• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think there are many writers in general. There are 300,000 people, and 1 in 10 will publish a book in their lifetimes.

      • schmidtster@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Okay, but one guy writing 1000 books would skew that number substantially.

        You get 20 doing 10 that’s still a large portion changing the statistics.

        Is it actually 1/10 or is just 30000 books from the population.

        • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That’s ‘1 in 10 Icelanders will write and publish at least one novel at some point in their life’, not ‘one book written for every 10 Icelanders’.

          It’s a stat you’ll see floating around the internet, though I haven’t seen the ultimate source.

          • schmidtster@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yes it’s deliberately worded to be vague it could really mean either with no source, I did some research and most of what I found was multiple books are being published by people, with that same 1/10 being repeated, didn’t look into publishing rates or anything yet though.

          • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Keep in mind, that’s just the people famous enough to have English Wikipedia articles.

            There’s no way 1 in 10 people in Iceland are full-time professional authors publishing a book every year.

            In the US, most authors I personally know write for fun and have a novel or few on something like wattpad and they’ve made exactly $0 on it.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Yep. My mom has written multiple published novels but she considers it something she does for fun more than anything.

    • Klanky
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      1 year ago

      When I visited (so take it with a grain of salt) a local (who was a friend of a friend and showed us around) said that culturally there is a lot of encouragement to be creative in various forms. Be interested if any Icelandic people would either confirm or deny this.