Bgarland

“Of all the work produced from this region no one observer gets the place or the people completely right,” Rob Amberg writes about his 40 years spent photographing Appalachia. His photo essay “Up the Creek” is part of The Oxford American’s “Portraying Appalachia” Symposium.

No matter who you are, this is pretty funny. But if you have kids, it's very nearly transcendent.

(via @ginatrapani)

Between the 40 Towns project organized by Jeff Sharlet’s Dartmouth students and the newly unveiled Vanishing Point project from Duncan Murrell’s students at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, it seems abundantly clear that college students are better at putting together web publications than 99% of established publishing outfits. Begin your tour with Christine Delp’s look at a blind man who makes his own martinis, and then check out other stories such as Ge Jin’s photographic essay on Chinese university students.

Via Kickstarter

Beard shown actual size.

In 1977, a seven year old kid named Hans Fex did something other than exist with the actual name Hans Fex. He saw some artifacts his father, Dr. Jörgen Fex (a name somehow even more clutch than Hans Fex), had brought back from Malta embedded in resin, and got the idea for the Mini Museum  – a collection of precious artifacts combined in a compact display, perfect for the average nerd’s home. It only took 35 years and the invention of Kickstarter for Hans to bring his idea to fruition, and with three weeks still left to go on the campaign, it’s already been funded at 20 times its goal price.

Here’s how you get yourself some dinosaur DNA for your desktop:

First, you have to decide: Small, Medium, or Large?  A “small” mini museum is a 2-inch by 3-inch collection of 11 artifacts, which includes a moon rock, dinosaur poop, and dirt from Dracula’s castle. (Unknown is exactly how much Transylvanian soil is necessary to keep your vampire charged.)

The largest-sized mini museum (4″x5″) will include all the goodies — bricks from Lincoln’s house, bits of the Titanic, dinosaur bones, and part of the command module from Apollo 11 — but that’ll set you back $239. Of course, how can you really say an iPhone 5 is more valuable than a piece of a mummy, or a mammoth’s hair? I mean, what if you get into black magic and the only thing that’s gonna give you true wizard powers is a rock from Mars? You’d feel like a dummy, that’s what.

Kickstarter accepts no responsibility if you accidentally create a horrific Costa Rican theme park.

Each “museum” is a one inch thick piece of resin with shards of these specimens embedded and labeled accordingly. What’s cool is that, while some of this stuff was purchased from other collectors, a lot of these things were acquired by Fex himself over the last 30 years. It makes this less of a corny ThinkGeek trinket (though Fex was previously involved with designing for GeekLabs), and more of a piece of art, really. Each signed and numbered museum is a part of his life’s work, which is almost as cool as owning radioactive glass from the first nuclear test.

A piece of sand that was melted into glass after the world’s first nuclear explosion test in New Mexico, which probably won’t give you spidey powers.

I’m usually kind of difficult to shop for, but if anyone’s looking for ideas: shards of meteorites and a human brain is a good start. (And you can get that one in the “medium” size, for $179.) If you tell me you purchased it from a guy named Hans with a big red beard, it makes the thought more than count. It makes it magical. And possibly Viking in origin.

We haven’t seen a comic from Bill Watterson in two decades, but he’s back with an illustration. Watterson drew the poster art for a new documentary on comic strips Stripped, which also features him. There are no tigers to be found but a nude man jumping out of his clothes in full color instead.

Blue and Orange Ribbon

My model of the Solar System is going to knock the judges on their- wait a minute, what is THAT?

Great. Awesome. Looks like I stayed up all night painting Uranus for nothing. I might as well not have bothered looking all over town for Styrofoam balls of just the right sizes. Because Miss Know-It-All built a freaking TELEPORTER.

Plus, she has CAKE. So she's not only a genius scientist, she's a genius panderer, too. Cool. And I guess next year my baking-soda volcano is going to have to compete with her, I don't know, cold-fusion muffins or something. It's enough to make me write a malevolent, self-aware computer script. Hmm...

