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

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If the following information is accurate, it will have huge implications for the publishing industry, authors and readers. For instance:

Will the overabundance of ebooks make it harder for readers to find books to read?

Will the low prices put pressure on publishers, particularly on romance publishers like Harlequin and Kensington?

Will this put pressure on the Big 5 Publishers to increase their ebook royalties rate to retain talents?



http://edwardwrobertson.com/self-publishings-share-of-the-kindle-market-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.

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%

http://edwardwrobertson.com/followup-self-publishings-share-of-the-kindle-market-
by-genre/
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%
With time on their hand, anyone can reproduce the findings with the latest Top 100 Paid like Edward Robertson did.

Top 100 Paid [Best Sellers in Romance]
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/158566011

Top 100 Paid [Best Sellers in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense]
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-...Thriller-Suspense/zgbs/digital-text/157305011

Top 100 Paid [Best Sellers in Science Fiction]
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Science-Fiction/zgbs/digital-text/158591011

Top 100 Paid [Best Sellers in Fantasy]
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Fantasy/zgbs/digital-text/158576011

I did a "browse" of the top 100 Paid in the 4 popular genre and they do match up well with the available findings.
 
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Also, does this "ballpark" figure conform with what people know/expect?

http://edwardwrobertson.com/self-publishings-share-of-the-kindle-market-by-genre/
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%
From the followup:

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%
 

cornflake

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If the following information is accurate, it will have huge implications for the publishing industry, authors and readers. For instance:

Or it's fairly meaningless to the publishing industry, especially as it's one platform of one platform.

Will the overabundance of ebooks make it harder for readers to find books to read?

Ebooks aren't books. I think you mean 'good ebooks' or 'ebooks that they want to read,' but why does that breakdown mean anything about an overabundance? What is an overabundance? Harder than what?


Will the low prices put pressure on publishers, particularly on romance publishers like Harlequin and Kensington?

Considering your first question seems to presume a lot of the stuff is not wanted by readers, I don't see why it would.

Will this put pressure on the Big 5 Publishers to increase their ebook royalties rate to retain talents?

Huh? Retain them from what? What about that simple breakdown says ANYTHING about who the people doing the self-publishing are?


http://edwardwrobertson.com/self-publishings-share-of-the-kindle-market-by-genre/

With time on their hand, anyone can reproduce the findings with the latest Top 100 Paid like Edward Robertson did.

Top 100 Paid [Best Sellers in Romance]
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Romance/zgbs/digital-text/158566011

Top 100 Paid [Best Sellers in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense]
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-...Thriller-Suspense/zgbs/digital-text/157305011

Top 100 Paid [Best Sellers in Science Fiction]
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Science-Fiction/zgbs/digital-text/158591011

Top 100 Paid [Best Sellers in Fantasy]
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Fantasy/zgbs/digital-text/158576011

I did a "browse" of the top 100 Paid in the 4 popular genre and they do match up well with the available findings.

Whatever you're trying to say, I don't think it's clear.
 
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I can self-pub 50 books a year. They'll be crappy first drafts with barely coherent plots and flat characters, but I can do it.



Those lists are basically meaningless.

For example the romance list not only has several novels by famous authors like Dean Koontz and Nora Roberts, but one of the top five sellers is a short story, there's a four-book box-set for $0.99, etc. There's also a Janet Evanovich book listed low in the top 100 that's first for the mystery/thriller/suspense list.

I could go on, but I don't see much point.
 

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Those lists are basically meaningless.

I'm going to set aside the OP's questions and points for a moment, and ask a question I wanted to ask in the Romance Top 100 thread before it was locked.

Why do some posters here like to dismiss the Kindle bestseller lists?

Those books sell A LOT, and Amazon has about 65% of the ebook market. This is nothing to sneeze at, so why are people ach-oo-ing in these threads?
 
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I'm going to set aside the OP's questions and points for a moment, and ask a question I wanted to ask in the Romance Top 100 thread before it was locked.

Why do some posters here like to dismiss the Kindle bestseller lists?

Those books sell A LOT, and Amazon has about 65% of the ebook market. This is nothing to sneeze at, so why are people ach-oo-ing in these threads?


I feel like I covered several points of this in my post you quoted.


I'd also be willing to give them more credit if we had actual numbers. Also, what time period do those lists cover? Their description says they are updated hourly. I'm unclear if that means it's books sold per hour, or if they cover some unknown time period and are updated hourly against that.

