I remember hearing a study once that showed that if someone has a business like, say, a jam stand, that person is more likely to sell jam if they have a limited choice in flavors: like eight varieties rather than twenty-four. 

I’m also reckoning with the annual slew of articles published at the beginning of April about the decline of professional baseball. The reasons given are many, ranging from the overdone observation that baseball is “boring” to some other more nuanced critiques. My theory, though, is that there are just too many damn baseball games each season, so that even a moderately interested fan such as myself feels like following the sport is just about impossible.

I bring up these two seemingly unrelated observations to segue into a third: that there are probably too many books being published each year. At the Press, we published about 70-80 books per year — not that many compared to the big publishing houses and their armies of imprints, but still quite a few, considering that’s more books than most people read in a year. 

The larger picture seems to confirm this idea: more books than ever being published with fewer being sold — and publishers’ response to this new reality feels pretty business-cynical. A big part of this seems to be coming from an explosion of self-publishing, but publishing companies are publishing more too. 

I doubt the inverse correlation is perfect causation, but it makes me wonder. Using myself as an anecdote, I can say for sure that there are many times where I feel like shutting down in the face of all the reading choices out there. It’s certainly exciting on one hand to have so many books being released that sound interesting, but this also naturally is followed by the feeling of disappointment when a book doesn’t meet expectations — all the more so because I feel resentful that I had all these choices and I happened to choose the wrong one.

This is a scarcity-oriented mindset on my part, but it’s the product of the implicit message that books are being published so rapidly because they’re all needed to fill some sort of widening gap. What if we did it differently? Published slowly, carefully, methodically, so that each book was a momentous event and not just another in a series of nearly infinite blips. Maybe this would foster a willingness among readers to dedicate the time to get to know a book as a work of art rather than evaluating it as a commercial product.