Recommended Viewing: Afua Richardson has illustrated Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

American life expectancy has leapt up some 30 years in the past century, and we now live roughly 79.8 years on average. That’s not terrible, but it’s not fantastic either: We rank 35th in the world as far as lifespan, nestled right between Costa Rica and Chile. But looking at life expectancy by state, it becomes clear that where you live in America, at least to some extent, determines when you’ll die.

Here, I’ve found the life expectancy for every state to the tenth of a year using the data and maps from the Measure of America, a nonprofit group that tracks human development. Then, I paired it up with the nearest country by life expectancy from the World Health Organization’s 2013 data. When there was no country with that state’s exact life expectancy, I paired it with the nearest matching country, which was always within two-tenths of a year.

There’s profound variation by state, from a low of 75 years in Mississippi to a high of 81.3 in Hawaii. Mostly, we resemble tiny, equatorial hamlets like Kuwait and Barbados. At our worst, we look more like Malaysia or Oman, and at our best, like the United Kingdom. No state approaches the life expectancies of most European countries or some Asian ones. Icelandic people can expect to live a long 83.3 years, and that’s nothing compared to the Japanese, who live well beyond 84.

Life expectancy can be causal, a factor of diet, environment, medical care, and education. But it can also be recursive: People who are chronically sick are less likely to become wealthy, and thus less likely to live in affluent areas and have access to the great doctors and Whole-Foods kale that would have helped them live longer.

It’s worth noting that the life expectancy for certain groups within the U.S. can be much higher—or lower—than the norm. The life expectancy for African Americans is, on average, 3.8 years shorter than that of whites. Detroit has a life expectancy of just 77.6 years, but that city’s Asian Americans can expect to live 89.3 years.

But overall, the map reflects what we’d expect: People in southern states, which generally have lower incomes and higher obesity rates, tend to die sooner, and healthier, richer states tend to foster longevity.

In an act of grand generosity, Ilya Bernstein has made his translation of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry available for free via Google Books. (h/t Keith Gessen)

This is not a good development:

To make matters worse, ownership of a Chrome extension can be transferred to another party, and users are never informed when an ownership change happens. Malware and adware vendors have caught wind of this and have started showing up at the doors of extension authors, looking to buy their extensions. Once the deal is done and the ownership of the extension is transferred, the new owners can issue an ad-filled update over Chrome's update service, which sends the adware out to every user of that extension.

[...]

When malicious apps don't follow Google's disclosure policy, diagnosing something like this is extremely difficult. When Tweet This Page started spewing ads and malware into my browser, the only initial sign was that ads on the Internet had suddenly become much more intrusive, and many auto-played sound. The extension only started injecting ads a few days after it was installed in an attempt to make it more difficult to detect. After a while, Google search became useless, because every link would redirect to some other webpage. My initial thought was to take an inventory of every program I had installed recently -- I never suspected an update would bring in malware. I ran a ton of malware/virus scanners, and they all found nothing. I was only clued into the fact that Chrome was the culprit because the same thing started happening on my Chromebook -- if I didn't notice that, the next step would have probably been a full wipe of my computer.

How did you develop a love for reading?

Ask George Saunders, Barry Hannah, or Andrea Barrett. For each of these writers, their love for reading was realized in a K-12 classroom. For Maya Angelou, it’s thanks in part to Miss Kirwin, a “brilliant teacher” at the George Washington High School in San Francisco. For John McPhee, it’s thanks in part to Olive McKee, an English teacher he had for three years. Of course, you don’t have to look to lauded authors. Most readers, writers, and book-lovers can point you to a moment in their educational journeys where a love for reading was inspired in them by a passionate K-12 teacher.