Further, they're Kindle lists. So it's also relevant what portion of the sales they cover for books that aren't e-book only.

They're a very incomplete picture of the issue, which is why it's dangerous to draw set conclusions from them.



Another question to ask is how the percentages would change if we looked at more than the Top 100? Would they hold for the Top 1000? The Top 10,000?
I am happy that someone actually quoted a reasonably reliable source for some of their stats. The Forbes article was very interesting.
 
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cornflake

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I'm going to set aside the OP's questions and points for a moment, and ask a question I wanted to ask in the Romance Top 100 thread before it was locked.

Why do some posters here like to dismiss the Kindle bestseller lists?

Those books sell A LOT, and Amazon has about 65% of the ebook market. This is nothing to sneeze at, so why are people ach-oo-ing in these threads?

From that link, ebooks are 30% of the market. That's not broken down, and as was pointed out in the other thread, a lot of romance are mass market pb sold in places like supermarkets.

However, let's go with the 30%, for argument's sake.

So, out of 100 romance books, 30 are ebooks. Of those then, if 65% are kindle titles, that's 19 or so. According to the OP's link, 49% are self published. So we're talking about, rounding up, 10 out of 100 books.

Now, that's the best-case scenario, because we've no idea how many books a kindle bestseller makes, how long some of those titles were bestsellers or at what price vs. what price, who wrote them (whether half of those were by the top two authors, or by a successful trade-published author who is selling his or her own backlist or who nows what), etc., etc.

Even then - 10 of 100 books, generously. That's romance. In m/s/t, according to the links, we'd be talking about, rounding up, 2 books out of 100, with all the above unknowns applying.
 

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Remember, I'm setting aside the original post of this thread. Can we do that for a moment?

All I want to see is some acknowledgement that the books on the Kindle bestseller lists sell a lot of copies. A book that is in the top 25% of the overall list is selling thousands of copies in a day.

http://kdpcalculator.com/index.php

And if we're talking about ebooks, which the romance thread was about, it's not crazy to speculate that self-publishers now or in the future will take half of the romance ebook market if they consistently have half the category's bestseller slots in a store that sells 65% of ebooks.

Again, can we set aside the larger claims for a moment? I guess for me this started when someone in a thread about ebooks, went to the paper book list. No, wait, I think it was that time when someone in this forum speculated that only other self-publishers only buy self-published books. I think people should spend more time in the ebook lists and understand what the ranks mean.
 
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All I want to see is some acknowledgement that the books on the Kindle bestseller lists sell a lot of copies. A book that is in the top 25% of the overall list is selling thousands of copies. Do people here even know what those ranks mean?

http://kdpcalculator.com/index.php

How do you know that black box is reliable, esp. when it states that Amazon's sales data are private?
 

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Remember, I'm setting aside the original post of this thread. Can we do that for a moment?

All I want to see is some acknowledgement that the books on the Kindle bestseller lists sell a lot of copies. A book that is in the top 25% of the overall list is selling thousands of copies in a day.

http://kdpcalculator.com/index.php

We can't acknowledge that books on ALL Kindle bestseller lists will sell a lot of copies because it's just not true. There are so many genres, and so many different Kindle bestseller lists, that there are loads of books out there which have reached those bestseller lists without selling more than a handful of books. For example, I have a friend whose book was a Kindle bestseller in its own genre list and to this day it's sold no more than twenty copies.

If you're talking about the overall bestseller list for Kindle books then that's a different matter: they'll usually sell in good quantity. But, having a few friends who have made that overall Kindle bestseller list, I dispute your assertion that the top 25 books on the list sell thousands of copies a day.

That is true sometimes: but it's not always. For example, it's not unusual for well-promoted books to rocket up the list on publication day, spend a very brief time on the bestseller list and then to plummet out of it just as quickly, having sold a good few copies--but those sales will never be equaled, and the books might well fail to sell more than a couple of thousand copies in a couple of years.

And if we're talking about ebooks, which the romance thread was about, it's not crazy to speculate that self-publishers now or in the future will take half of the romance ebook market if they consistently have half the category's bestseller slots in a store that sells 65% of ebooks.

