Two months ago, I took a look at how many of the bestselling Kindle genre titles were self-published. I had two purposes in mind: first, to see whether there were any differences in the success of self-publishing between the big four genres (Romance, Mystery/Thrillers/Suspense, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy).
The second purpose was to provide some more data for the initial Author Earnings report. The report indicated that self-publishers were doing incredibly well within genre ebooks, but one of the more widespread criticisms was that the report was just a snapshot that might not represent anything more than that moment in time.
I thought that was a valid critique, but I also suspected it would prove false — Amazon is amazingly consistent from day to day and month to month, and the AE report looked at a substantial chunk of data. I was betting that later studies would show similar results.
Among the report’s conclusions was that genre fiction accounted for about 70% of all Kindle ebook sales, and that self-published titles accounted for roughly half of that. I used a different methodology, and a worse sample size, but when I checked in February, self-publishing’s share of the bestselling Kindle titles was as follows:
- Romance: 49%
- Mysteries/Thrillers/Suspense: 11%
- Science Fiction: 56%
- Fantasy: 49%
Three of the four genres were roughly 50% self-published, with the glaring exception of the thriller market. Meanwhile, here was each genre’s overall share of the Kindle market (methodology explained in the original post):
- Romance: 40%
- Mysteries/Thrillers/Suspense: 20%
- Science Fiction: 5%
- Fantasy: 6.33%
This added up to 71.33% of all Kindle ebook sales. I pulled my numbers a few weeks after the first Author Earnings report collected its data, yet my conclusions mirrored theirs: about 70% of all Kindle sales were in these four genres, and of those sales, close to half were of self-published titles.
It’s been two months since then. How do things look today? First, here are the four genres broken down by method of publication — self-published; through a small or medium press; Amazon publishing imprints; and by the Big 5, which includes major genre houses like Harlequin and Baen, where appropriate.
ROMANCE
- Self-published – 59%
- Small/medium – 3%
- Amazon – 12%
- Big 5 – 26%
MYSTERY/THRILLER/SUSPENSE
- Self-published – 26%
- Small/medium – 1%
- Amazon – 15%
- Big 5 – 58%
SCIENCE FICTION
- Self-published – 53%
- Small/medium – 7%
- Amazon – 12%
- Big 5 – 29%
FANTASY
- Self-published – 45%
- Small/medium – 6%
- Amazon – 8%
- Big 5 – 41%
There are a few differences between the first grab and this one. The percentage of bestselling self-published romance titles is up by a good percentage. Thrillers are way up, more than double the initial look. Meanwhile, self-published sci-fi and fantasy titles are slightly fewer. Amazon’s publishing imprints are up, representing just under 12% of the total, compared to a little over 9% the first time.
I wouldn’t draw too much from any of these changes, though. You can hardly conjure a pattern out of two whole samples drawn from a methodology that’s prone to variance. What’s most interesting to me here is how little is different: in three of the four major genres, self-published titles still represent about 50% of the bestsellers. Thrillers continues to lag behind, but this month’s look suggests it’s not quite as tough for self-published titles to compete as the original breakdown suggested.
Okay, so what about the genres’ overall market share? Here’s how it breaks down this time:
- Romance – 35.2%
- Thrillers – 26%
- Science Fiction – 5.4%
- Fantasy – 6.4%
This adds up to 73% of overall Kindle ebook sales. Crazy.
Compared to February, sci-fi and fantasy are essentially the same. Romance is somewhat smaller, but thrillers are up by a decent percentage. As before, however, I wouldn’t try to read patterns in the differences — I’m not at all sure that romance sales are actually down. The sample sizes involved make this part of the data prone to a fair amount of variance.
Again, what’s most interesting to me isn’t the differences. It’s how similar these numbers are a full two months later — these four genres continue to comprise ~70% of Amazon’s ebook sales, and roughly half of those sales are of self-published books.
Inspired by the Author Earnings report, I’ve taken a quick whack at looking at what percentage of Kindle ebook sales self-publishers represent by genre. To get there, I simply look at the top 100 bestsellers in each genre—romance, mystery/thriller/suspense, science fiction, and fantasy—and split them up by method of publication. Note that, unlike the Author Earnings study, this is merely a breakdown of the raw number of self-published titles on the bestseller lists, not the number of total book sales within each genre.
