The latest author earnings report dropped recently with its deepest look yet at the state of the US ebook (and print and audio) publishing world, 1million titles deep, and it mostly confirms previous reports about the rise of Indie, Inc and the fade of the BPHs influence.
The full report and all its many confirmations (yes, tradpub is not only the realm of legacy publishing practices, it is also becoming the realm of legacy authors) can be found here:
http://authorearnings.com/report/may-2016-report/
However, the part I'm focusing on is buried deep, past the report and its sobering addendum, into the comments, where Data Guy calmly dropped this not so little chart:
http://authorearnings.com/wp-content...enre-units.png
(It's probably too big to embed here and shrinking it might impact readability.)
1- romance makes up around 40% of all ebook sales, with non-traditional publishing taking up about two thirds
2- SF&F makes up around 15%, with nearly 60% non-traditional
3- Thrillers around 14% and 35%
4- Mystery 9% and 40%
5- LitFic about 6% and, say, 8% but with the kicker that APub titles make up nearly half.
6- the rest, about 14% is other: non-fiction, coloring books, erotica, etc
So it seems romance and SF &F readers really love Indie, Inc. (Explains a lot, really.)
Mystery is worth keeping an eye on as it used to be a laggard in ebook sales in general and Indies in particular and it has shown the second biggest shift since 2014 (slightly different chart, similar ratios):
http://authorearnings.com/wp-content...her-type-5.png
The biggest change, however, seems to be in (gulp!) Literary Fiction where Indies are now a visible presence but, as pointed out above, the biggest publisher by far is Amazon.
Remembering that AmazonPublishing is also by far the biggest source of translated fiction in the US and, well, they seem to be a real force on the "cultural" side of publishing. They are actually looking a lot like the "Classic" publishing houses of the 50's and 60's, from before the multinationals took over Manhattan publishing.
Very interesting chart, that one.
Oh, and the rest of the report and addendum is also very much worth checking out.
Did I mention it's eyepopping?
Quote:
For this report, we didn’t stop at 200,000 listed category best-sellers. Instead, we also had the AE spider crawl through each of their also-boughts, and pull data on every single one of *those* titles, as well. And then we had it crawl the Amazon author pages for all of those books, too, and pull data on every single other title each author had for sale on Amazon. We ended up with daily sales data on a million of Amazon’s Kindle ebooks — nearly a third of all titles listed in the US Kindle store. We captured practically all of the titles selling with any frequency whatsoever, the vast majority of the infrequently-selling titles, and many, many of the non-selling. Our dataset includes:
Nearly every single Kindle book selling 1 or more copy per day. (98.5% of them)
90% of all Kindle titles selling at least 2-3 copies a week
81% of all Kindle titles selling 1 or more copy a week
64% of all Kindle titles selling 2 or more copies a month
32% of all Kindle titles listed in the Amazon US Kindle store.
With this report, Author Earnings is now capturing and breaking down a full 82% of daily Amazon Kindle ebook sales. Even better, we’ve been able to capture the majority of the previously unmeasured “dark matter” sales — whose composition we had before only speculated about. Well, now we know.
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They're getting so deep into Amazon's data it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon took some action. They are only publishing minimized data and percentages but the raw data they collect gives them a window into Amazon's deeper secrets.
For example, asked about whether Indies did coloring books over at TPV, it took Data Guy but minutes to dig this out:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/2016/...comment-358072
Quote:
Here’s what the overall Amazon stats on coloring books look like (sorry for the format):
mysql> select publishertype, sum(salesperday), sum(dailyrevenue), sum(authordailyrevenue) from kindlebooks where formattype = ‘print’ and title like ‘%coloring%’ group by publishertype;
+——————+——————+——————–+————————-+
| publishertype | sum(salesperday) | sum(dailyrevenue) | sum(authordailyrevenue) |
+——————+——————+——————–+————————-+
| bigfive | 1147 | 10051.55996966362 | 1168.2080109715462 |
| indie | 6128 | 39226.79976797104 | 13455.987939553801 |
| small/medium pub | 5441 | 39177.579954624176 | 4462.821904197335 |
| uncategorized | 693 | 5878.619947195053 | 566.7715984284878 |
+——————+——————+——————–+————————-+
4 rows in set (3.11 sec)
Doesn’t look like Amazon imprints have gotten in on the coloring-book thing yet. ��
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Dude's dangerous.
