The title basically asks the question: of all people who have ever published a book, have most of them only published one? If not, have a plurality?
Define “published.”
Assuming you mean commercially published, I’d agree that the mode is that authors publish one book (i.e., more authors have published only one book than authors who had other numbers of books). But I don’t think that majority of them published only one book; the economics are such that the publisher has an incentive to publish more books from a single author.
I am a librarian and have heard this “most authors only write one book” thing for decades. It is often cited as a rationale for eliminating a time-consuming activity known as “authority control.” Essentially, authority control is the process of insuring that author names are always indexed consistently in library catalogs, regardless of what appears on the books (so that if you’re looking for “Fitzgerald, F. Scott” you don’t also have to check “Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key” and other variations too). It also involves adding birth and death dates and other distinguishing information to authors’ names.
Authority control is an expensive process (although it’s far less expensive now than it was back in the days of physical card catalogs) and cost-cutting administrators frequently target it for downsizing or elimination. “Most authors only publish one book” was usually offered in support of this. In other words, you shouldn’t bother researching Joe Blow Author’s birth year and middle name because chances are he would never publish anything else anyway.
The odd thing is that even though EVERYBODY in the library field knew about this “one book” thing, you rarely saw a citation to the actual evidence. It was just one of those things that was believed because it sounded like it had to be true. Presumably it could be proven by sorting an author index by the number of titles associated with each name.
Most of the authors I know personally are mystery writers, and mystery writers tend to sell series. So I don’t know about most authors, but ALL the ones I know have published multiple books. It’s almost a requirement, if you’re submitting to an editor at a mystery publisher, that you have another one in the pipeline.
Not the same thing, but it is said that most PhDs in math, at least, publish only their thesis. I know no evidence for this either.
I never heard the term “authority control”, but I sure recognize its value. A woman I know has published under seven different names (maiden name + various combinations from her two marriages and two divorces). And there is a 19th century Russian mathematician whose name I would spell Chebychev whose name has appeared with 23 different spellings. This is the result of many transliterations of the original Cyrillic.
It seems that Isaac Asimov’s name (which was originally Russian) is now spelled differently in Russian due to retransliteration from Cyrillic->Roman->Cyrillic since he is primarily seen as an American writer who wrote in English, and any Russian copies of his works are probably translations from English.
Yes, genre writers of all kinds can’t sustain a career without being prolific.
But genre writers are a tiny percentage of all writers. People write memoirs and how-to books and cookbooks and highly specialized technical books and fiction and poetry and dozens of other categories. Go into a large university library and the genre books are off in a crevice of a corner off a back section of the stacks.
Even the definition of publishing gets weird when you start looking at all books. Most people think of publishing as the big commercial houses in New York. But anybody can set themselves up as a publisher anywhere, and they have been doing so in every city and most small towns since the invention of the printing press. There are thousands of small or obscure presses, many of them devoted to specialized subjects, that you can find in any large used book store. I’m not counting self-published books or vanity presses, either. Self-publishing has a long and honorable history and needs to be counted. Vanity presses occasionally publish books of real merit. Where do you make the cut?
Google recently estimated that it had digitized one-tenth of the 130,000,000 books ever published. I don’t know where they got that figure, but it sounds right. What percent of those were published by large commercial publishers? I have no idea, but my WAG is that it’s way under 50%. That other half is undoubtedly loaded with one-timers.
It’s a very different question to ask what percentage of books were published by people who wrote only one book and what percentage of authors only wrote one book. The OP is asking the second question. It seems reasonable to me to think that most people who try to write manage to publish only one book and the percentage of people who publish each additional number declines in a predictable curve until it hits a single individual at a few numbers past 500 books and then tails off entirely at a certain point. Something like this although this graph is for something different.
(If you ask who has written the most books, you’ll get trapped in another round of definitional nitpicking, starting with “define book” and “define wrote”.)
I’m going to assume, as most of the respondents in this thread have, that you mean, “Have most of the people who have written a book that was published never gone on to write subsequent book(s) that were published?”
I would guess the answer to the question is yes, but I really don’t know how to mine the databases to get a definitive answer. A very large number of books that are “published” get printed up at the corner copy shop or run through a vanity press*. These are largely memoirs, family histories, family cookbooks, and the like. Those never make it into a book database, and there’s no way to count them. I would call it almost a certainty that the majority of people who do this never do another book.
Of authors published by mainstream publishing houses, the answer would probably split along fiction/nonfiction lines. The author who spends 20 years painstakingly crafting a book about collecting dolls produced by the Anasazi between 700 and 900 AD probably did it because of a personal passion for (and knowledge of) that subject. Such an author is unlikely to produce a second book. I know many such authors.
Even in fiction, a lot of people who produce and sell a book come to realize that it’s a lot more work than they want to go through, or realize that they only have one decent story in them. But today it’s really easy to crank out 300 pages of crap and send it unedited to a vanity press with a check for $600. Poof You’re a “published” author. I’ve seen quite a few people do this two or three times before they realize that they’ll probably never even break even on the books.
- *If you write up a 30-page story of your life, print 6 copies, bind them, and give them to your kids for Christmas, was it really a book? Was it published? What if it was 100 pages? What if it was 22 copies? *
At least in university libraries, a certain percentage of works will be the dissertations of the students getting their doctorate degree. In the natural sciences and technical areas, these are usually done by the copy shops around the university (in the last decade, switched to electronic publishing); in the paper subjects, dissertations are usually published in a series by a publishing house (how good your work is depends on how the money flows: for a normal dissertation, you pay the publisher; for a good one, they will pay the costs; for a very good one, they will pay you an amount).
Only a small number of doctorate holders go on to habilitation and publish that paper, and then keep working and publishing in that field.
I don’t have numbers though, whether that percentage of one-time authors is bigger than 50% or not.
A published author told me that if you write a book that bombed when you try to publish your 2nd book it’s not easy to get published again. She added it’s probably easier to get your first book published when you don’t have a failure on your record.
I’m not sure if this what the OP Was getting at, but…
Harper Lee excepted, SUCCESSFUL authors rarely call it quits after publishing just one book, just as SUCCESSFUL recording artists rarely drop out of the music business after making just one album.
But most writers and most singers AREN’T successful. It’s very hard to get a recording contract and it’s very hard to get a first book published. And even if you DO manage to make a record or publish a book, it probably won’t sell and you probably won’t ever get a chance to make a second album or publish another novel.
There are a LOT of people who worked for years to get one unsuccessful book published, then were never able to sell another. I’m not sure if the majority of authors fall into that category, but it wouldn’t be surprising.
Harper Lee wasn’t the only wildly successful author to publish only one book. Margaret Mitchell only published one book during her life, but it was one of the most popular books ever. According to Wikipedia, many years later someone discovered another manuscript by her and published that. Somewhere I remember reading that she’d written a sequel to Gone with the Wind, but destroyed it because she was uncomfortable with all the publicity she got from GwtW.
Thomas Heggen only wrote one book (Mister Roberts) which was also very popular. Apparently he developed writer’s block and couldn’t write another.
I highly recommend the documentary Stone Reader, about the one book written by this guy: Dow Mossman - Wikipedia. The movie is a funny, moving, heartfelt ode to the joys of reading.