This is the follow-up post to Friday’s examination of The Discussion Over “Author Earnings.” Let’s use this opportunity to speak clearly about what we do know about the ebook sales landscape, since there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about the data that’s available. The worst meme around is the one in which the real and substantial data we have is dismissed for its incompleteness, in favor of people’s personal wishes and observances. The big touchpoints are the direction of the ebook market, and the rise of digital self-publishing. On the former, the US market data clearly indicates that […]
Self-publishing
The Discussion Over “Author Earnings” (Part 1)
It’s time to start looking at what a lot of people have been talking about this week: bestselling self-published author Hugh Howey’s “Author Earnings” website and “report.” In case you have not read it (or read about it), Howey joined up with a programmer and they crawled some of Amazon’s genre bestseller lists for a brief period. Based on that and Howey’s own experiential deductions about correlations between Amazon “sales rank” and actual unit sales for his own books, they came up with elaborate (and unsupportable) — but provocative — declarations about yearly sales and authors earnings via Kindle sales. […]
More Details On Top Self-Publishers That Use ISBNs
When Bowker first announced their updated 2012 statistics last month about newly issued self-published books and ebooks that carry ISBNs last month, we were asked not to share specifics about individual companies. As we noted, four companies account for over 80 percent of the ISBN-carrying self-published books. There is no data available on the substantial flow of ebooks from the likes of KDP and Nook Press that carry only proprietary identifiers rather than ISBNs. So in the Bowker counts, self-published print books still are in the lead. CreateSpace alone accounted for over 55 percent of the ISBNs, with 131,000 titles […]
Coming Soon
Two non-standard publication announcements of note today: – Simon & Schuster Children’s has announced a December 10 publication — with an announced first printing of 250,000 copies — of WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY?, a picture book by the Norwegian comedy due Ylvis, based on their viral novelty music video hit The Fox. (They say in the announcement, “We actually started the process with the illustrator before we even uploaded the video to YouTube.”) – Author of our four novels including TIME OF MY LIFE, Allison Winn Scotch is self-publishing her novel THE THEORY OF OPPOSITES. “After a terribly discouraging experience […]
WH Smith Back Online, But Kobo CEO Says eBooks Won’t Return Until Weekend — As Kobo Launches in India
Kobo chief executive Mike Serbinis finally addresses their issues with self-published books personally, in an interview with the UK’s Telegraph. Meanwhile, WH Smith has managed to get their website back online and open for business — though it appears they are only selling print books and have not restored sales of Kobo ebooks yet. The Telegraph reports that “Kobo hopes that the majority of its catalogue – minus the offending titles – will be back online by Saturday 19 October.” As Serbinis indicates indirectly, part of the problem is that they look to technology to screen titles rather than direct […]
Self-Publishing Grows Again, Of Course, But We Still Don’t Know How Big It Is
Bowker released their statistics for the output of new self-published titles in the US in 2012 — though as usual, they can only track books that carried ISBNs. That total — 391,000 titles — was up significantly over the 235,000 titles reported for 2011. As in the past, the top four producers accounted for over 80 percent of all the ISBN-carrying self-published titles. In order, the top producers are: CreateSpace (the biggest gainer) Smashwords (moving up into second) Lulu (moving up into third) Author Solutions But the Bowker counts do not include the vast pool — an unspecified hundreds of […]