Also, instead of five categories of publisher, I use four: self-published, small/medium press, Amazon Publishing, and Big 5 (including, where appropriate, major genre publishers like Harlequin and Baen). For books where the publishing method was unclear, I did a search of the house. If the house published only a single author’s works, I listed it as self-published. If the house published multiple authors, even if it was obviously an author collective, I listed it as small/medium.
Okay! Without further ado, the numbers:
ROMANCE
Self-published: 49%
Small/medium: 11%
Amazon: 9%
Big 5/Harlequin: 30%
MYSTERY/THRILLER/SUSPENSE
Self-published: 11%
Small/medium: 5%
Amazon: 16%
Big 5: 68%
SCIENCE FICTION
Self-published: 56%
Small/medium: 9%
Amazon: 5%
Big 5 (plus Baen): 30%
FANTASY
Self-published: 49%
Small/medium: 7%
Amazon: 7%
Big 5: 37%
One of these things is not like the other! At an immediate glance, one thing is clear: if you’re publishing in romance or SF/F, self-publishing is an extremely viable method. Roughly half of all the bestselling books in each of these genre is self-published. That’s pretty remarkable.
For mysteries and thrillers, however, it’s a different story. Of course you don’t have to be a bestseller to make a living as an independent author, but it’s equally remarkable that just 11% of the top 100 mysteries and thrillers are self-published. That suggests two things. If you’re a thriller author, you may want to keep querying agents. Or that there’s a market inefficiency in thrillers, where there aren’t enough good indie titles to meet demand. It’s also possible that both of those things are true! I couldn’t say.
Also, it should be said that this is just a look at the top 100 in each genre out of hundreds of thousands of total books. It’s quite possible, perhaps even likely, that a broader look at the data would present different trends. However, it does match up well with the Author Earnings study of these genres combined, so I’m not sure a bigger sample would be that much different.
Of course, there’s one more big factor here: each genre’s total share of the Kindle market. Fortunately, that’s really easy to ballpark. By looking at the #100th-ranked book in each genre and dividing that by its overall Kindle rank, we get an estimate of what percentage of the entire Kindle market each genre represents. For instance, if the #100 book in Romance were #1000 in the Kindle store, we could figure that 1 in 10 sales, or 10%, are of romance books.
Here’s how it shakes out:
Romance: 40%
Mysteries/Thrillers: 20%
Fantasy: 6.33%
Sci-Fi: 5%
You’ll note that adds up to 71.33%. Hugh Howey’s much bigger and better sample suggested these four genres comprise 69% of total Kindle sales (though it didn’t break it down by genre). To me, this means the above numbers should be pretty accurate, despite the crude methodology used to determine them.
Obviously, romance is the runaway winner. There is a huge market for it and self-publishers do very well there. Fantasy and science fiction are about neck and neck: fantasy is a little bigger, market-wise, but self-publishers have more share of the science fiction market. Mysteries and thrillers have a very big overall market—half as much as romance, and a fifth of all Kindle sales—but taking advantage of the size of that market appears to be a challenge for self-publishers.
Also, if the Author Earnings report didn’t already make this perfectly clear—holy shit self-publishers sell a lot of books. I knew we’d taken over a big part of the market. I didn’t know that, within three of the four most popular genres, we’d taken half of it.
Quick edit: I should make it perfectly clear that these percentages are very preliminary. Where the Author Earnings report samples nearly 7000 books, including about 2600 of the top 7000 titles in the Kindle store, I’m only sampling the top 100 in each genre. In a sample that modest, even a small variance from the norm might throw things out of balance. For instance, if just five of the books in fantasy were switched from self-published to Big 5, the numbers of each would be nearly equal. I will try to remember to run this again in another month or so and then again later in the year to see whether the results hold.
That said—there are several signposts the data’s pretty accurate. For one thing, among three genres, the percentages are pretty similar across the board. For another, although I divide things up differently, and am only measuring number of titles instead of number of sales, my results are pretty close to those of the Author Earnings survey—which was taken, to my knowledge, 2-3 weeks ago. The lists I looked at today were certainly comprised of many different titles, yet the number of self-published titles on both studies is pretty close. This makes it less likely that either study is an anomaly.
