Hugh Howey at authorearnings.com describes an innovative data mining study to determine whether it is in an indie-author’s financial interest to self-publish.
ePublish Yourself Intelligence
Hugh Howey reports the following:
- The major booksellers provide very little useful sales data to help authors make meaningful decisions.
- An open question remains: is it more lucrative to self-publish or is it better to try to sign with a conventional publisher?
- Working with a data mining consultant, Howey collected and analyzed data about nearly 7,000 ebooks (later expanded to 50,000 titles) in several bestselling genre categories on Amazon.
- Findings include:
- Lower-priced books (as an average among those surveyed) produced higher reviews
- Indie and small-publisher titles dominate the bestselling genres on Amazon
- Indie authors outsell the Big Five conventional published, combined
- Indie authors earn nearly half the total author revenue from genre fiction sales on Amazon
- Genre writers stand to do better financially by self-publishing, independent of the potential of their manuscripts.
ePublish Yourself! encourages reading this report
Statistics is a complicated business, and we at ePublish Yourself! are unable to perform a serious mathematical analysis of the presented results (or even comment on the method of sample selection, etc.). However, to our knowledge, this is the first, large-scale data mining project concerning Amazon ebook sales that makes the experiment data publicly available for independent analysis (for which the authors should be duly commended).
ePublish Yourself! encourages authors to read the report, and further encourages mathematicians and statisticians to offer additional analysis of the test methods and results. We look forward, as do the report authors, to advancing the discussion.