Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
That's weird. The vast majority of the books at a Barnes and Noble store (not counting the discount section*) are Big Five books and Amazon and B&N should both have them to this day.
Where I think Amazon pulled ahead is in indies and as Nook lost relevancy small presses stopped paying attention to them.
|
Correct on both counts.
Kindle's calling card these days are Indies, small presses, and APub (by default--this can't be stressed enough: those are very good books competitors refuse to stock, hurting themselves and helping amazon). Sure, they carry everything else, too, but that's what separates them from everybody else. And it makes then enough money from enough different sources no publisher can push them around. And they know it.
Back before they shut down, Author Earnings did a study of the ratio of Indies, BPH, MID-size, and small press, in the major ebookstores.
Google and Apple were close to 90% tradpub and very high in BPH.
KINDLE was barely two thirds Tradpub and less than a third BPH.
NOOK and KOBO were somewhere in between, with Kobo doing quite a bit better with Indies than Nook.
The numbers made sense: back when it mattered, the only way for Indies to get into Apple was via aggregators like SMASHWORDS and Google stopped accepting Indies a few years back.
Nook still had their bad rep with the romance indies (and, boy, are they legion!).
Kobo is pretty much the only other player that has made any kind of case for Indies "going wide" because of their Overdrive link.
Which is undercut by the libraries "allergy" to anything not listed in the literary journals. (When it came out that SMASHWORDS Indie titles were segregated, "ghettoized" in Overdrive listings, it was revealed the Libraries demanded it. Kinda limits the value of going that route.)
Since Amazon sells over half all books in the US it is safe to say that that 30-40% of sales going Indie, small Press, and especially APub, makes a big difference between stores.