Ultimately, though, time will tell.
A couple days ago, I rejoined the Self-Publishing Podcast once again. This time, we’re talking launch strategies, box sets, sales trends, and how to give a big boost to later releases in your series, among other things. This is either the third or fourth time I’ve been on the show—apparently I’m now the Justin Timberlake to the SPP’s SNL—but I had a particularly great time on this episode, and feel we covered an awful lot of ground.
So, looking back over Part 1 and Part 2, here are the conclusions I’d put forward.
First, Amazon Select no longer offers much if any reward to most of its participants. Meanwhile, a new market has opened (Kobo), and while everyone is waiting for B&N to keel over and die, the Nook store is still selling boatloads of books every single day. Until they close, the sales are there. It’s hard to know exactly where Apple’s at, but they’re a legit ebookstore too. Lots of people make lots of money there. I sure don’t, but you can’t win ’em all.
So the current environment favors distributing everywhere in a way it didn’t back when Select was a magic bullet. Even if geographical or technical challenges makes it hard to publish direct to B&N, Apple, and Kobo, just use Draft2Digital or Smashwords.
Waiting to publish and/or promote is a bad idea (I hath decreed it!). So what do we do with our first book?
I see a few ways to go with this. The first option is to toss your first book into Select for a single three-month period with the knowledge it’s highly unlikely to do much for you. Call this the “At least it’s better than nothing.” In fact, let’s make sections!
“At Least It’s Better Than Nothing”
Sure, the other stores exist, and sell books, but with so few ways to advertise or otherwise reach Nook/Kobo/Apple readers, you’re sacrificing very little by starting out in Select. And free runs still have some utility. You may sell a few copies post-free. You may start to get a feel for how appealing your book is; don’t read too much into any one failure, but if it gives a bunch of copies away with little to no promotion, you might just be on to something. And perhaps most valuably, free runs are still a good way to garner some initial reviews to qualify your book for promotion at the various advertisers.
Here’s how I would handle it. Do a couple free runs immediately, just 1-2 days long. Feel free to extend them if you really explode, but try to save two free days. Next, schedule Book #2 to publish about a week before Book #1 expires from Select. (This may require waiting a short while to publish #1 or #2, so let’s just pretend I didn’t spend 1500 words condemning the idea of waiting in Part 2.) Do not enroll #2 in Select. Instead, schedule a free run on #1 for the day after #2 goes live, with the hope this will get #2 off to a stronger launch.
When #1 reverts to paid, see how it sells. If you’re satisfied with the way things are going, you can enroll #2 in Select at this point and re-up #1. But if Select is as dead as it is for most people, #1 is ready to expire and #2 was never enrolled. As soon as #1 exits the program, distribute both books to all channels, uploading directly wherever possible.
The idea here isn’t to use Select to rack up hundreds or thousands of dollars in sales. Those days are long gone, sad trombone. Rather, the idea is to leverage the power of free to get readers to take a chance on you, to build up Book #1’s infrastructure (its reviews, alsobots, etc.), to gain mailing list subscribers, and to support the launch of #2. Any real sales over this period is just a bonus.
This is a very short-term plan and it’s highly unlikely to make you a rock star, but at least it’s a plan.
“The Boring Way That I Do Things: Sales and Ads”
Option number two is what I’m (mostly) currently doing. It’s not how I got here, but I think it should work all right, with a few modifications. Basically, it consists of publishing to all platforms, then running advertised sales, particularly to bolster new releases.
To get a little grittier with my nits, if I were just starting out with this method, I’d upload direct to all four major self-publishing platforms (Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple). If for some reason you can’t upload to BN or Apple, use Draft2Digital. Their price changes go through much faster than Smashwords, and if you’re running regular sales, it’s going to be important to be able to change prices quickly–like within 24 hours. You’ll probably want to publish to Smashwords and distribute to all the other markets eventually, but honestly, they’re all so small you’re not missing out.
Then.. scramble for reviews.
And by reviews I mostly mean “Amazon reviews,” although BookBub will look at everything you’ve got, including Goodreads, so they’re all worth getting. The purpose isn’t the reviews themselves, but to get enough that the various ad sites will agree to advertise your book. While there’s no such thing as enough reviews, the scale we’re looking at is somewhere around 5-20; ~5 will qualify you for smaller sites, and ~20+ will start to look pretty good to the big ones.