However, the ability of schools and teachers to foster a love for reading in students is under assault in today’s educational climate. We live in a time of high-stakes accountability, where quantifiable metrics, namely standardized test scores, are used to judge students, teachers, and schools. Now, we are faced with the Common Core, new standards in Math and English Language Arts that are sweeping the nation. Incentivized by billions in federal grant dollars, 45 states are adopting the Common Core, with some states rolling out their implementations over the last two school years and other states waiting until next school year.

With these new standards come new tests, namely the Smarter Balanced assessment and PARCC, which are expected to take up to 10 hours for students to complete every year, starting in third grade. These tests will dominate students and teachers’ lives and turn many engaging classrooms into test prep zones. This myopic focus on testing places an extraordinary burden on students and teachers — such an extreme focus detracts from students’ educational experiences and greatly impedes schools and teachers’ ability to foster a love for reading in all students.

This should matter not only to students, parents, and teachers, but to publishers, writers, readers, and booksellers across America. If we want reading to flourish as a pastime and a serious pursuit, schools must be able to devote the necessary time and resources toward reading for pleasure.

You can probably think back to a time in school when you were introduced to something new. Maybe it was a concept in science class or a way of solving problems in math. With this new knowledge came a mix of recognition and surprise, the delight of learning. For many readers, a book passed along by a kind English teacher or eccentric history teacher carried with it this delight. In this sense, K-12 teachers are agents of intellectual excitement. A vibrant teacher can ignite students’ curiosity and enthusiasm in immeasurable ways. Especially for students who don’t have access to many literary resources at home, the classroom is the place where the world of books is brought to life. Educators can pass along their love for reading by introducing students to great books and by being sources of passion, creativity, and spunk.

In her Paris Review interview, novelist Andrea Barrett talks about her difficulties in high school, how she used to skip class and was a “horrible student.” Yet there was one person who stood out, a 10th-grade English teacher named Mrs. Williams. Mrs. Williams gave students “an extensive list of really good books to read” and then asked them to journal about their reading experiences. Soon, Barrett was reading more than she ever had before. “Mrs. Williams,” Barrett says, looking back, “was important to me in ways I didn’t understand for years.”

This is a relatable feeling. The lasting ramifications and reverberations that result from the guidance of our teachers — these people who, at the time, may have seemed silly, ridiculously strict, overly enthusiastic, and unbearably old — are hard to quantify. Yet many of us have been shaped in tremendous ways by these teachers who took the time and extended themselves, these teachers, like Mrs. Williams, Miss Kirwin, and Mrs. McKee, who went above and beyond and brought reading into our lives. Booksellers everywhere should be sending these teachers thank-you cards. These are the people who are inspiring the next generation of readers and book-buyers in America.

It’s worth thinking about what a young Andrea Barrett would have made of an English classroom that was strictly aligned with the Common Core and geared solely toward preparing students to get high scores on standardized tests. Instead of reading novels hand selected by her teacher, Barrett would read the same informational texts as every other student. Instead of being able to journal about her own ideas, Barrett would complete multiple-choice questions, each of which related directly to a Common Core standard. This is not the kind of environment that can foster a love for much of anything.

While we do not know what the full effects of these new efforts to standardize education will be, it’s clear that success on these Common Core-aligned tests will shape learning and teaching in many districts, because these tests will be a primary metric by which districts are judged. This will greatly influence what’s happening in our classrooms. Simply put, the more instructional time K-12 teachers have to spend preparing students for high-stakes tests, the less time teachers have to foster a love for reading in students.

This is not only a question of classroom time, but also of students’ perspectives. When books are seen through the lens of test prep, they lose value. Texts are turned into word searches, where students’ singular goal is to find the correct answer. If reading is treated merely as a way to extract the necessary information — rather then as an activity worthy in and of itself — our literary culture will be greatly diminished. “The most significant kind of learning in virtually any field,” writes visual arts teacher and Stanford professor Elliot Eisner, “creates a desire to pursue learning in that field when one doesn’t have to.” This definition of learning — of learning that is transformative, of learning that galvanizes our minds for a lifetime — is what should be driving our discussions, instead of the current focus on more and more high-stakes tests, where standards are geared toward establishing uniformity of thought among students and where creativity and individuality are neither valued nor encouraged.

