This comes as no surprise to any author, and research generated by Claude using data from a variety of sources including academic and industry has confirmed that “Discoverability in a saturated market” is the #1 challenge in publishing.
Yet, according to Kathleen Schmidt, book-buying behavior is "straight-up weird" . Books are different to consumer products.
Awareness doesn't equal conversion when it comes to reading material. The real drivers of book sales remain trust, engagement, and word-of-mouth .
In certain genres (e.g fantasy, romance, it would seem almost production line generation and these genres have strong market share in titles.
No one can argue that the book market feels saturated, exacerbated by AI maybe?, and a consumer that simply has limited attention span.
Is this a sign of the future. What is the future of traditional writing and long-form books themselves?