OP, is that a stand alone library, or member of a system?
I work in a 3 county library system, and our "hold" number reflects your place on the system wide list. However, depending on how a copy is tagged, your place within your home library list could be much shorter. For example, if I tag a book as "New" instead of just "bk" it won't interloan (only our library patrons can receive holds), so patron #41 pops up as next for our copy. Unfortunately, if we have no copy and every other library marks theirs "new" then our patrons wait until another library has filled all their holds and changes "new" to "bk" after 6 months.
On the other hand, I was always told to order another copy if our hold list exceeded 7.
At a seminar, we discussed ways to handle extremely long hold lists. Some systems rent large numbers of high demand titles, rather than buy. I believe the rule of thumb was a patron shouldn't have to wait longer than 3 months.
Just as another poster mentioned trying a different format (paper vs e-book), look at other options like large print, audio on disc, playaway, paperback vs hardcover, of different editions. Each one has a unique bib record, so each has a unique hold list. If you just click on the first one, you might have ignored a larger pool of available copies.