Words about numbers

Written by someone who really shouldn't be allowed near a number.

It’s 6:30pm on the Sunday evening after the Franschhoek Literary festival (6:30 being the first of a few numbers I have for you).

I’m at home, over-stimulated, sifting through my notes and trying to process the weekend over a cup of tea and a social hangover.

At some point this weekend I got a paper cut, one of those that didn’t seem to ever want to stop bleeding, so all my notes (and my car and my clothes) are bloodied. I’ll leave you with the irony of a writer named Paige Nick getting a paper cut.

I’ll also leave you with these numbers jotted down on blood-stained scraps of paper. They came out of the mouths of a few authors, publishers, agents, booksellers, even finance guys at major corporations, who i either chatted to, listened to or overheard over the course of the festival. So please don’t sue me if any of them are off, don’t shoot the eavesdropper.
(With apologies to those of you who are actually good with numbers, which are honestly not even half my thing.)

I posted these first few bolded and italicised stats already, so if you’ve seen them please scroll past to the next lot.

Exclusive Books sales are up 3% this year.

1.9 billion books were sold this last year worldwide (up from 1.45 billion in 2021)
(CORRECTION: That’s Rand value of books sold in SA in the last year) Thank you for the correction, Marius who is a publisher with a substack here:

7.4 million books were sold in SA last year.
Which means 1 in 10 South Africans bought a book (not that one in ten read a book, sadly. I probably bought 3 in 10 of those if my TBR is anything to go by.)

16 000 tickets were sold for the festival’s events before the festival even started.
(Capacity was 21 000 tickets and judging by the crowds they may have come close to that.)

There were somewhere in the region of 121 events over three days (a mix of panel discussions, workshops and screenings.)

157 participants in the events (authors, publishers, broadcasters, moderators.)
8* of those were big-name, bestselling international authors. (I think, it could have been 7 or 9, but that’s the around-about number.) (Did warn you, I’m not to be trusted with numbers.( )(Or brackets.)

Youngest author at the festival? I’m going to take a guess here, Tara Roos at 20.

Here’s another number, her Substack, Tara’s Take has over 70 000 subscribers!

I didn’t see anyone who seemed younger than Tara at the festival. Although i wasn’t expecting Sam Dalrymple to be quite so young. When you hear ‘International bestselling author and historian’ you kind of picture a tweedy old guy, not this at 29.

Every year the News24 breakfasts sell out in a heartbeat, and everyone who missed the bus proceeds to beg, borrow and steal to try get into them. So this year, News24 added a 3rd breakfast. Which promptly sold out too.

Now a few publishing stats:
In SA right now, around 25 – 30% of our book sales go through Amazon/Takealot.
Audio books make up about 10% of sales.

(For comparison, in the USA, Amazon takes about 60-65% of the marketshare.
With 30% in audio books.)

Audible.com is coming to South Africa in the next few months, and are already hoovering up South African content. (No numbers here yet, but it felt like a headline I didn’t want to leave out just because it’s numerically challenged.)

100% of the panels I went to brought up an AI debate of some kind, even the ones that weren’t supposed to be about AI.

There are something just short of 2000 lawsuits currently open against Meta and other platforms under broader claims about addictive design and youth mental-health harm.

And I don’t want to leave you on such a depressing stat, so here are some lighter reading numbers:

Shawn Buck who runs Silent Book Club Cape Town has invented Strava* for readers. (*Strava: That smug sports app that plots and tracks your run/swim session for social sharing)
Just go to the story stats website, log your reading stats, and it generates a cool bookmark-type digital overlay you can drop on top of any picture or video to share your reading progress. Jus’likethat 🫰

What I’m reading next:

Must just decide which to read first between these three, feel free to weigh in on them on GBAS, surely statistically one out of these three have to snag your interest, or no?

And one final stat, there are only about 3000 billionaires* in the world.
(*this stat straight out of The three comma club, couldn’t help myself, took a quick sneak peak).