Again, can we set aside the larger claims for a moment? I guess for me this started when someone in a thread about ebooks, went to the paper book list. No, wait, I think it was that time when someone in this forum speculated that only other self-publishers only buy self-published books. I think people should spend more time in the ebook lists and understand what the ranks mean.

Here we're getting into dodgy territory. You're referring to a thread, possibly more than one thread, which was closed for good reason.

It's AW policy that when a thread is locked you don't get to start up the same conversation elsewhere. If you are really keen to do that, send one of the room mods a PM. They might not be willing to reopen the closed thread(s) but they might be open to you starting a new thread to have the discussion you're interested in.
 
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Remember, I'm setting aside the original post of this thread. Can we do that for a moment?

All I want to see is some acknowledgement that the books on the Kindle bestseller lists sell a lot of copies. A book that is in the top 25% of the overall list is selling thousands of copies in a day.

http://kdpcalculator.com/index.php

And if we're talking about ebooks, which the romance thread was about, it's not crazy to speculate that self-publishers now or in the future will take half of the romance ebook market if they consistently have half the category's bestseller slots in a store that sells 65% of ebooks.

Again, can we set aside the larger claims for a moment? I guess for me this started when someone in a thread about ebooks, went to the paper book list. No, wait, I think it was that time when someone in this forum speculated that only other self-publishers only buy self-published books. I think people should spend more time in the ebook lists and understand what the ranks mean.

How do you know that black box is reliable, esp. when it states that Amazon's sales data are private?


What Helix said. Amazon has never released data on what their sales rankings mean, and they guard them pretty jealously. So unless you can cite some actual sources based on real evidence, then no, I don't feel the need to acknowledge something I don't know is true. Further, according to your own link, the 25th book is actually selling no more than about 1,250 copies a day. I'm not sure I'd qualify that as "thousand of copies a day."




If you can show me a list of actual romance novels, with accurate sales data, showing 50% of the Top 100 sellers are self-pubbed, I'll be happy to have a real discussion with you.
 

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Genre bestseller lists and sublists aren't the same as the overall bestseller list. One can have a rank in the hundreds of thousands and still make one of those sublists. This is why I look at overall rank more as a sales indicator. With romance, however, many of the top 100 in romance are in the top 100 overall because it's a popular genre.

In this forum, though I failed to in this thread, I've said that rank gives a ballpark idea of how books are selling. Also, I said "in a day," not "a day" (which implies consistency). Books can rise and fall quickly in and out of that list. If people want to dispute the range that the calculator gives, then OK. I think the ballpark says this book is doing well, though not in the thousands, and it's nothing to sneeze at:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IRGU5OU/?tag=absowrit-20

Remember, I'm not evangelizing, I'm asking for acknowledgment, as in not dismissing, or deriding.
 
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Torgo

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Genre bestseller lists and sublists aren't the same as the overall bestseller list. One can have a rank in the hundreds of thousands and still make one of those sublists. This is why I look at overall rank more as a sales indicator. With romance, however, many of the top 100 in romance are in the top 100 overall because it's a popular genre.

In this forum, though I failed to in this thread, I've said that rank gives a ballpark idea of how books are selling. Also, I said "in a day," not a day (which implies consistency). Books can rise and fall quickly in and out of that list. If people want to dispute the range that the calculator gives, then OK. I think the ballpark says this book is doing well, though not in the thousands, and it's nothing to sneeze at:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IRGU5OU/?tag=absowrit-20

Remember, I'm not evangelizing, I'm asking for acknowledgment, as in not dismissing, or deriding.

I worked in digital publishing for a Big 5 firm over the last few years and necessarily had to pay a lot of attention to things like the various Amazon and Apple charts. I also had the opportunity to correlate those data sets with the other big data set I had access to - the weekly ebook sales report showing exact sales figures across thousands of titles.

What I learned is that it's really hard to estimate anything even from the Amazon Top 100. It's very volatile; it's reporting purely relative information; it's representing sales across what I would regard as several different ebook markets that don't intersect with each other. Not so much apples and oranges but apples and toaster ovens and car insurance.

I'm sure everyone here is perfectly happy to acknowledge that the top-selling ebooks on Amazon sell a lot of copies, and that, at that level, people are making a living out of full-time writing, no matter how they are published. What I don't quite get is how to analyse it any further than that. What does it mean if x% of the top 100 is published using method A and y% is published using method B? I simply don't know and nobody ever seems to put forward a theory.

