Quote:
Originally Posted by VydorScope
It is useful for exactly what it is doing, raising awareness that self-pub authors can and do compete with the big publishers, something many experts have been trying to deny. That was Hugh's objective and in that he has succeeded. All across the industry people are talking about the data. I suspect we will see competing surveys and reports with time.
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We're long past the point where anyone's denying that self-published authors can compete with commercially published authors at least in terms of Kindle success.
The only real questions left have to do with how reasonable are these expectations for a self-published author, and those questions are a lot more difficult to answer. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think this study does answer those questions (Howey is apparently among them), even though it doesn't even come close to addressing them. However, by saying that the data suggests self-publishing is a better choice for "even stellar manuscripts," he's saying that the expectations of success are better with self-publishing than commercial publishing even though the numbers say nothing of the sort.
They talk about how much money an author can make, but not about how likely they are to make it, but without that latter part there's no way to tell which choice is better.