Will the Future of Publishing be Self-Publishing?

I never imagined I would become an advocate for self-publishing. I’m not quite there, but I’m getting close.

Last week’s discussion indicated how difficult it is to find an agent and get books published. (And thank you to everyone who commented.) Some people said they were done with trying to get agented. Other comments pointed toward the corporatization of the American publishing industry, and how it has led to a narrowing of what’s acceptable to the Big 5 and other major publishers.

I think most writers know that it’s the relatively few, already successful writers who get the bulk of the Big 5’s (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan) marketing dollars. Most other published writers, especially newbies, get very little if anything, and are required to do their own marketing if they wish to be successful. This is definitely the case with many independent publishers, although they can be more accepting of work that doesn’t fit the Big 5’s narrowly-defined (read: “unimaginative”) needs.

But I have always been hesitant to submit my book length work to independent publishers because of those marketing concerns and because I also have experience as a graphic artist, specializing in publications. So apart from the marketing (at which I admit I am terrible, and I’ll be talking about the lunacy of forcing artists and introverts to do their own marketing in the coming weeks), there isn’t anything independent publishers can do for me that I can’t do for myself, aside from taking the majority of the sales revenue.

Self-publishing once was considered vanity publishing. Remember PublishAmerica, the laughingstock of the publishing industry? I recall that some people sent them gibberish and it was accepted for publication. Even as recently as ten years ago self-publishing was disparaged as an exercise in ego.

But in light of the reality of book publishing today, self-publishing has lost much of its negative connotation. Whether writers hope to be a commercial success, or just want to see their work in print, the odds of traditional publishing are against them.

Let’s look at the numbers, or at least the numbers I was able to find.

According to Publishers Weekly, in 2023 more than 2.6 million books were self-published in the U.S. I do not know if that includes books published by an individual using a company name, so the number could be higher. The ISBN database company, however, in their 2025 entry for “How Many Books Are In The World?” claimed that 2.2 million books are published every year. Obviously both statements cannot be true.

Exact figures are very difficult to find, but a reasonable estimate based on some internet searching is that the Big 5 publishers produce approximately 50,000 new titles per year. Of these, based on a statistic I found that claims about 20% of these titles are fiction, there are 10,000 new novels from the major publishers each year.

How many novels are pitched to literary agencies each year? That’s a very tricky question. No one has verifiable figures on this, and that’s understandable. So I’m going to do some extremely creative extrapolation to determine the answer. (Which is basically saying this is a total guess.) A few literary agencies post their annual statistics for how many queries they have received and how many new authors they have signed as clients, so let’s start there.

For example, BookEnds Literary Agency’s statistics for July, 2016 were 1241 queries with two offers of representation. The Nelson Literary Agency reported 8539 queries for 2022, with four offers of representation. Finding additional statistics proved fruitless, but using those two agencies that indicates a .06% chance of just getting an agent. Statistics on how many represented books are accepted for publication are just as hard to find, but AI says (and I really hate to use AI but it’s just to make a point) the figure is between 1% and 2%. Multiply that (1.5%) out to yield a figure of .00092%. Granted, a lot of those queries were for the same books to different agencies. But even if you assume each author queried 50 agencies, that only changes the percentage to .0046%.

Now reverse engineer. 10,000 novels divided by .000046 equals 21,739,130 novels written each year. Or thereabouts. (I told you this was weird math.) But even if it’s only 10 million, or five million, it’s a big number. Way bigger than the number that get traditionally published.

So, why not self-publishing?

As someone who’s written eight novels (one published traditionally by an independent publisher, one self-published about 15 years ago as an experiment…long story), I would hate to see those other six never achieve the completion that comes with being designed and bound and on a shelf somewhere, even if it’s only my home office.

The quality is there. After more than two decades, digital printing (or print on demand) has achieved very good quality. Offset presses still do a better job, especially on custom orders, which digital typically can’t handle. Even Amazon’s KDP does a good job of printing and binding. At Orca we used it to produce all twenty issues, and I only recall one or two books that had to be returned, comparable to the error rates of other presses, both digital and offset, that I have seen reported by publishers. POD also does not require upfront costs or deposits like offset printing does.

I can’t help wondering if the future of publishing is self-publishing. Large traditional publishers may still be around decades from now, but I have noticed their revenue reports have shown a steady decline in the past five years. Maybe self-publishing will go the way of social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, with individual content creators sharing and selling their work to a smaller, targeted audience, instead of trying to score the “big” contract. Maybe novel writers will become more like musicians and visual artists, whose trades have been transformed by corporate economics. If so, then book publishing will be more like those industries, with the major companies scouring the self-pub universe for talent instead of developing it on their own. Some publishers and agents are already doing this.

Later this year I will reach a milestone age. I can’t help thinking time is running out for me as a writer and my publishing opportunities diminish with every passing year. Maybe that’s the time I’ll pull the trigger on those unpublished novels. Will that be giving up? It’s not like I didn’t try to get them published. And it sure would be nice to see those books on a shelf.

- Joe Ponepinto

What do you think about self-publishing, present and future? Will traditional publishers become irrelevant? Will self-publishing dominate the way we produce and read books? Comments are open.