of whether you did all you could to make it accurately reflect the book you have written. It always falls short of the essence of the book, which is – of course – in its writing and so you tell yourself: don’t judge a book by its cover but rather judge the cover by the book.

This is a short post about the forthcoming: ‘A Constitution of the People’. More, in a later post, on why the particular cover design for A Constitution of the People was chosen and the mild controversy surrounding the original version! (With thanks to Lily Lewis for a review of the post – views mine alone as are errors and omissions).

[i]      UNESCO compiles an index of book titles published per country per year from various sources as it sees this as an important standard of living, education, and of a country's self-awareness. The two million figure was taken from the most recent figures available for each country. See also, Wresch, William. Have and Have-Nots in the Information Age. Rutgers University Press, 1996, p. 39.

[ii]     Madrigal, Alexis. 2010. “Google: There Are Exactly 129,864,880 Books in the World.” The Atlantic, August 5, 2010. 

[iii]    Flood, Alison. 2014. “UK publishes more books per capita than any other country, report shows.” Guardian, October 22, 2014. 

[iv]     Piersanti, Steven. 2020. The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. June 24, 2020

[v]      Ibid.

[vi]     Ibid.