If this current trajectory continues, the next generation of Americans will spend more time in school prepping for high-stakes tests than they will reading books or engaging in lab work or doing much of anything else. It seems likely that this, in turn, will have an impact on the number of active readers in America, a number that is already in noticeable decline. If we want our schools to be transformative places, if we want students to develop a deep love for reading, then we must understand that the most fundamental parts of an education are those that cannot be easily quantified through standardized tests.

At a time when so many external groups and special interest forces are involved in education, it’s important that the voices of book-lovers echo in our classrooms. Publishing houses should provide more free resources to students and schools. Local writers should find ways to collaborate with K-12 teachers. We should all advocate for a public education that engenders a love for reading in students.

Thinking of writers — George Saunders, Maya Angelou, and Andrea Barrett, just to name a famous few — who have been influenced by their K-12 teachers, it’s worthwhile to contemplate how they would have experienced today’s high-stakes testing climate. Would they still have developed a rich love of literature? Can such a love flourish in an environment where student achievement is reduced to standardized test scores? What is at stake, in this debate over education, are the lives and minds of the next generation of readers, writers, thinkers, activists, and academics in America. At some point, we have to ask how many students have already been turned off by today’s educational priorities? We have to wonder how many stories have already been lost.

Bonus Link: The Problem With Summer Reading

Image Credit: Flickr/albertogp123

Get out the kids’ sleeping bags and get ready to roll it out in the… National Archives!

That’s right. On Saturday, January 25, kids ages 8-12 and an accompanying adult will have the first-ever opportunity to go on an after-hours historical adventure through the National Archives and spend the night among some of America’s most valuable treasures at the History, Heroes, and Treasures sleepover.

Celebrated author and History Channel host Brad Meltzer will kick-off the evening with a reading from his new children’s series before sending participants on a mission of historical discovery. Along the way, guests will encounter Abraham Lincoln and Amelia Earhart, meet journalist and author Cokie Roberts, and travel back in time through activities that bring the rich holdings of the Archives to life.

As the night comes to an end, a selection of Oscar-nominated short films will be screened in the McGowan Theater before guests fall asleep alongside the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights in the Archives’ iconic rotunda.

And the fun doesn’t end there. On Sunday morning, breakfast will be served up with some with Archives trivia, where guests can put their new-found knowledge to the test. They’ll also get taste of history as American Heritage Chocolate presents a special demonstration of how hot chocolate was made in colonial times.

Participants will also receive the first two books in Brad Meltzer’s brand new children’s series, I am Abraham Lincoln and I am Amelia Earhart, and have the opportunity to have them signed by the author!

The History, Heroes, and Treasures Sleepover is open to kids ages 8-12 accompanied by an adult. Cost is $100/members and $125/non-members. The registration packet is available for download here.

Half an hour on the slow train from Antwerp, surrounded by flat, sparsely populated farmlands, Geel (pronounced, roughly, ‘Hyale’) strikes the visitor as a quiet, tidy but otherwise unremarkable Belgian market town. Yet its story is unique. For more than 700 years its inhabitants have taken the mentally ill and disabled into their homes as [...]

The post The Geel question appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

In 2005, Steve Jobs told a class of graduating students at Stanford University, “for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’"

The idea that we should live each day like it was our last isn’t new, of course, and is supposed to inspire us to, you know, go sky-diving, Rocky-Mountain climbing, and the like. But how would you live this day if it wasn’t your last, but rather the 19,718th-to-last? Or the 8,657th?

A new watch called Tikker claims to have created a way to calculate approximately when, according to its creators, a person is likely to die, and then to input that date into a wristwatch. The idea is that being constantly reminded of his or her own mortality will nudge the wearer to live life to the fullest.

