Saying 'guess you've never heard of Hugh Howey,' is like saying 'guess you've never heard of JK Rowling,' in response to someone saying that planning a career in novel-writing is an unlikely path to wealth. Or like saying 'guess you've never heard of Bill Gates,' if someone says, 'perhaps dropping out of school isn't the best career path.'
Yup. An outlier is never proof of anything!
That chart does not, in any way, say that 31% of e-books sold on Amazon are by self-published authors.
Yup. In fact, a lot
more than 31% of ebooks on Amazon are by self-published authors . . . which serves to
disprove that self-publishing is generally a good path to lucrative sales, because a much smaller percentage of self-published authors make their way to a high rank. I think I read somewhere that 8 million out of 12 million books on Amazon are now self-published. I don't have time to dig up a cite right now but to explain the statistics let's pretend that number is right.
Then 67% of books on Amazon are by self-published authors . . . but only 31% of the top-selling 120,000 books are.
That says
terrible things about how well self-publishing does! If self-publishing was equal to trade publishing in the efficacy of getting your book out there, 67% of books on Amazon being self-published
should mean 67% of the top sellers are self-published. The fact that the percentage is
less than half (!) of that suggests that self-publishers do not do
nearly as well for their books in general as trade publishers do for theirs. SPers don't even maintain their percentage into the bestseller list, let alone exceed it.
And this doesn't even take into account the other problems (below) . . .
It says that on one specific day, 31% of 50% of the Amazon bestseller e-books were self-published.
(red highlighting mine)
We don't know whether these are the same self-published books every day or different ones bopping up and down the list. If you're looking to make a living as an author, popping up the ranks for one day thanks to a promotion and then sinking to the basement will mean crap.
Other things we don't know:
- How these books were priced. If many of them were at, say, 99 cents, even though they're top sellers, they could account for a very small percentage of the revenue brought in by those 120,000 books. Just because those 120,000 books bring in 50% of Amazon's revenue doesn't mean the self-published books in that number are contributing 31% of that 50%. They could be contributing 1%. We don't know.
- How this compares to the overall market. Amazon is a large retailer, yes, but they're far from the whole picture. A lot of trade-published authors make good chunks of their income through things like print and sub rights.
- Whether these numbers are even close to accurate given that Amazon is notoriously close-mouthed about the way its sales ranks are calculated, and that's what Howey uses.
- How this all equates to which authors are making a living -- or even getting read.
- How a particular book will do if sent down a trade pub route versus a self-pub route. Some genres and niches are much easier to do well in self-publishing. Some are not. Some authors are better at what self-publishing requires. Some are not. These numbers are absolutely meaningless when trying to determine the right path for your book. They don't prove anything for self-publishing OR for trade publishing -- they're meaningless.
So instead of 31 out of 100, it's now god knows what. If there were 1000 books on Amazon (there are not), and 500 were ebooks, and of those, 10% were 'bestsellers,' it's now 15 out of 1000, which would be 1.5% of the books on Amazon.*
Yah, you got it.
As mentioned above, though, there IS a large percentage of self-published books on Amazon, and this makes things worse overall for the self-publishing advocates (not that they admit it). Because, to piggyback off corny's example, in that case we'd have 1.5% of the books on Amazon being bestselling ebooks that are self-published. But what if EVERY SINGLE ONE of the non-top selling ebooks was a self-published book? (And in real life a significant chunk of them are.) Then we'd have 500 ebooks with 50 top sellers, and 465 of those 500 are self-published and 35 of them are trade published and EVERY SINGLE ONE of the trade published books is in the "top selling" ten percent. Which would mean
100 percent of trade published ebooks are on that list but only 15/465 =
three percent of self-published ebooks are on that list. This example is, admittedly, extreme, but the point is, the way Howey does his (horrible, misleading) math, we would STILL have that 31% number from it when only 3 percent of self-published books are hitting a top-selling list.
Which goes to show just how misleading Howey's "math" is.
