Suggest OddsIf Book Sales Go Bad, Don’t Blame the Dragon
IStock Photo 7165349 © Oleg Prikhodko
Books about dragons are becoming more common. Between 1984 and 1998, according to Locus Magazine, an average of 30.6 science fiction novels a year were published whose titles contained the word “dragon.” Though books like The Dragon's Carbuncle and The Gully Dwarves (Dragonlance Lost Histories, Vol. 5) might have enjoyed only modest success twenty years ago, since then, they have risen steadily in popularity. In 2006 alone, 65 dragon novels — over twice the previous decades’ average — were published.
In spite of their impressive upswing, dragons still form a narrow slice of the book market. Roughly 3.08 billion books were sold in the US in 2008, but sales were dominated by a small proportion of all the works published. Most people already have an idea of who’s on top. Best seller lists are a hodgepodge of thrillers, Pulitzer Prize winners, vampire-romances, literary classics, diet books, and political biographies. But who is on the bottom? Who keeps the dragons company?
One of the least popular topics is agriculture, which accounts for 1 in 184.6 books published. Even more unpopular, whether because readers find it dull or because they find it panic-inducing, is the subject of personal finance. Few people want to read a book like Are You Financially Checkmate? The odds a new published book is about personal finance are just 1 in 472.9. It’s about eight times more likely that a person’s remains will not be picked up from a crematorium.
Given the preference for paranormal fiction over personal finance, it may not be surprising that 41% of people would give themselves a C, D or F when it comes to financial literacy.
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