“Tikker is a wrist watch that counts down your life from years to seconds, and motivates you to make the right choices,” the company, which is a Kickstarter-project-turned-real-thing, writes on its site. “Tikker will be there to remind you to make most of your life, and most importantly, to be happy.”

Happy, I tell you! Quick, you only have 57 years, 6 months, and 23 seconds left! Get happy, for Chrissake!

Tikker was created by Fredrik Colting, a 37-year-old Swede who previously gained notoriety by writing an unauthorized sequel to The Catcher in the Rye under the pseudonym John David California. J.D. Salinger sued Colting — his lawyers called the book a "rip-off pure and simple — and a judge blocked its publishing in the U.S.

If there’s one thing you can say about Colting’s newest venture, it’s that it’s definitely original. First, Tikker users fill out a questionnaire about their health habits, risk factors, and age. That information generates the time, down to the second, that the wearer has left until they leave this mortal coil.

Then, start the countdown! Just like on a time bomb majestic rocket ship blasting off to heaven.

The watch has helped the “Tikker team” create a bucket list, which includes items like, “Perpetually lay on a beach,” “Quit my job and watch every movie I always wished I had watched.” And of course, “Tell the girl at the coffee place that I love her.”

Hey, Coffee Place Girl, would you like to spend the next 473,354 hours with me? We’ll be watching old movies on the beach. Also, it's looking more like 60 hours now because I can no longer buy food since I quit my job.

It’s not an entirely bizarre idea, though. We tend to value things that are scarce, and death is, after all, a scarcity of life. Thinking about death can make us appreciate life more, and it can also make us into better people. For example, when researchers told subjects to imagine dying in an apartment fire, and then asked them a series of questions, the participants showed less greed, more spirituality, and more gratitude.

But if you’ll bear with me for a just a few of your remaining 28.4 million moments, there are a few caveats. Insurance and retirement companies already use “death clocks” that aim to calculate longevity, but there’s evidence that their estimates vary widely, even for the same individual, and there’s a 50 percent chance you’d outlive your deadline. There’s of course also a chance that, like Narcissus, you will become so distracted by your Tikker’s elegant beauty (or actuarial precision) that you’ll get hit by a bus.

And an idea called terror management theory suggests that because we fear death, and death is inevitable, we use self-esteem and positivity to cope with the crushing reality of our finite existence. So when we’re primed to think about death, we actually hew more closely to our pre-existing beliefs and behaviors. One study exposed smokers to warning labels centered on death — and the smokers with high self-esteem only thought more favorably of smoking after seeing the warnings.

The first Tikkers will ship in April. And while you can’t put a price on the icy breath of your impending demise, one watch will set you back $59.

(by @GuiMurilo)

There’s no official protocol for responding to a disappointed fan, but that may change after more writers get wind of this response, written by Threats author Amelia Gray, to a man who complained that her book was “nothing more than conversations among insane people.” Gray admitted that the man’s gripe did, in fact, have merit, after which she urged him to buy a copy of A Time to Kill.

Audio guides, apps, multimedia: Museum-going is ever more mediated by technology. But attempts to woo audiences with razzle-dazzle can be alienating… more»

1. A Breadcrumb Trail of Recent US Writing and Publishing Stats

• 2012 fiction books published with an ISBN: adult fiction 67,254; YA and juvenile fiction 20,339
• 2012 Net book sales: $27.1 billion
• 2011 books published: traditionally published 347,178; self-published 235,000
• 76 percent of all books released in 2008 were self-published
• Roughly 50 percent of all fiction published (traditional or self-published) is a romance, mystery, sci-fi, or fantasy story
• 1900 independent bookstore locations in 2012
• 1 percent chance across all genres of a published book being stocked in a brick-and-mortar store
• 20 percent of all books sold in 2012 were e-books
• Approximately 185 U.S. institutions granting MFAs in fiction
• Best markets for fiction sales: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington D.C.
• 600-700 books received weekly by LA Times for review consideration
• 197,768 self-reporting writers in 2009
• 39 percent increase between 1990 and 2005 in the number of writers and authors

Sources: Publishers Weekly, “Artists and Arts Workers in the United States Findings from the American Community Survey” (2005-2009) and the “Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages” (2010), American Booksellers Association, Bowker Books in Print, Association of Writers and Writing Programs, Huffington Post, LA Times, The New York Times.

