Yes, authors are competitors.
Hmm… let’s think about this for a moment. The average reading time per capita (in America), per day, is 15 minutes, and this number is dropping every year. I will assume 5% of the US population reads, lol. This gives us about 17,000,000 readers, or 4,250,000 hours of reading per day. That sounds like a lot! If the average book takes 9 hours to read, we get around 470,000 books per day, or 170,000,000 books per year. Wow!
Now, just for fun, let’s say your readers all read the same books. That 170,000,000 books per year plummets to just 10 books per year, 17,000,000 times. Obviously, this is an extreme example so, to keep it interesting, let’s assume they read a few different ones and make that number 1,000,000 unique books per year.
How many new books come out every year in America? About 4,000,000, which means roughly 3,000,000 new books get zero or only a handful of eyes… oh. These numbers are completely fabricated. They’re probably much worse.
If a new author wants readers to try their book, they need them to not read someone else’s book. This is basic business. There simply isn’t enough readers for the glut of books saturating the market, a market that’s growing while the customer base is shrinking. You and all the other authors are competitors. The ones telling you otherwise, those are the smart business people hoping you’ll sit out the game.