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Author Earnings...
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Joe Konrath went over it on his blog too. Some VERY interesting results that almost sound too good to be true for those who have been pushing the indie revolution for a while. The cynic in me says to wait and see if something doesn't get leaked showing a flawed program or even falsified data.
On the other hand, if this is all fairly on the money, it means pulling a few major support beams out of the basements of the Big 5 and we take one serious step to seeing those companies fall in on themselves.
I don't think they will fall. There will always be authors who want someone else to do the ground work for them, and honestly I wouldn't mind it myself. But, I think it might be another piece in the machinery that makes them give better deals to the authors they work with. Stop non compete clauses, and offer higher royalties on ebooks, etc. Hell, I'd give them 10% if they would do just the distribution.It's completely possible for self pubs and traditional publishers to work along side one another, and benefit each other... if people are willing to do it.
I think the Big 5 are too big to adapt, like the dinosaurs. As Konrath said on his blog in response to this article, just about anything they do is going to be costing them a hell of a lot of money, for little actual gain. They might be able to hold on a bit longer, but without massively downsizing to the level of some of the medium-press operations (along with accepting smaller profit margins, something I don't think the people in charge of the Big 5 will EVER do.), I think they're going to crumble. Yes, there will always be some authors happy to have someone else do the work for them, but there are some good small-medium presses out there doing that right now for deals a Big 5 exec wouldn't waste his spit on.
Oh I completely agree with that. They keep consolidating, because they are publicly owned companies, and they need to keep the profits. But it's not good for the bottom line.
Crissy, I looked at Howey's report, and tell me if I missed it, but were all sales representative of actual sales? Were they able to weed out all of the free giveaways? If free giveaways were included in earnings data, then obviously these findings could be skewed significantly.
Gregor wrote: "Crissy, I looked at Howey's report, and tell me if I missed it, but were all sales representative of actual sales? Were they able to weed out all of the free giveaways? If free giveaways were inclu..."From what I understand it was all taken from top 1000 paid listings in SF/F, mystery and romance; not free. But I will definitely ask on the podcast tonight and find out.
The are expanding the research to top 50,000 books too. That's going to be the best representation of it all, IMHO.
Hugh Howey just put out a report about the earnings of authors on Amazon. He got together with a tech guy, and they pulled data from amazon regarding the top 1000 books in genre fiction. Then they broke it down by indie, traditional, amazon imprint, and small print publications. There are graphs, and discussion on all of it.
http://authorearnings.com/
There is also a survey, and a petition that you can take/sign.
We're also doing an interview with Howey on http://selfpublishingroundtable.com/ tomorrow at 5:30pm PST if anyone is interested.