2. How Many Novelists are at Work in America?
Recently, the BBC reported that one in 10 Icelanders will publish a book at some point in their lives. Per capita, the island nation has more readers, writers, and books published than anywhere else on the planet. Since there are a little over 300,000 Icelanders, we can estimate that more than 30,000 writers are in various stages of germination, many of them novelists.

There are times when I feel like Austin, Texas, where I live, is a little like Reykjavik. Aspiring, failed, midlist, and commercially successful novelists abound and they all seem to frequent the same coffee shops, attend the same readings, and know the same people. A large Icelandic family might have to endure two or three writers at the same dinner table, but in Austin I can’t get my haircut or order a cortado without overhearing a plot summary. I’m exaggerating a little, but not by much. By all accounts, Brooklyn and Portland have it worse. But half of the Austinites I know are writing a book, most of them novels. (That I need to broaden my social circle goes without saying.) Recently, a friend — a blessed non-writer — asked me what he thought was a fairly straightforward question: How many novelists do you think are at work in America? He tossed it off casually, like he was asking about average rainfall or median house prices. He wanted a reasonable answer and I said I would have to get back to him. I carried the question around for weeks, rolling it over in my mind, afraid to look at it in broad daylight. The stats above reveal some of the breadcrumb trail as I tried to find an answer.

Before sifting through the numbers, I want to point out that there’s an inverse relationship between small business entrepreneurship and the number of people writing novels in America. While the number of self-employed Americans has been dropping for years and is considered by most economists to be in steady decline, the number of novelists continues to grow. There are more novels being written and published (traditionally and through self-publishing) than at any other time in U.S. history. A handful of novels were published during the writing of this paragraph.

That a novelist is nothing like a small business entrepreneur is rather obvious. For one thing, novelists typically don’t assess the market to see if there’s a demand for their labor of love before they begin production. If anything, the decision to write a novel is driven by a kind of secular faith. The process requires enormous amounts of time, energy, and heartache, with no guaranteed return on investment. Like belief in a higher power, the will to publish a novel ignores all the atheistic arguments and the cold hard numbers. Sure, there are some outliers and windfalls. But would anyone start the small business Novel-in-Progress if they knew that the average book in the U.S. sells less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime? Actually, yes, many of them would.

That every novelist occupies a magical realist mindset is worth considering. Annually, there are laments about the death of the novel or at least the death of the good and interesting and innovative novel. From what I can tell, though, there are a few hundred thousand American novelists who pay no attention to this cultural distress call. How many exactly?

Since self-publishing accounted for about 76 percent of all titles in 2008, and amounted to 291,000 titles across all genres in 2012, we should take the term novelist in the broadest possible sense. I’m referring to people who are actively writing novels with the intention of publication — either through self-publishing channels or through traditional publishing houses. (I realize this is a broad definition; one might argue a novelist has to have published a novel to be called that. But most dictionary definitions simply state that a novelist is “a person who writes novels.”)

My numbers include reported statistics, educated estimates provided by reliable sources, and personal extrapolations. One limitation is that Bowker Books in Print tracks titles by ISBN number, so we don’t always know exactly which reported titles are self-published or traditionally published. Of course, many self-published books never bother with obtaining an ISBN for a print or e-book. Also, there isn’t a separate category just for adult novels. “Adult fiction,” as reported by Bowker, includes novels, short story collections, and graphic novels written specifically for the adult market.

