Only 40 Self-Published Authors are a Success, says Amazon

Wow…

“40 self-published authors “make money”, all the others, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, don’t.”

““Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years. Yes, 40 authors have managed that…”

Not that I would sneeze at “selling more than one million e-book copies” over five years but for me, selling 100,000 over the same period would be “a success” to me.

Could I “retire” and write professionally? No, not at that level, but it beats where I am today (at 1,000 copies sold in 2015).

Claude Forthomme - Nougat's Blog

The cat is out of the bag, finally we know exactly how many self-published authors make it big: 40.

Yes, that’s not a typo.

40 self-published authors “make money”, all the others, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, don’t. This interesting statistic, recently revealed in a New York Times article, applies to the Kindle Store, but since Amazon is in fact the largest digital publishing platform in the world, it is a safe bet that self-published authors are not doing any better elsewhere.

“Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years. Yes, 40 authors have managed that, and have even gone on to establishing their own publishing house, like Meredith Wild. Her story is fully reported in the New York Times, here, and well worth pondering over.

That story reveals some further nuggets about the current…

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