In case you missed it, the Author Earnings Report is out. Loads of pretty pretty graphs and charts. Basically, what it boils down to is: ebooks are alive and well, self-publishing is alive and well, and the naysayers can bite us.
I love how big publishing keeps wanting us to believe that print sales are king and all that crap. If you look at the total sales of all books everywhere, sure, the print slice of the pie chart looks overwhelming. Until you remove textbooks. And then you remove non-fiction. Then the sales numbers and dollars of ebooks are way above print sales. Natch.
"90% of all Romance purchases are ebooks." Let that sink in. Now, I don't write romance, but that number is pretty sweet.
And it looks like self-publishers (those who have their own imprint and those who don't (like me)) are taking 35.9% of the ebook market in units sold.
Sure, the Big 5 are still taking the largest piece of the pie monetarily. That's because they overcharge for everything and the market is still letting them. :shrug: All my books are $2.99ea and they will continue to be until I see a reason to raise my prices. (Which mainly decided by my own purchasing ability. I can't make myself buy higher priced books, so I'm not going to make other people shell out for them. I'd feel like a hypocrite. And I hate that.) If I ever did decide to raise my prices, though, it would probably only be a buck hike. Time will tell.
Anyway, this report gives me hope. It always does. My sales may still be down, but as long as there's hope, I'll keep plodding along. Someday, I'll get a bigger piece of that pie. =o)
Like you, I just keep plodding along. My sales have been flat since last quarter. Every once in awhile, I get a big spike (6+ books in a day as opposed to 0 or 1) and I wonder what happened. I don't advertise. I occasionally will post something on a FB snippet group, but sale dates don't correspond to anything. I'll never figure it out so I'll just keep writing and publishing books.
ReplyDeleteHere's to pie a la mode for both of us!