Episode Details

Almost Nobody Writes. Here’s the Proof.
And Why That’s About to Change for You.

A Handout for Folks Who Like Facts
By Paul Truesdell, JD, AIF, CLU, ChFC, RFC
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Let me tell you why you’re here, or at least why I hope you’re here. You’re not here to write the next great American novel. You’re not here to craft fiction or chase a publishing deal or see your name on a shelf at Barnes and Noble. You’re here because somewhere inside you, there are stories that matter. Real stories. Your stories. The ones your children and grandchildren deserve to hear, the ones that explain where they came from and what shaped the family they were born into. Memories that will be cherished long after you and I are gone.
The problem is, almost nobody actually writes those stories down. And I can prove it.
The Size of the Country
The United States population sits at roughly 342 million people as of early 2026. That’s the official Census Bureau figure, not one of those inflated estimates floating around the internet. Of those 342 million, about 260 to 270 million are adults, eighteen and older. Remember that number.
Books: The Numbers Are Smaller Than You Think
According to Bowker, the official ISBN agency in this country, self-published titles with ISBNs hit over 2.6 million in 2023, up about seven percent from the year before. Traditionally published titles, books that went through an actual publishing house, came in around 563,000 that same year and actually declined slightly. Toss in titles that skip the ISBN process, like many Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing e-books, and you’re looking at roughly three million or more new titles per year.
Three million sounds like a lot until you realize nobody tracks unique authors. Bowker counts titles, not people. On the traditional side, industry estimates put it at roughly 300,000 to 600,000 unique authors per year, accounting for writers who publish multiple books annually. On the self-publishing side, when you narrow it down to people who actually completed and released a real, full-length book, estimates land around 500,000 to a million.
Combine both sides and a reasonable estimate for unique authors publishing at least one book in any given year is somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million. And that high end is generous, because a whole lot of those self-published titles are barely pamphlets.
Even at one million unique authors, that’s three-tenths of one percent of the U.S. population. Zero point three percent. At the more realistic estimate of 500,000 to 800,000, you’re looking at fifteen-hundredths to a quarter of one percent.
Almost nobody writes books.
Short Stories: Even Fewer People Bother
Short stories, the real kind, crafted fiction that appears in literary magazines, journals, and anthologies, not your nephew’s social media ramblings, are an even smaller world.
The top outlets like The New Yorker, Paris Review, One Story, and Granta publish maybe ten to fifty stories a year each. Smaller publications run four to twelve. Add in anthologies like Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize collections, and the Pushcart Prize, and you’re looking at maybe 5,000 to 15,000 unique short stories published in legitimate U.S. outlets per year. And many of those are written by the same people, established writers and MFA graduates cycling through the same magazines year after year.
Unique short story authors in any given year? Probably a few thousand to maybe 10,000, and a good number of them are also publishing books, so there’s overlap.
Almost nobody writes short stories either.
Put It All Together
Combine book publishing and legitimate short story publication, account for the overlap, and the total number of unique Americans producing real, publishable creative writing in any given year is probably under one million. More realistically, it sits between 300,000 and 800,000.
As a percentage of the total population? Somewher