Amazon's self-published success stories

[morriss003]

These thing happen in cycles. Suppose one of the major networks comes up with a successful TV show about people who solve crimes by examining dead bodies. I guarantee that if it should ever happen, every other network will immediately put on shows that are similar and there will be clones and clones of the clones.

[ProfCrash]

I tend to think that those are genres that people are able to read pretty quickly. I have read my fair share of Paranormal Sci Fi (I love Kim Harrison and Jim Butcher sometimes) . Most are not exactly tough reads. They are fun and enjoyable but they are not challenging. Since I read mostly for fun, I am fine with that.

My point? Fun and easy but not challenging tends to mean that you can get through the book pretty quickly. Which means that you are looking for more material. Which probably leads to looking for books that are less expensive, lets face it if you are reading 2-5 books a week price matters more than if you are reading a book every week or two. This leads to experimenting with Indies. There are a ton of books out there and their price point is drasticly cheaper than the mainstream press. Not to mention, many Indie publishers, at least the ones I have seen posting on baords, tend to have a backlog of books that they have been trying to sell for a while so you have regular publication of books.

Not a bad formula for success. Fans who love reading, are looking for good books, at a cheap price and authors who have not had success with the Big 6 who have a back log of material. Get them together and bam you have a good amount of sales and some happy campers.

All of this is speculation on my part.

[Joykins]

My sense was that the paranormal romance genre was supersaturated and these self-pub authors are trying to cash in before something else is flavor of the week.

I'm hoping the tides shift soon...I like romance but vampires and werewolves bore me to tears.

[ProfCrash]

I wouldn't be surprised if that was a part of the explination but there has to be a reason why the market is so saturated.

I think it probably is the reason why Non-Fiction does not sell as well as Fiction and within in Fiction, why some genres sell better than others. I would imagine that Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Romance all sell better than what many of us would think of as literature, the award books and more the like. If you are someone who reads a lot, you are likely to find your way to the independent authors because it is an untapped market and less expensive.

I have my moments of enjoying vampires and werewolves but that is more the Kim Harrison style or Sookie Stackhouse type thing, hey look these things exist and how are we adjusting to them more then romance and the like.

[Top100EbooksRank]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

The link is here if anyone is interested in the article.

From io9

"Readers of the Kindle Boards, a website for Kindle enthusiasts, have put together a list of [145 self-published authors ] who have sold more than 50,000 books on Amazon. This list is probably incomplete."


http://selfpublishingsuccessstories.blogspot.com/

It's at 159 now (up from the 145 listed) who have sold more than 50,000 self-published ebooks

Of those 159, these 26 have sold more than 200,000. (at $2.05 royalties for an ebook priced at $2.99, 200,000 ebooks sold could mean $400,000 in royalties for the self-published author).


The "200,000+ self-published ebooks sold" clubs:

Amanda Hocking - 1,500,000 ebooks sold (December 2011)
Barbara Freethy - 1.3 million self-published ebooks sold (Dec 2011)
John Locke- more than 1,100,000 eBooks sold in five months
Gemma Halliday - over 1 million self-published ebooks sold (March 2012)
Michael Prescott - more than 800,000 self-published ebooks sold (Dec 2011)
J.A. Konrath - more than 800,000 ebooks sold (April 2012)
Bella Andre - more than 700,000 books sold (May 2012)
Darcie Chan - 641,000 ebooks sold (May 2012)
Chris Culver - over 550,000 (Dec 2011)
Heather Killough-Walden - over 500,000 books sold (Dec 2011)
Selena Kitt - "With half a million ebooks sold in 2011 alone"
Stephen Leather - close to 500,000 books sold (Nov 2011)
CJ Lyons - almost 500,000 ebooks sold (Dec 2011)
J.R. Rain - more than 400,000 books sold (Sept 2011)
Bob Mayer - 347 sold in Jan to over 400,000 total sold by year's end (Dec 2011)
Rick Murcer - over 400,000 ebooks in one year (May 2012)
Tina Folsom - over 300,000 books sold (October 2011)
J Carson Black - more than 300,000 books sold (November 2011)
Terri Reid - 300,000 sold (May 2012)
B.V. Larson - over 250,000 books sold (Dec 2011)
Kerry Wilkinson - more than 250,000 books sold (Feb 2012)
T.R. Ragan - 239,592 books sold (March 2012)
H.P. Mallory - more than 200,000 ebooks sold (July 2011)
Marie Force - more than 200,000 sold in the last year (March 2012)
Scott Nicholson - Just guessing, I'd put my worldwide sales total between 200k-250k
David Dalglish - more than 200,000 (May 2012)

[apbschmitz]

I got a lesson in the needs of romance readers while standing in a checkout line at the library a while back. The woman ahead of me had a cardboard box filled with romance novels. I asked her if she could possibly read that many books. No, not really, she said. The problem was that she had read many of them before, but could never be sure until she got a couple dozen pages into them. The last thing she wanted is to be caught without a book to read, so she had to lug cartons of books back home. If she wanted 20 books, she had to check out at least 40.

As others observed above, this is a different level of desperation than you find among most readers of literary fiction. If you've got to be writing, better to be writing for fanatics.