How do you get these reviews? Honest ones, that is? Some people have had success with giveaways at LibraryThing and Goodreads (offer free copies in exchange for honest reviews), but that’s seriously all I know about that. I hate stuff like chasing reviews and it makes me want to give up and go home.
But the reviews aren’t going to just show up on their own, and in my experience it takes something like 100 sales to get 1 single review, so do the math. It could be months–years!–before your book has ~20 reviews arrive organically. You’ll have to chase them down somehow. If it helps, think of them as a Legend of Zelda sidequest. O brave warrior, you must track down the 20 Lost Reviews in order to unlock the Dungeon of Forbidden Advertising!
That out of the way, things are much simpler: find places that advertise ebooks, and book ads. To be a little more specific, find places that advertise ebooks well. Places that immediately cover the cost of the ad or come close to it. Some people like to argue that all advertising is valuable, because brand awareness, and when a consumer sees something seven times mumble grumble sales, but you’re not Crest toothpaste on a shelf with Arm & Hammer and the store brand. You’re one book on a shelf of two million. The people seeing your ad are probably never going to stumble over your book again.
I’m aware of five good ebook advertising sites. In roughly descending order: BookBub, POI, ENT, KBT, Book Blast. Generally speaking, it’s best to advertise at $0.99. At $0.99, these sites will generally break even or better, and the goal is to reach as many new readers as possible.
Run ads whenever your sales dry up, which as a new author will probably be always. And when book #2 arrives, try to have ads in place for book #1. It’s generally effective to drop to $0.99 for three days (the day before the ad, to ensure your price lowers; the day of the ad; and the day after to pick up the stragglers), but if you keep selling at $0.99 and you like what you’re seeing, stick with it as long as you like.
And that’s it, really. The downsides are there are only so many places to advertise, competition for spots is fierce, and BookBub is the only effective site I know about to reach beyond Amazon, but as they say, it is what it is. Even temporary boosts will reach new readers and may shake up your alsobots, leading to a longer tail of post-promo sales. It’s a long-term strategy, too. You’ll only be able to advertise any one book every so often, but as long as you keep writing new ones, that’s fresh material to promote.
This is the core of my current strategy, for whatever it’s worth, but I do have some qualms that it might be tough for brand-new authors to book ads at desirable sites. And there’s the review threshold to get over. But I see new authors doing this on KBoards right now, so it’s not impossible.
Now.. my favorite idea.
“The Nuclear Option!”
While I was mulling around the idea of this little series, I ran this idea by a group of writers I know–several of whom are much more successful than myself, and all of whom are very smart–and it was pretty much roundly rejected. So bear in mind that if this were a commercial, that commercial would say “Five out of six full-time indies think this is a Bad Idea!”
But it is, I think, what I would do if I were just starting today.
I would go permafree immediately.
For those just dipping their toes into the self-publishing waters, “permafree” means setting your book free permanently. Bit of a misnomer, as technically you can revert it to paid at any time, but the idea is to set it to $0.00 forever as a free introduction to your series. It’s a powerful tactic because it costs readers nothing to give your book a shot, and if they like it enough, they’ll go pay actual money for the later books in the series. Indies do this all the time. It’s one of our most basic tactics.
The unconventional bit of this is that writers generally don’t put it to use until they’ve got three books in the series out in the world.
The idea is to wait until you’ve got a couple sequels to make money from before you start giving the first one away for nothin’. But I’m not sure why the magic number is three. I’ve seen people go permafree with great results when they only had two books. So if it works for two, why not one??
…oh right, the part where you’re making zero money. But here’s what you’re making instead: readers. Of your stuff. At a much faster rate than you’ll be gaining them by charging $2.99. Readers who will (hopefully) go on to buy your sequels when they do come out (so long as you have a mailing list or other way to alert them), helping launch those books higher, and ultimately making you more money–and thus getting you closer to a real career–than you would have made waiting until book #3 to drop #1 to free.
And if you’d be worried about giving away a potential bestseller before it has the chance to find its legs, good news! The logistics of permafree require your book to start life as a paid title. Since you can’t set your BN price to $0.00 yourself, you’ll have to distribute your book there via Smashwords. It can take a few weeks for a SW-distributed book to go live at BN. Even after it does show up free on BN, it may take Amazon days, weeks, or months to pricematch to free.