Now, let’s grapple for The Number…

Let’s start with how many people report being a writer or an author. For NEA statistics, survey respondents identified writing as their “primary” job. Their estimate for 2009 was 197,768 self-reporting writers and authors. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a similar category and pegs the number for 2010 at 145,900, with 68 percent being self-employed. For both agencies, “writing” includes advertising writers, authors, biographers, copywriters, crossword-puzzle creators, film writers, magazine writers, novelists, playwrights, sports writers, and lyricists. (By the way, according to the NEA stats, there are about 9,000 self-reporting writers living in Texas and I’m pretty sure 8,500 of them live in my Austin neighborhood.) Now, not every self-reporting writer is a novelist or earning any living from fiction. What about the engineers and dentists writing a bildungsroman on the weekends? There’s no way to accurately account for them. (They might be partially captured in readership numbers for periodicals like Poets & Writers, which has a readership of 100,000, with 63 percent of readers reporting that they write fiction.)

So let’s turn to the number of self-published and traditionally published works of fiction in 2012: 67,254 for adult fiction, 2,200 for young adult, and 13,297 for juvenile fiction. These include anything published with an ISBN number, either self-published or from a traditional publisher. Since the juvenile market isn’t known for its novels, we can assume that the adult fiction and young adult novels account for no more than 70,000 titles. Assuming most writers can’t turn out a book every year, an average of a book every 3 years would be the high end (James Salter’s most recent book ended a 30-year stretch without a novel). So let’s say or imagine there’s a pool of 210,000 writers producing fiction with an ISBN number. There are obvious problems with this number. For one thing, it doesn’t properly account for new entrants into the market. What about the couple thousand fiction MFA graduates each year who are getting up early to write their novels before a non-literary day job? Also, we need to take out short stories and graphic novels from the 70,000 yearly titles. And we need to add in self-publishers without an ISBN.

Can we agree on a low-end pool of 250,000 active novelists? If I had to account for all the people writing novels that will never see the light of day, in either self-published or published form, I’d put that number at one million. That’s less than a third of one percent of the population. Established novelists and jaded critics, take heart.

What if we want to know about novelists publishing only in mainstream presses? If we go back to 2002, before the dramatic rise of self-publishing, we might get some insight. In 2002, 25,000 fiction titles were published. We can assume the vast majority of these were from mainstream and small presses, not through self-publishing channels. If the same ratios hold for today as compared to 2002, then adult fiction from mainstream publishing would account for 18,700 titles. Half of that is so-called “genre” fiction. So let’s call “literary novels” a little under 10,000.

Getting back to my inquisitive non-writer friend, the real answer is that no one knows exactly how many novelists are at work in America. We can guess and infer and extrapolate. The truth is that no one’s ever asked the question of the U.S. population in any organized way. There’s never been a “novelist” box to check on a tax form or on a state agency survey. After studying the data, I’m inclined to think there’s a million people writing novels, a quarter of a million actively publishing them in some form, and about 50,000 publishing them with mainstream and small, traditional presses. Then again, I have a novelist’s penchant for rounding numbers for the sake of narrative convenience. Putting the numbers aside, what we do know is that there’s an army of folks writing novels — some bad, some glorious — against staggering odds. Writing a novel is like starting a small business and investing thousands of hours without knowing exactly what it is you’re going to end up selling. It’s a leap of faith every time, even for someone who is five novels into a career.

Perhaps the most revealing statistic of all is one that’s buried in the sea of data. The NEA reports that of all the self-identifying authors and writers, 46.8 percent report arriving at or starting work at noon or later. There are two ways to interpret that number. The first way is to say it includes all the fulltime novelists who are just getting their workdays started. That sounds like a pretty nice life to me. But the other way it to say it includes the legion of unknown novelists who get up early to work on books before they start an unrelated day job. They spend their mornings writing novels that the world hasn’t asked them for and that the world — statistically — will largely ignore. Call it a kind of mad devotion.

Image Credit: Wikipedia