Who Reads?

"Who Reads Nonfiction?" by Beth Luey, in Publishing Research Quarterly (Spring 1998), P.O. Box 2423, Bridgeport, Conn. 06608–0423.

Millions of Americans have bought Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time (1988) and other high-profile works of serious nonfiction (some of them, like Hawking’s tome, all but impenetrable). Some big hits, such as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980), have been glossy coffee-table books tied to public TV shows; others, such as Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987), just happened to strike a cultural nerve. But such stunning successes give a misleading impression of the dimensions of the audience for nonfiction, says Luey, director of the Scholarly Publishing Program at Arizona State University. All the regular readers of serious nonfiction in America, she estimates, form a population only about the size of Arizona’s.

Much less is known about nonfiction readers than about readers of "quality" fiction, Luey observes. Folks who read literature and general fiction number about 16 million. A 1989 study showed that 59 percent are female, and 49 percent have attended college. Forty percent are in their thirties or forties, and almost as many of the rest are younger as are older.

Readers of serious nonfiction are a much smaller band: no more than four million, by Luey’s rough estimate. And the realistic maximum potential audience for "a solidly written, well-promoted book" is probably no more than, say, 20 percent of that total, counting both cloth and paperback sales. "Only illustrated books directly linked to television series are likely to have hardcover sales of a million or more," she says. The usual initial print run of an unknown author’s first trade book is 5,000 to 10,000 copies.

Luey’s informal research (including questionnaires returned by 53 people) suggests the nonfiction audience is, like the fiction one, about three-fifths female, but generally "better educated, and wealthier." The nonfiction audience also may be much grayer than the fiction one: only 13 percent of her respondents were 35 or younger.

Her survey participants "are avid readers by any definition," Luey notes. More than half read 30 books or more a year, and more problem of "poor writing (variously defined than a fourth read at least a book a week. And as condescending, wordy, and pompous)": her respondents have a simple solution to the when they encounter it, they stop reading.