And you can test the waters in the other stores as well. Upload direct to Kobo, Apple, and even BN and see whether the book takes off as a paid title. If it doesn’t, and you want to hasten the pricematching process, lower your price at Apple and Kobo to $0.00. As soon as the free SW version shows up at BN, pull your self-published version from sale.
It’s an extremely simple plan, there’s flexibility in the execution, and since advertising beyond Amazon is so limited, making a book permafree is probably the best option for reaching readers in the other stores. Amazon’s algos are pretty cruel these days. The trend is almost always down, and once your first 30 days as a new release are up, the cliff can come hard and fast. Diversifying your readership in other stores will help keep things steady between new releases.
Also, it’s pretty dang low-effort. Upload, tweak a couple prices, then remind Amazon that it’s free elsewhere until they pricematch. Once it qualifies (reviews etc.), sub it to freebie sites. That’s pretty much it. Go write!
But this plan isn’t without drawbacks. Some authors feel that books downloaded for free wind up with lower reviews than books people paid for, and there’s anecdotal and logical support for that idea (although no comprehensive studies I’m aware of). You’ll be giving up some unknown amount of initial income until your sequels arrive. If you’re on a tight budget, that’s a real consideration, especially if you could use those earnings to invest in snazzier covers or advertising or whatever. Someone suggested to me there’s psychological value in knowing total strangers have paid real money for a book you wrote, particularly in the fragile early days.
I’m unswayed. Free is one of the few tools brand-new authors have to make themselves competitive. If you can see yourself using it eventually, why wait? Why not fire it up right now and grab all the visibility you can in every store you can get into? Why not start gathering a mailing list right off the bat?
Anyway, let’s look at the timing on this. Day zero, you publish to Amazon, Smashwords, and wherever you’re uploading direct. It then takes a few days to be approved by Smashwords premium distribution (which you need to distribute to BN). If you haven’t met their formatting demands, you’ll have to try again; there’s a few more days. Once approved, it’ll probably be a couple days until it actually ships, and even then it can take 2-3 weeks for the free book to actually show up at BN. Once it does, Amazon rarely pricematches immediately. Even if you’re reporting your free book on their “tell us about a lower price” link, it can be days or weeks before they decide to match.
At this point, you’re beyond Amazon’s new release window, and if you’ve buckled down on the sequel, you should only be a couple months out from publishing. Yay. You gave #1 a shot as a paid title, and even if permafreeing it before #2 is out turns out to be a stupid idea, it’ll only be a stupid idea for a couple months until #2 goes live and permafree magically becomes a good idea.
You could hedge a bit more by waiting to set the permafree wheels in motion until #2 is almost ready. Finish up #2, then hit publish as soon as Amazon sets #1 to $0.00.
Anyway, this rationale is getting ridiculously long.
Let’s take a step back and look at what brand-new indies have to work with: virtually nothing. No fans, no reviews, no experience. The only way to accumulate those things is to publish a book and get it into readers’ hands. There are two factors in getting a reader to choose a book: first, they have to see it; second, it has to look interesting enough to overcome their resistance to buy. Making a book free creates visibility and reduces resistance. QED. I said QED!
P.S. — For unknown reasons, the comments section of this blog like to disappear sometimes. Refreshing a couple times will generally convince them to show up. This is one of the many things I lament, but don’t have time to fix. The glorious life of a mid-list indie.
Books don’t sell in the summer.
Traditionally, the seasonality of book sales is decidedly Southern Hemisphere. Better sock away those December riches, because come July, it’s going to be slim pickings. Back when I was querying agents, summer was advised as both an unusually good and an unusually bad time to do so, because the publishing industry supposedly shuts down until adults come back from beaches and kids go back to school.
Dean Wesley Smith chronicled the “summer slump” here, stating publishing houses punted summer because “it was known that the lowest time for buying books by customers was May through the middle of September.” Despite the ebook/indie revolution, “That has not changed.” Just last week, Digital Book World led an article with “Typically July is one of the slowest months in book publishing.” Google “summer slump” and “book sales” and you’ll find dozens of indie authors advising other indies how to make it through the doldrums without losing hope even as sales (and incomes) slide away into the ooze.
