• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think there are many writers in general. There are 300,000 people, and 1 in 10 will publish a book in their lifetimes.

    • schmidtster@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Okay, but one guy writing 1000 books would skew that number substantially.

      You get 20 doing 10 that’s still a large portion changing the statistics.

      Is it actually 1/10 or is just 30000 books from the population.

        • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Keep in mind, that’s just the people famous enough to have English Wikipedia articles.

          There’s no way 1 in 10 people in Iceland are full-time professional authors publishing a book every year.

          In the US, most authors I personally know write for fun and have a novel or few on something like wattpad and they’ve made exactly $0 on it.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yep. My mom has written multiple published novels but she considers it something she does for fun more than anything.

      • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s ‘1 in 10 Icelanders will write and publish at least one novel at some point in their life’, not ‘one book written for every 10 Icelanders’.

        It’s a stat you’ll see floating around the internet, though I haven’t seen the ultimate source.

        • schmidtster@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yes it’s deliberately worded to be vague it could really mean either with no source, I did some research and most of what I found was multiple books are being published by people, with that same 1/10 being repeated, didn’t look into publishing rates or anything yet though.