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Originally Posted by Grace Elliot
If sales have plateaued and yet there are more authors out there, that would suggest the market share for each author is smaller.
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Well, I guess that if the number of authors rises, as it has in most recent years, average market share has to decline, just as a matter of arithmetic.
US print + eBooks sales, taken together,
supposedly rose six percent last year. If I understand my last link, that's a six percent raise in retail prices paid. I'm not sure how that maps to average authorial income.
My wild guess is that many authors are keeping their incomes from falling only by releasing books more often.
Regardless of average market share, or traditional publisher vs. indie, or paper vs. eBooks, being an author remains a terribly difficult way to make a living. Maybe this March 2013 link appeared on Mobileread before, but I can't find it:
My Amazon Bestseller Made Me Nothing
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The New Yorker wrote one whole, entire, punctuated-and-everything sentence about me! My book was the No. 6 bestselling title in America for a while, right behind all the different “50 Shades of Grey” and “Gone Girl.” It was selling more copies than “Hunger Games” and “Bossypants.” So, I can sort of see why people thought I was going to start wearing monogrammed silk pajamas and smoking a pipe. . . .
This is what it’s like, financially, to have the indie book publicity story of the year and be near the top of the bestseller list.
Drum roll.
$12,000.
Hi-hat crash.
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