A few weeks ago I got an email about the 2017 Smashwords Survey, but I've only just got around to reading it. You can find it
here if you're interested in looking at the original slideshow presentation.
There are 111 slides, though a lot are Smashwords marketing guff you can skip over. Also, since I am not a romance author (perhaps regrettably, given the statistics in those slides: 49% of sales), I got to skim over quite a lot more of the slides.
Of interest (to me):
They claim FREE still draws readers, but their first proof of this is download count, which my own experience suggests has little to do with actual readers. Their figures also show the impact of FREE in download counts seems to be decreasing fairly steadily over the years.
They do, however, offer more substantial evidence that offering the first book of your series as FREE (ie. "perma-free") may have a substantial positive impact on earnings (over the rest of the series).
So the old advice of offering the first book of your series free still stands (and I still continue to ignore it, but never mind that
).
They also offer statistics on word-counts, suggesting that 80..110 thousand words is the best length for sales ... but since the only genre they breakout is romance (which is already the biggest influence on the total figure) this is a less than useful indicator of what you should be writing outside romance.
They talk of "box-sets" as being useful for marketing but not a big impact on earnings.
They suggest their pre-order system has a substantial (positive) impact on sales - but I'm not sure I find this convincing. Once you admit the importance of marketing, and making use of marketing tools like pre-order, then you admit that those using pre-order are probably the most heavily marketed, and so would be up there even if it wasn't for pre-order ... if you see what I mean.
Anyway, just something I found interesting on a Sunday afternoon when I should have been writing.