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All these numbers are interesting, but I don't know that anyone has enough of the right numbers to make more than simple sweeping generalizations.
These numbers clearly show self-published authors can make a lot of money on Amazon, something we have plenty of other data points to support as well, but I don't know that they do more than that.
It's been clear for a while now that for most authors, self-published success is going to produce more income than equivalent commercially published success. Let's face it, Amazon's 70% royalty rate is more than half again what a bookstore pays the distributor for a print book.
The benefits of success are real.
Unfortunately, I think they're cherry-picking their data.
The top 7,000 best-sellers even in genre fiction make up less than 1% of the total number of books available on the Kindle store. The top 1% are always going to be successful, if they weren't I'd strongly advise staying far far away from the industry.
If you look at Howey's estimated sales figures, he shows that approximately twice as many self-published authors make at least $10,000 a year (his lowest bracket) as big five commercially published authors. The obvious inference, and the one he wants us to draw, is that self-published authors are close to twice as likely to make that amount as those published by the big five.
The problem is that the numbers don't say that.
The likelihood of success is dependent on the size of the field, and we aren't given any indication of those numbers. If the number of self-published authors is smaller than the number of big five authors, then their numbers would look even better; if it's larger, the reverse is true.
All of these numbers need context to be useful, and it's context that we're not getting. We need to see what proportion of the total pool of self-published authors make it into the top 7,000 genre best-sellers and compare that to the proportion of big five commercially published authors that do the same.
That's going to give a better measure for success.
If the numbers are close to even, it's a slam dunk for self-publishing.
If there are ten times as many self-published authors as big five authors, then suddenly twice the absolute number of successes becomes one-fifth the likelihood of success and that's not as pretty a picture.
I want good numbers, I really want good numbers, because I do feel self-publishing is a valid path to success. I just don't think these numbers are as good as people think they are.
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