Ebook Sales Favour Indie Publishers.



For a while now, I, like many other writers, have been wondering how well independent or self-published authors are doing in the ebook market compared to those who use traditional publishers. There is so much secrecy in the publishing industry that it is hard to tell. But I have just read a report, written by Hugh Howey, that suggests indie ebook authors are doing very well when compared to those who use traditional publishers.

For those who don’t know, Hugh Howey is a science-fiction author whose self-published Wool series has sold millions of ebooks. He was offered a million dollar deal to sign with traditional publisher Simon and Schuster. The original offer was to distribute Wool to book retailers across the US and Canada and included the ebook rights. But Howey decided to keep the ebook rights and took a six figure deal instead.  

Howey recently wrote a report based on data he obtained from a software program that trawled the web for information on ebooks sales. The data he uses in the report is from nearly 7,000 ebooks in several genre categories (including science-fiction and fantasy) on Amazon. The report is simply titled the 7K report and is available at authorearnings.com.




The report has several very interesting graphs like the one above. It shows that over half the ebooks in Amazons bestseller genre lists were indie or self-published. Howey says the pie chart suggests that the major publishers are not publishing enough genre fiction, including science-fiction, so the slack is being taken up by indie and self-publishers.

This is great news for a science fiction writer like myself who is repeatedly reading that the science fiction readership is decreasing. It looks like it might be actually increasing, despite traditional publishers best efforts to ignore it.

The report reveals many interesting details about ebook publishing on Amazon. For example, it really pays to be published by Amazon themselves (on 47 North or equivalent). The pie chart above show Amazon publishers accounting for only 4% of the titles in the genre bestseller list, but another graph in the report shows those 4% of ebooks accounting for 15% of the daily ebook sales in those genres.


If you were wondering how Amazons ebooks sales compare to their sales of hard backs, the above pie chart is astounding.  It shows that 86% of the top 2,500 genre bestsellers in the Amazon store are e-books.



The above chart helps Howey conclude that genre writers who indie or self-publish are financially better off than authors who go with traditional publishers, no matter what the potential of their manuscripts is. If you are a fiction writer, you have to read the report.   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Image
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...
Read more

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

Image
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other, and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. While Tommy, a failed artist who was looking after Francie, just acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings.  The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct We say we care, but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.  Anna is the main protaganist, a successful architect, who rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. Frequently forwarding articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taki...
Read more

New Blog Look.

I have just updated the look of my blog. I am trying to create a consistent web presence online by ensuring that my blog, website and social media look the same and are connected.  This desire for a consistent web presence is a result of what I have learnt in my studies for a Bachelor or Arts (Internet Communications). I have just completed the first two subjects. One of the subjects, Web Communications, had us creating a new web presence, so I created a new blog on Wix, a new Facebook page, a new Twitter account, and joined Wattpad for the first time. As part of the assignment we were supposed to consistently style all the sites. The central node is here . The other subject was an Introduction to Internet Design. In that subject we had to create, from html and CSS code, a website. I choose to do one for author Graham Clements. For that website, I pretended that I had published four novels that are in reality only unpublished, and in need of redrafting, manuscripts. I am quite ...
Read more