In reality, books compete for our reading time alongside newspapers, magazines, and other online publications. Even this year, when leisure time increased as a result of the pandemic, novels saw only a subtle increase in sales over last year—by 2.8 percent. News consumption, however, saw an increase of 215 percent with most of that time taking place on Facebook (23 minutes per day), Google (14 minutes per day), and MSN (five minutes per day).
If the market for our attention is intensely crowded, the sliver of that market devoted to reading books is very, very small. And if the demand for books is small, the supply of books is great. To make it onto a reader’s nightstand, an author will have to compete with the roughly 3 million books currently in print to get there—and a seemingly endless supply of ebooks.