Readers Ahoy
Harder to find
The number of books published in the United States has sky rocketed - 750 million units in 2025. But the number of readers has shrunk. The market is deemed to be saturated. The total includes self-published books, a growing category[ . I’m not sure how this contributes to the saturation as I thought self-published books just went to a limited number of friends since they had no access to the various distribution channels the publishers use. But apparently on-line sellers like Amazon do handle self-published books. It seems the cheapest printers are in India. I also wonder why books defy the usual laws of economics. If demand for a product is in decrease, so will be its production. If there are fewer readers, why are there more books?
Less than half the population reads at least one book in a year. The vast majority of readers have college degrees. Interestingly, many colleges and universities complain their students are coming from secondary education virtually illiterate. We must be talking about older college graduates. And it is the older age group where reading books is still practiced. Categories of books also proliferate. Crime and mystery tops in sales with self help second; then comes biography, history, science fiction, business and economics, travel and so on. Romance is an interesting category. Does that mean the bosom heaving, Regency novels of Georgette Heyer? But an even more curious category is Literary Fiction. It’s one of the smallest – with less than 20%. What definition of “literary” is being used? Is it just written words greater in quantity and more distinctive than speech? Could it be well-written fiction? But there is no non-literary fiction category, and there certainly is badly written fiction – just as there are badly written news reports.
I confess I am a published writer of fiction. My life career was as an international investment banker. Why do I now write? I will begin with the most shameful reason; I enjoy reading my own work. Why must it be published then? Because it will be professionally edited and nicely packaged. Many artists like looking at their paintings framed. If I had a psychoanalyst, he/she would say I was suffering from “narcissistic, intellectual self-abuse”. (I readily admit I have just invented that condition.) But a more serious reason is therapeutic. I suffer from an extraordinarily rich and detailed, long-term memory. It strains the capacity of my brain. I seek relief by fictionalising the events and people that crowd my memory. In my first published work – an autobiography, I admitted including a degree of invention. I justified this by stating: “Well, if it didn’t happen exactly like this – it certainly could have.” In the same way, I take the events and people that constitute my memory, turn them this way and that, combine them, send them in new directions, and develop them from a single scene to a full life story. None of my characters will easily recognize themselves as they are composites, and the participants in various events are, in most cases, no longer with us. I thank them posthumously for their contribution to my extensive memory.
I have a final reason. I fell in love with the English language while at my secondary school – Deerfield Academy. French is my mother tongue, but English fascinates me. As an equestrian loves to train horses, a golfer spends time on the range, a singer vocalises in the shower, an artist sketches on the restaurant menu, a model poses in front of the mirror, a cook looks for recipes on the internet – I try to write the English language, ever seeking the unattainable perfection of the great literary giants.
Stanislas Yassukovich
May 2026