The Author Ratings Report

[VydorScope]

Go fill out the survey and then read the report. It has lots of eye opening data (well will be eye opening for some of you...) Good stuff.

http://authorearnings.com/

[VydorScope]

One note of interest

The other eye-popper here is that indie authors are outselling the Big Five. That’s the entire Big Five. Combined. Indie and small-press books account for half of the e-book sales in the most popular and bestselling genres on Amazon. Instead of feeling any sort of confirmation bias, my immediate reaction was to reject these findings. Surely they weren’t accurate. And so I complained to our magical data snoop that we were only looking at e-book sales. What percentage of the overall reading market does this represent? Our data guru said this was a question we could easily answer. You won’t believe what he found.

and...

Did the smelling salts work? Are you with us? It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100 best-selling books in these genres are e-books!

Which is what I have been saying all along... go read the report, and look at the source data links and etc. Love to hear thoughts on it.

[barutanseijin]

Here are my lifetime earnings as author:

in paper publications: one pittance (£500 + ¥3,000)

in digital publications: zilch

[gmw]

This was on the News subforum as well, and I thought that in some respects it fitted better here. There is certainly a lot in that report, and a lot of surprises. It is interesting that someone has found a way to analyse Amazon sales without having to get access to the actual sales data (it is a very good example, from a computer security point of view, of how much information can be garnered from systems by analysis of metadata).

There is a lot in there to offer encouragement for independent publishers. I also like that it appears to demonstrate that the public slush pile system is working - independently published works are finding their way to top in a volume big enough to prove that it's not just outliers. None of which says it is any easier for an author to reach that range, but when you add this to the many recent articles about the woes of traditionally published authors, the advantages of independent publishing become very convincing.

You have to suppose that the big name publishers already know all this, they've had access to a big enough portion of the sales data that the numbers are unlikely to surprise them. I wonder if any of them have any plans to do anything about it? Perhaps the big publishers will morph into high profile PR agencies for names big enough to afford them (which, it seems to me, is close to what they've become already).

[Steven Lake]

I didn't need to see facts like this to know that print was dead and digital was the full way to go. When I got into publishing print was king. But in the years since then I saw my print sales shrink to zilch and my digital take over completely. Now I don't publish anything in print anymore. You want print, you special order it, otherwise I'm not doing any print at all, ever, period. It's just not worth it. And this report just proves that.