In her March 2008 Asimov’s editorial, “Panning for Gold,” Sheila Williams shares the following nugget of information about her readership:

I think that at least 10 percent of Asimov’s readers are currently trying their hands at writing. I suspect that over the years Asimov’s editors have seen stories at one time or another from at least 20 to 30 percent of you—perhaps even more.

I must admit to being surprised that the number is so high. Perhaps it’s because I never tried to calculate such a percentage for Science Fiction Age back when I was editing fiction, and if I’d been paying attention, I would have already been aware of such a large overlap.

Oh, I tallied other numbers on and off, such as the percentage of submissions by women compared to the percentage of published stories by women, so that I could respond when people took me to task for the magazine not being representative of the pool of available stories—but I never thought to examine readers and writers as a sort of Venn diagram in an attempt to divine the correlation.

I trust that Sheila’s observation is correct. I’d love to know whether this fact holds true for other magazines, and for book publishing as well, both within science fiction and without. Is the reader/writer relationship similar in mysteries? How about romances?

I also wonder whether this carries over to other creative fields. What percentage of movie audiences want to make movies? What percentage of people who go to the theater hope to someday work in the theater? Is Asimov’s an anomaly, in that it’s so heavily supported by those who want to be a part of it? Or do Sheila’s numbers hold true for all artistic endeavors?

I’m not sure that there’s any way of finding this out. Any ideas?