And, speaking of how Indie publishing is destroying the world, here's a view from the litfic camp:
http://thefutureofpublishing.com/201...ing-ecosystem/
Quote:
How Can Prize-Winning Books Remain Invisible?
Here’s my next datapoint. The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) is a not-for-profit membership association serving the independent publishing community. Among their numerous activities they’ve offered the Benjamin Franklin Awards for print books for some time now. They have recently added the Benjamin Franklin Digital Awards to honors innovation in electronic book publishing by individuals and organizations of all sizes. I’m all for it. IBPA is a good trade group and they work hard for their membership. The books that received awards were mostly published in 2013. I made a spreadsheet of the winners. I took each title and found its Amazon Kindle sales ranking (several of the titles also had print editions, but I didn’t include that data). Here’s what I found (rather than attaching specific sales numbers to specific titles let me offer averages): 593,710 was the average sales position of the winning titles on Amazon, varying from about 200,000 to about 1.7 million in the listings. One title, “His Dream, Our Stories” (a book commemorating “The 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech) had hit #8,147 on the bestseller list. But it’s free. The book looks great, but free sure helps move quantities. (Two of the 12 titles had never been listed on Amazon. I don’t know why. ) It’s hard to say exactly what a bestseller is on Amazon because its rating system is based on sales velocity at any one time rather than on overall sales. Gernerally speaking when I see a title at 10,000 or lower I think it a success. Once it slips below 100,000 it has usually fallen into nowhere land.
My point is simple: A reputable publishing group offers awards to some of its best titles yet can’t really move the needle on those books’ sales. If these awards can’t help sales, what can? For this I damn Amazon. Who are they trying to help besides their own ruthless firm? If this is how we must paint the future, I’ll take my pictures from the past. The industry’s worship of this firm makes me ill.
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A lot more at the source.
Including some... interesting... math.
It's a fun read, really.