The reason these threads get locked sometimes is that the discussion never goes very far, and occasionally gets irritable, because we lack data across the entire market. I would very much like publishers to mutually agree to release ebook sales figures, in fact. I think it'd bring a lot of clarity.
 

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I'm sure everyone here is perfectly happy to acknowledge that the top-selling ebooks on Amazon sell a lot of copies, and that, at that level, people are making a living out of full-time writing, no matter how they are published. What I don't quite get is how to analyse it any further than that. What does it mean if x% of the top 100 is published using method A and y% is published using method B? I simply don't know and nobody ever seems to put forward a theory.

The reason these threads get locked sometimes is that the discussion never goes very far, and occasionally gets irritable, because we lack data across the entire market. I would very much like publishers to mutually agree to release ebook sales figures, in fact. I think it'd bring a lot of clarity.

Thank you, Torgo. Since these threads also tend to lose focus quickly, I wanted to emphasize your acknowledgement of Ava's point and concerns.

I also want to comment that it is precisely the "larger claims" and questions that cause these threads to degenerate into baseless contention. Data gets offered that is not anywhere near sufficient to base any kind of projection on, especially the kind of projection that seems to be the desired outcome for some of us, such as big changes in how the Big 5 publishers treat aspiring authors.

How does spending lots of time and energy pouring over sales figures and trying to work them around to support a desired change in the industry help anyone write a better book and get it published, or self-publish it well and successfully? If people seek encouragement for their creativity in this kind of discussion, others are always going to be looking for a more realistic way to understand the terrain of writing and publishing, and the two groups are going to find little common ground. The conversation will then, predictably, swirl around in mutual befuddlement, and that benefits no one.
 
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JournoWriter

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All I want to see is some acknowledgement that the books on the Kindle bestseller lists sell a lot of copies.

Why do you care so much about receiving this acknowledgement from people here at AW? What is your point or argument that you will make once armed with that acknowledgment?

I don't pretend to understand all the ins and outs of the SP or ebook sectors. I do get confused when trying to wade through the various threads and posts by katyperryfan and adamneymars, which all seem to make the same vague contentions time and time again. Neither seems to want to engage in discussion or answer questions beyond certain topics, but there seems to be some larger context always looming behind the scenes that's hard to puzzle out.

Is your point that SPing is growing? That it is crushing trade publishing in sales? What, exactly?
 

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I think data ferreted out of the Amazon lists is worthwhile to look at, but should be understood to be nothing more than a snapshot—at least until someone puts a bunch of consecutive snapshots together and produces a movie of it. That would be more valuable, though obviously time consuming. It's dangerous to interpret too much from a snapshot.

What I've learned from Amazon best seller rankings: The genre rankings tell very little. Two sales in some non-fiction genres will push a book up to rank 50-70. Big deal. I pay more attention to overall ranking by e-book. One sale of a book, even if it's ranked below 1,000,000, will raise that book to around 125,000 to 150,000 in the overall ranking. After 24 hours it will have fallen to something under 200,000, maybe 250,000. This seems to be true with every isolated sale, regardless of day of the week or month. That tells me that somewhere around 250,000 (give or take 50,000) e-books sell one copy a day on Amazon. One day a short story of mine sold three copies, and it rose as high as 24,500 in the overall ranking. By the end of the day it was 83,000. That tells me that between 75,000 and 100,000 e-books sell multiple copies a day on Amazon. Beyond that I can glean very little from the rankings. To know more, I'd need that movie, or I'd need to know and understand the ranking algorithms.

As a mostly non-seller, I try to not care where my books rank, though I'd be lying if I said it didn't matter at least a little.
 

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How does spending lots of time and energy pouring over sales figures and trying to work them around to support a desired change in the industry help anyone write a better book and get it published, or self-publish it well and successfully? If people seek encouragement for their creativity in this kind of discussion, others are always going to be looking for a more realistic way to understand the terrain of writing and publishing, and the two groups are going to find little common ground. The conversation will then, predictably, swirl around in mutual befuddlement, and that benefits no one.

And thank YOU Kyla for putting your finger on why these threads always seem to circle the drain.

I think data ferreted out of the Amazon lists is worthwhile to look at, but should be understood to be nothing more than a snapshot—at least until someone puts a bunch of consecutive snapshots together and produces a movie of it. That would be more valuable, though obviously time consuming. It's dangerous to interpret too much from a snapshot.

