Authorearnings.com Jan 2018 report! (Must read, if you want to make even a modicum of money from your books)

[Quantum]

If you care about making a modicum of money from your books, then it behooves you to understand this report in depth.

Now we capture over a million top selling titles a day. Every day.

Our analytics run in real-time, 24/7.

Which means that if a book sold even a single online copy since April 2017, no matter whom the publisher or author, we can probably find it in our ever-growing dataset. Whether that title sold two copies yesterday or two thousand, we can see those sales. We can total them up in our dashboard. And for next week’s unreleased titles–or next month’s–we can tally up their accumulated online preorders, too.

With over 250 million rows of live ebook, audiobook, and online-print data at our fingertips, we can now, with the click of a mouse, slice & dice online book sales from last quarter, last month, or last week, any way we like. So let’s take a look back over the last three quarters of 2017, from late April thru the end of December, to see what our dashboard can tell us about which books US consumers were actually buying online during that 9-month period.

http://authorearnings.com/report/janu...

[Graeme]

Thanks Alex, a great article.

One interesting takeaway. The $4.99 price point is very similar to the $9.99 price point and both are better than anything between them.

[J.J.]

I think the final point in the article is an interesting one, and it may require authors to rethink the old strategy of "building brand."


" A lot of today’s top-selling indies are relatively new names. We didn’t recognize a lot of them.
" And a lot of yesteryear’s pioneering indie superstars no longer even make the Top 50.

"In retrospect, upon further reflection, that shouldn’t really be surprising to anyone. But it helps explain why, despite today’s rosy picture, a lot of the public indie-author-community chatter sounds so unrelievedly grim.

"Remember that the early indie pioneers, who rode the first wave of self-publishing when it was shiny and new, were super excited about the industry changes that enabled their newfound success. Many of them consequently spent time and energy evangelizing for self-publishing, accumulating along the way large followings among their fellow authors and aspirants, and to this day, many other authors and newbies still look to those early pioneer gurus for ultimate insight and information about the industry.

"So perhaps it was inevitable that, now that we’re 7 or 8 years into the era of viable self-publishing, many of these early pioneers are hitting their sophmore slumps. And telling their large author followings that indie publishing is no longer what it used to be, and that “nobody” is making big money anymore.

"The data proves them wrong.

"What it shows instead is a changing of the author guard.

"But the newest superstars of Indie, Inc., who have replaced the indie pioneers in the top rankings, are in general a quieter bunch than their predecessors were. They spend far less time evangelizing self-publishing, or giving advice to large groups of authors. And why would they? Indie publishing has gone mainstream."

Perhaps it really is a good idea to release new work under a new pen name as long as it's not part of an existing series...Then again, it might be a good idea to limit the length of a series and start a new project for that same newness factor.