And in our example, those 15 books could all be from the same author, or from hybrid authors whose self-publishing is piggybacking off their successful trade pub deals. Those 15 could all be in one genre. Those 15 might not be the same 15 every day. Those 15 might all be listed for 99 cents.
This isn't a rant against self-publishing. I self-publish and I love it. This is a rant against Howey's math, which is doing its damnedest to
misinform authors about the choices out there.
Even if there were 31 of 100, wouldn't mean anyone was actually buying or reading them; it'd mean they existed.
Yah, I'm comfortable with agreeing that the ones on the top seller list are probably being bought and read -- at least on the
one day we know they hit it -- but again, that says nothing about the vast vast
vast majority of SPed books. It also says nothing about what happens to those books after they drop off the top sellers list. My book has occasionally spiked for a day, and let me tell you, it didn't take a lot of sales. In fact, for the majority of its life (I think it's dropped below that now), my book's rank has been over 120,000, putting it in Howey's top seller category* for the majority of that time. And I haven't made
close to a standard trade-pub advance in my genre with it. I haven't even
grossed close to a standard trade-pub advance for it.
* Amazon ranks are a notorious black box, so we can't say my book was
really a top seller, but rank is what Howey uses anyway. Let me tell you, my book has not contributed more than a fingernail to that "50% of Amazon's ebook revenue."
I want to highlight this again because I think it's exceedingly likely that the top
handful of bestsellers make up most of that 50% of revenue, with a long tail of other books contributing -- my book being in the top 120,000 for a long period of time has not meant squat. And who's in that top handful of bestsellers? We don't know!
Lots of places besides Amazon sell books; lots of places besides Amazon sell e-books. Physical books still sell a whole lot of the market.
Yup, and sub rights, don't forget those. A lot of trade pub authors make income through many sources. Most self-pub authors make the vast majority of their income through ebooks. So even IF we had accurate, informative numbers (which we don't!), we would be comparing close-to-100% of a self-publisher's income with a small portion of a trade published author's income. DOES THAT SOUND LIKE IT MAKES SENSE.
There are millions of books languishing on Amazon, and other places, that aren't on any bestseller list. There are several more issues (what constitutes a bestseller, etc.,), but they seem fairly obvious.
Oh, yah.
I recommend people do what they feel is best for them, after actual research, not after listening to Hugh Howey.
This. Self-publishing is not for everyone. I love that it exists -- so much! -- and it's good for me, but I
really cannot stand the way Howey misinforms people about it.
Do your research. Choose the route that is the best for
you as an author and the best for
your book as a book. Not everyone will be happy self-publishing, just as not everyone will be happy partnering with a trade publisher. It's both a personal and a business decision.
Self-publishing is not, for God's sake, a marginalized class like some people make it out to be. And trade pubbed authors are not Stockholmed idiots who haven't seen the light yet. The choice is a freakin' business decision.
*Gotta get slh to check my maths.
Thanks so much for dragging me into this thread, corny.
I was supposed to be writing!
Just kidding. Always happy to come poop in a math thread.
While I'm happy for any writer to find the path that his right for him/her, I disagree that self-publishing is easy. Successful self-publishers do a tremendous amount of work.
^^^THIS.
I find it personally insulting when people dismiss self-publishing as the "easy" path. Sure, some people do it that way, but a lot of us take self-publishing very seriously as a business we're investing in. Do you want to know one reason why a lot of my close writing friends are reluctant to self-publish? Because they see the freakin' crap ton of work
I put into it (and they'd want to self-publish to a similar standard that I do).
It depends what your goals are self-publishing. If people just want an ebook for their friends and family to buy and are using Amazon to get that, then cool. Throw it up there. I don't have a problem with that. But don't claim self-publishing in general is easy, cheap, or less work than querying, because there are plenty of people self-publishing with other goals, and the ease, affordability, and work involved with self-publishing will depend entirely on what your creative and business goals
are, and to say self-publishing must or should be cheap or easy is dismissing all those self-publishers who have goals different from yours and put in a fuckton of work to see them happen.