Not long ago, getting a book into readers’ hands usually meant getting past a publisher first.
An author needed an agent, an editor, and, eventually, a publishing house willing to take a chance on the manuscript. The publisher controlled much of what came next, including production, distribution, marketing, and the decision about how many copies a book might reach.
That system still exists. But it no longer defines the entire book business.
A new report from selfpublishing.com offers a measure of how quickly the alternative publishing economy has grown. Publishing by the Numbers 2026, drawing on data from the Association of American Publishers, R.R. Bowker, Nielsen BookData and Pew Research Center, estimates that self-published titles now outnumber traditionally published books in the United States by more than five to one.
According to the report, in 2025, more than 4 million ISBN-registered titles were published in the U.S., up 32.5% from the previous year. Globally, the self-publishing market reached $2.16 billion and is projected to reach $6.16 billion by 2033.
“Every year we look into the data, the headline changes,” said Chandler Bolt, founder and CEO of selfpublishing.com. “This year, it’s audiobooks quietly overtaking e-books and independent bookstores opening at a pace nobody predicted.”
The numbers point to a fundamental change in who gets to publish, how books find readers, and where the economics of the industry now sit. The publisher is no longer the only gatekeeper.
The Author Becomes the Publisher
Through digital publishing platforms, an author can publish without securing a traditional publishing deal, set a release schedule, and retain responsibility for decisions ranging from pricing to marketing.
That control comes with its own costs. Independent authors must often pay for editing, design, and other services themselves and assume much of the work involved in bringing a book to market. But the financial incentive can be significant.
According to the report, self-published authors now account for 51% of eBook unit sales and as much as 34% of eBook revenue. Royalty rates can reach 40% to 70%, depending on the platform and arrangement, compared with the roughly 10% to 15% commonly associated with traditional publishing deals.
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing has been central to this shift, giving individual writers a distribution system that once required a publishing company.
Then Came AI
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used throughout the writing and publishing process. For some authors, it can assist with research, brainstorming, editing, or other parts of production. For others, it can generate substantial portions of a manuscript.
R.R. Bowker management has identified AI-generated titles as a possible contributor to the sharp increase in self-published books. That has raised a question the industry is still trying to answer: As the number of books grows, how should readers know how those books were made?
The Authors Guild has introduced a certification program for human-authored books. Others in the industry have called for AI-related disclosure fields to be added to ISBN registration.
The issue is larger than labeling. Traditional publishing has long relied on editorial selection as one way of signaling that a manuscript has passed through a professional process. A publishing environment in which anyone can produce and distribute a book at scale requires different signals of quality and authorship.
TikTok Changed the Discovery Process
For decades, readers discovered books through bookstores, libraries, newspaper reviews, magazines, television, and recommendations from friends. Increasingly, they discover them through their phones.
BookTok, the publishing community on TikTok, has become one of the most visible examples. The community has generated roughly 370 billion views and is credited with driving 59 million print book sales in the U.S., worth an estimated $760 million in revenue, according to the report.
Its influence has spread internationally. BookTok-driven sales across Europe topped €800 million in 2025.
The significance of the phenomenon goes beyond TikTok itself. It demonstrates how the path from reader to buyer has changed.
The Audiobook Boom Tells Another Story
The U.S. audiobook market reached $2.43 billion in 2025, while the global audiobook market is projected to grow at an annual rate of 26.2% through 2030.
That growth reflects a broader change in how people fit books into their lives. Listening allows a book to occupy time that reading a physical or digital page cannot: a commute, a workout, or household chores.
It also changes what it means to compete for a reader’s attention. Books are increasingly competing not only with other books but with podcasts, video, social media and other forms of audio and digital entertainment.
At the same time, the data on reading habits remains complicated. Pew Research Center found that 75% of U.S. adults read at least part of a book in the previous year. A separate YouGov survey found that 40% of Americans read no books in 2025.
The Bookstore Isn’t Disappearing
Perhaps the most unexpected part of the current publishing story is happening offline.
The American Booksellers Association recorded 605 new bookstore openings in 2025, compared with 65 closures. Its membership has increased 97% since 2020.
That does not fit neatly into the familiar narrative that digital publishing is replacing physical books and online retail is replacing bookstores. Instead, the industry appears to be becoming more fragmented.
An author can publish independently. A reader can discover a book on TikTok. The same book can be consumed through an audiobook app and later purchased as a physical copy from a local bookstore.
For someone considering self publishing a book, that increasingly means entering an ecosystem with more ways to create, distribute, promote, and sell a title than existed even a decade ago.
Technology has not eliminated the physical book. It has changed the number of ways a book can reach a reader. The old gatekeepers have not disappeared. They simply have more competition.
