Quote:
Originally Posted by Pajamaman
As far as I can understand it, the situation is as follows:
For a while over the last five years or so, indie authors and independent publishers were able to sell their books on Amazon and their own sites at a profit. They had visibility on Amazon, and readers bought their books at a profitable price.
Something has happened.
Readers no longer buy from independent sites. They buy from Amazon.
And Amazon is no longer giving as much visibility to indie authors as it was before. It has shifted to giving greater visibility to the Big 5 publications. Amazon did this by changing its algorithms and advertising system. Why did this happen? About two years ago, Amazon came to agreements with the Big 5 publishers. What happened in the relationship between Amazon and the Big 5 that Amazon decided to more aggressively market Big 5 books, and to let indie books sales wither?
There is also the issue that readers are buying less indie books, or are not willing to pay as much. That could be because of Amazon's shift in focus.
There is also Trump. This might have affected people's buying habits.
Really, I don't know. Did I get it wrong? I'd love to be enlightened.
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You're not wrong.
But you're missing a roughly $200M piece of the puzzle: Kindle Unlimited.
When people buy a book, print or digital, they buy for a variety of reasons. It might be a gift, it might be to read right away, it might be a replacement for a copy they read years before. Or it might be to read it at a future date.
It is a fairly safe bet that at any one point in time, the number of books sold exceeds the number of books read by that buyer.
Kindle Unlimited changes that: Kindle unlimited only delivers money to the author and/or publisher when books are read. This means that every book via KU is displacing a sale of that book (unless the reader really really likes it) or another book that might've been purchased if KU were not an option. Eyeball hours dedicated to reading being pretty much a fixed value for each reader.
Now, one ways of looking at that $200M annual payout from KU is that the average full book-read payout is reportedly somewhere around $2, which translates to 100M books worth of KU reads last year, displacing a potential 100M book sales. (Assuming TBR lists didn't get much shorter in 2016.)
For context, last month's DBW conference brought a much improved survey of sales (print & digital, traditional & non-tradpub) that gives us fairly trustworthy absolute unit sales numbers.
(Here's a pretty good summation:
http://www.sfwa.org/2017/02/really-sold-2016/
The ebook unit sales numbers for adult fiction:
175M tradpub
150M Indie
50M Amazon Publishing
Print books unit sales:
141.4M tradpub
21.8M Indie
1M (almost) Amazon
Now, KU is primarily a channel for Indie and ePub titles so those books read through KU are mostly Indie. (There's well over a million titles in there.) Those lost sales are still delivering money to Indies but only Indies in KU. Which is Amazon-exclusive.
Some of those 100M KU reads lead to followup sales in the Kindle store but they sure as heck don't lead to sales anywhere else. And they may not all represent displaced (and thus lost) sales but a pretty solid fraction of them surely do.
Anyway you slice it, KU is bleeding out a significant fraction of ebook sales and turning them into page reads. How big a fraction we could spend weeks debating.
It could be as high as 30% or as low as 15% but whatever the number it will not be zero. And, regardless of how many subscribers KU retains and how much of a profit Amazon makes off it, those displaced reading hours aren't being spent outside the Kindle ecosystem.
That is not good news for Amazon competitors big or small.
Just as the BPHs push to grow print sales at the expense of digital--because all they produced was more sales for Amazon--KU growth only feeds the Amazon ecosystem and nobody else. Thanks to agency and the push for print, adult fiction is becoming an Amazon Casino: no matter how you play, no matter if you win or lose, the house always wins.
Edit: BTW, the genre breakdown numbers from the DBW session are eye-popping. For some genres, like african-American fiction, they are simply outrageous.