Yeah. As much as it's tempting to extrapolate a point into a huge case for something, it needs to be kept in the forefront of our thoughts it is nothing more than a snapshot. And if someone tries to mine the sales figures to make a big case for something, eventually Amazon will change their algorithm to make their data more obscure and harder to make any sense.

As a mostly non-seller, I try to not care where my books rank, though I'd be lying if I said it didn't matter at least a little.

Yeah, me too. I'm chuffed when I see my book rise in ranking but then I look at my sales and realize it's not all that exciting. :/
 
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rank gives a ballpark idea of how books are selling.

The general problem with this kind of assumption (though logical) is that the ballpark in question isn't open to everyone, and the management refuses to post the rules by which it operates.

If lists in general were true ballpark figures, then the NYT, USA, and Amazon lists would match, with a similar margin of error that might allow for a few books on each list to fall into a different slot. They don't usually match - each list has its own algorithm that counts and discounts certain sales or other criteria like where the sale was made, if it was made pre or post publication, etc.

The Amazon list is doubly questioned because Amazon isn't just the book-seller, they're also one of the publishers on the list. They have a vested interest in keeping their on-list presence high, which creates doubt in the unbiased nature of their rankings -- even if there's no reason for said doubt.

Lists are generally most accurate when put together by outside sources with inside access to information, but that rarely happens with publishing.

If you're in the top 100 on the master ranking list, then yes, you've likely sold a lot of books, but there are too many variables to come close to determining what "a lot" really means.
 

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One sale of a book, even if it's ranked below 1,000,000, will raise that book to around 125,000 to 150,000 in the overall ranking. After 24 hours it will have fallen to something under 200,000, maybe 250,000. This seems to be true with every isolated sale, regardless of day of the week or month. That tells me that somewhere around 250,000 (give or take 50,000) e-books sell one copy a day on Amazon.

Except that the conditions you just defined don't lead to your conclusion. :) For that under-1-million book to rise to 250,000, it had to start at under 1-million and then have a copy sold. If one copy is selling every day, it didn't start at under 1-million, it will have started higher. If a book is ranked around 250,000, what it tells you is that is was ranking much lower and then sold a copy yesterday. It doesn't tell you that that book is selling one copy a day.

Therein lies the madness of trying to extrapolate much of anything about Amazon rankings once they have more than three digits.
 
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Norman D Gutter

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Except that the conditions you just defined don't lead to your conclusion. For that under-1-million book to rise to 250,000, it had to start at under 1-million and then have a copy sold. If one copy is selling every day, it didn't start at under 1-million, it will have started higher. If a book is ranked around 250,000, what it tells you is that is was ranking much lower and then sold a copy yesterday. It doesn't tell you that that book is selling one copy a day.

Therein lies the madness of trying to extrapolate much of anything about Amazon rankings once they have more than three digits.

Right, I need to reword that. I didn't mean one copy a day, but rather 200,000 to 250,000 e-books sell at least one copy on any given day. That's what I meant to say. If I sell a copy on two consecutive days (a very rare occurrence), the ranking will probably be a little higher. I've had a few books sell on two consecutive days, and they ended the second day ranked around 75,000. This is fairly consistent. I feel fairly sure about my conclusion that 75,000 e-books sell multiple copies a day on Amazon. Not 100% sure, but fairly sure. I'll know more with a couple of more years of data. Amazon's algorithms seem to have both daily and weekly sales components. Sell a second copy in a week and a book rises a bit higher than selling two copies two weeks apart. Or so it seems from my limited perspective. None of which helps me to write or sell books.

But from that I'm sure not going to conclude that self-publishing is about to run trade publishing out of business. Now, if trade publishers would start sharing sales figures, that would be helpful.

NDG
 
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My eyes typically glaze over after the first few posts in these sorts of threads. They just always seem to be "Here are some numbers and they mean what I want them to mean" or "I'm going to imply simply by posting them that they mean something really great for my side", countered with "No they don't" or "Not necessarily" - and then we're off and running with hypotheticals that most writers who haven't yet published anything have no clue about (and most likely even some who have published)
 

BenPanced

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"Here are some numbers from Amazon and because they're numbers and they're from Amazon, they apply to everything outside of Amazon because Amazon."
 
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