According to Bowker’s Books in Print, there were 240,000 adult fiction hardcover titles published in English in the US from 1990-2010, or roughly 12,000 every year. If we interpret the above numbers generously, every year about one novel featuring Filipino characters written by a Filipino in English is published in the US. One out of 12,000. Over time, you can see how little literary production that is. In the past twenty years, twenty novels out of a quarter million have passed through the needle’s eye to find a U.S. publisher?