I ran into this same phenomenon myself last year. Great May/June, okay July, then a long, steady slide, until my October was so bad–about $860, as my primary job–I was starting to wonder whether I could keep doing this. Thankfully, a new release turned things around.
Yesterday, someone on KBoards asked whether, in order to avoid the summer slump, they should wait to release their next book until fall. Given what we know, it’s a good question. There’s just one problem.
Books sell just fine in summer.
eBooks do, at least. If you compare the number of sales needed to sustain a given rank on Amazon’s Kindle store, to my eye, it’s the same in July as it was in February. As per the quick and dirty formula I tossed out in that post, to determine how many copies a Kindle title is currently selling, take 100,000 and divide it by its sales rank. Or, to put it another way, rank x sales = 100,000. This rule of thumb comes close whether you’re selling 1/day or 1000/day.
Let’s look at the rank and daily sales of several titles from this July and see how they compare to the numbers from February.
Rank x Sales = Score ; Estimated February Rank
#95,000 x 1 = 95,000
#2429 x 50 = 121,450
#852 x 120 = 102,240
#819 x 136 = 111,348
#767 x 148 = 113,516
#325 x 280 = 91,000
All right, whole bunch of numbers. What are we actually looking at? An easy way to conceptualize this is to go to the extremes. If Amazon sold so few books that all it took to rank #100 was 1 sale/day, you’re looking at a score of 100 (#100 x 1). By contrast, if it was selling so many books that a rank of #100 required ten million sales/day, your score is 1,000,000,000 (#100 x 10,000,000).
To put it another way, say that it took you 100 sales yesterday to rank #1000. If today it took 200 sales to stay at #1000, that would mean all the books above you were suddenly selling much more, too. Yesterday, your hypothetical score was 100K; today, it’s 200K.
Thus a lower “score” is indicative of lower storewide sales volume while a higher score means more ebooks are being sold on Amazon each day.
Across a broad range of ranks, the average score of those seven books above is 107,793. If anything, more Kindle books are selling right now this summer than were selling in the weeks immediately after the Christmas boom had calmed down.
For ebooks, the “summer slump” is a myth.
Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. While the sample size leaves something to be desired, the most obvious qualification to this methodology is that the “100,000 formula” isn’t a real formula, but more of a rule of thumb. It’s imprecise. Back in February, for instance, it was also true that 10 sales/day would sustain a rank of #12,000, and 120,000 ≠ 100,000.
So if you think I had my original score wrong, and you believe 120,000 was “normal,” then our current score of 108,000 would indicate sales are down by 10% from February.
For most ranks I was looking at in February, however, the score was closer to 100K. Largely in the 95-110K range. To my eyes, the current score of 108K is virtually identical to February. And the number of sales needed to sustain that #12,000 rank was the same in February as it is right now in late July.
That, to me, is the key takeaway: Amazon ebook sales may be down for the summer, but it is not immediately obvious. It’s even possible they’re up. If the slump is so small it can’t be detected, I don’t think it can be called a “slump” at all.
As self-published authors, we don’t talk about failure enough.
Tobias Buckell recently wrote a piece about “survivorship bias” and its relation to self-publishing. He argues that the problem with self-publishing is we only hear from the winners. The survivors. When all you hear about are the successes, your view of how easy it is to succeed will be wildly distorted. His argument is based on this great article from You Are Not So Smart, which you should totally read.
Done? Yay. In response to Buckell, authors on KBoards have raised the interesting counterpoint that literally every single trad-published author is a survivor, meaning their whole perspective is skewed. Which.. is tough to argue with. On the other hand, I don’t think it nullifies his point.
A lot of people are self-publishing. Very few of them do well at it. And you almost never hear–and thus learn–from the failures.
Well, I named this blog Failure Ahoy for a reason. I think failure is awesome! Failure is what happens when you try. Fail enough, and you might even succeed. With that in mind, I’m going to post more about failure. I want to make it okay to suck. I have failed in many ways along my self-publishing journey, but there is no more stark or hilarious an illustration of that failure than my first covers. Man, I might need to brace myself here. Like with tequila.
Okay, ready if you are. Let’s dig up some corpses.