Tracking Amazon Kindle Top 100 Paid Ebook by genre[Big 5 Pub/ Amazon Pub/ small-medium Pub/self-pub]

The Forbes contributor - who is editor of the Digital Book World site, and not a Forbes staff writer - appears to have strung together unrelated gloom & doom statements that convey an incorrect image. I'd go back and review the rest of his reporting, but his site is down at the moment.

There are several reasons why Harlequin revenue have gone down 20% in the last few years. I believe that self-publishing is one of the reasons.

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Belief is not proof.

Romance is also a completely separate beast from most of publishing. Many romance authors can publish 12 books a year. This skews the genre to work much more cohesively with self publishing.

I wonder if the revenue drop has anything to do with the lawsuit. They were contracting books back to themselves through a company they owned at 6% to 8% of the cost to screw authors out of more of their money. They can't do that anymore, so they no longer get to steal money from their writers liked they'd been doing for quite some time.

Could that account for a small part of the drop, or is revenue considered everything brought in regardless of how it's distributed once it's in their hands? Also, when the negotiations to fix this soured, prompting the class action lawsuit to be filed, many authors looked elsewhere. I don't know how much it affected their stable of authors, but they may have lost some favored names.

shelleyo said:

I wonder if the revenue drop has anything to do with the lawsuit. They were contracting books back to themselves through a company they owned at 6% to 8% of the cost to screw authors out of more of their money. They can't do that anymore, so they no longer get to steal money from their writers liked they'd been doing for quite some time.

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Has something changed recently? Last I heard, the lawsuit had been reinstated (still pre-trial) on appeal and HQ hadn't made any effort at settlement nor any unilateral changes in their licensing/payment structure. ie. it's still using what it believes is a legal sublicense to its swiss subsidiary.

JournoWriter said:

The Forbes contributor - who is editor of the Digital Book World site, and not a Forbes staff writer - appears to have strung together unrelated gloom & doom statements that convey an incorrect image. I'd go back and review the rest of his reporting, but his site is down at the moment.



Belief is not proof.

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I can't prove that self-publishing has had any effect on Harlequin but I can tell you 3 things.

1) Harlequin revenue declined 20% the last few years
2) In the romance genre, about half of the top 100 Kindle romance ebooks are self-published.
3) Self-published romance ebooks prices are generally lower than Harlequin.

You can draw your own conclusion whether self-publishing has had any effect on Harlequin or not. I believe it does.

AdamNeymars said:

I can't prove that self-publishing has had any effect on Harlequin but I can tell you 3 things.

1) Harlequin revenue declined 20% the last few years
2) In the romance genre, about half of the top 100 Kindle romance ebooks are self-published.
3) Self-published romance ebooks prices are generally lower than Harlequin.

You can draw your own conclusion whether self-publishing has had any effect on Harlequin or not. I believe it does.

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Dude, let this thread die. No one has cared to post to it in 18 days, that's nearly 3 weeks. Why do you insist on arguing with people about how hard Harlequin has been hit by Kindle Self-pubed books? Stats are not in your favor, and other than Kindle, Romance is still dominated by trade published works. Kindle isn't indicitive of the entire market, it's only a segment.

1. Antibiotic use has been going up steadily since the 70s.
2. Gigantic porn star mustaches have been on the decline since the 70s.
3. People with gigantic porn star mustaches have been known to take antibiotics, and some of them shave their mustaches later.

Draw your own conclusions, but I believe there is clear evidence that porn star mustaches are symptoms of an infection that can be cleared up with a solid round of erythromyacin.

(Or, y'know, correlation may not actually equal causation and all kinds of trends may be at work.)

Oooo kay.

I haven't counted, but I believe every argument for and against significance of various reported statistics has been made repeatedly.

Let's put this one to rest.

Locking thread. As always, send a PM if you have a good reason to disagree with this lock.