Thank you for downloading the More or Less Podcast. We are a weekly guide to the numbers

in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford. If you know more or less, you'll know how

much we love burying our noses in a good book, especially if it's about numbers. Although

even the ones without any numbers in are still quite good, they're always the page numbers

to keep you going after all. But even picture books have numbers attached to them, sales

numbers, that is. And a particular claim about sales numbers has everyone talking. It

emerged during a high profile legal case in the United States.

So I was on Twitter and this tweet pops up that grabs my attention immediately. Apparently

out of 58,000 titles, half of them sell only like a dozen books per title. Now that

is an outrageous number, right? Like imagine getting traditionally published and not selling

more than 12 books. That's author Cat Rector, one of many in the industry who expressed

astonishment on social media at claims made by a lawyer from the US Department of Justice,

who said that out of 58,000 trade titles published every year, trade titles are books

aimed at a general audience, half sell only a dozen copies or less. A depressing figure

for writers everywhere, if true. But is it true? To find out whether there's a happier

ending to this particular tale, we turn to Kristen McLean, executive director of business

development and the primary industry analyst for the NPD books group.

So we jokingly have been referring to this number as Pandora's number because it definitely

when it came out at trial set the world ablaze as far as the publishing Chechakas. Basically,

Penguin Random House, which is the largest United States publisher and one of the largest

publishers in the world wants to buy Simon and Schuster, which is the third largest publisher

in the United States. And Penguin Random House is already quite a bit larger than the other

...