How many books have I actually published? Let’s finally crunch the numbers.
Since August 15th of last year, the number of editions of my books available on KDP/Amazon has increased significantly.
Let’s try to understand the meaning of the number 267 shown in the chart you are looking at.
To begin with, last July I published the 4th edition of what I consider my most important and representative book: *Transiti e Rivoluzioni Solari* (Transits and Solar Returns)—an Italian edition spanning 673 pages and a Japanese one of around 800 pages.
At that time, my titles were available in 9 languages. Today, that figure stands at 15: Italian, English, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Hungarian, Slovenian, Russian, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Finnish.
You can download the following two files from the homepage of my website, www.cirodiscepolo.it; I will now explain how best to read them:
ARCHIVIO_GENERALE_BIBLIOGRAFICO_CIRO_DISCEPOLO.xlsx
BIBLIOGRAFIA_GENERALE_AGGIORNATA_CIRO_DISCEPOLO.docx
IMPORTANT: To ensure you download the latest updated version of these files, I recommend opening the links in an incognito/private browsing window. Otherwise, your browser might retain an older version of the documents in its cache and display that instead of the most recent one.
These two documents are the result of a rather complex project I am undertaking with ChatGPT—a project that is still ongoing.
In fact, I can safely say that it was ChatGPT that physically organized the entire cataloging process: starting with my old historical bibliography, cross-referencing it with the KDP library, and categorizing works, editions, translations, print and Kindle formats, ISBNs, ASINs, reprints, and ambiguous cases. It continues to update and verify the data alongside me. It is important to clarify one thing right away: the figure “267” does not mean I have written 267 different books.
That number comes from KDP’s accounting system; in the Amazon report shown in the image, it represents the set of books KDP is including in that specific report. It is, therefore, a commercial or technical figure specific to the platform, not a count of my original works.
The bibliography we have compiled, however, relies on much stricter criteria.
Currently, the master document lists 182 documented titles or entries, derived from comparing the 180 entries in my historical bibliography with everything we were subsequently able to recover and identify. Yet, those 182 works—or entries—have spawned a vast number of different editions: new editions, translations, split volumes, print versions, Kindle editions, and so on.
In fact, the current census shows 321 edition entries and 391 format-specific bibliographic records, encompassing 287 unique ASINs. Even these figures, however, should not be interpreted as representing 321 or 391 distinct books; the archive deliberately keeps separate the data points that belong to the publishing history of a single work.
Let’s take a simple example using *Transiti e Rivoluzioni Solari*.
The first documented Italian edition dates back to 1997 and ran to 580 pages. Subsequent Italian and foreign editions followed. Today, the archive includes—among others—the fourth Italian edition (673 pages), as well as English, Japanese, and Dutch editions, along with numerous other language versions and Kindle editions. It would make no sense to treat them all as “the same publishing entity,” yet it would be equally incorrect to claim that each format constitutes a brand-new book written from scratch.
That is why, in my biographical note, I continue to use the cautious phrasing “over 150 books.” This does not contradict the 182 titles/entries in the archive, the more than 300 editions identified in the survey, or the 267 items currently shown in the KDP report. They are simply different units of measurement. The bibliographic document itself explains this distinction precisely to prevent such widely varying figures from being misinterpreted.
There is also another aspect that is particularly important to me.
Amazon represents only a part of my publishing history.
I published books many years before KDP existed, and numerous works of mine have been released by both Italian and foreign publishers. Consequently, a survey based solely on my Amazon library would inevitably be incomplete. Instead, we are attempting to reconstruct nearly fifty years of publishing activity, while acknowledging uncertainties—such as instances where we lack sufficient evidence to determine whether two records refer to the same edition or to two different ones.
And this is precisely one of the aspects of ChatGPT’s work that I appreciate most: when an identification is not certain, it does not force a conclusion. It flags the entry as “to be verified” and retains both pieces of information until we find documentary evidence.
The Excel spreadsheet serves primarily this purpose. It acts as our technical working archive, allowing us to track works, editions, formats, languages, codes, and outstanding issues.
The Word document, on the other hand, is a much more readable version of the bibliography—the one I would recommend to anyone wishing to simply trace my publishing output chronologically from the 1970s to the present day.
Naturally, both files will continue to evolve.
Just in the last few weeks, we have added new editions in various languages, and others are currently being cataloged. For this reason, I view the version published on my website as a near-complete, constantly updated bibliography rather than a static, definitive snapshot.
And perhaps the figure that delights me most is the one shown in the image above: 267.
Not because it represents 267 books written by me—as we have just seen, that is not the case—but because it visually illustrates the extent to which the international reach of a body of work, built up over nearly half a century, has expanded in such a short time.
And the work is not yet finished.
Anyone wishing to learn the full details, understand exactly what these numbers mean, and consult my updated general bibliography can read the full post on my blog:
https://cirodiscepolo.blogspot.com/
