Indie authors do very well in the mid-list. I blogged before on poor mmpb sales. If you write serial fiction, romance, sci-fi, erotica, and a few other genres, the door is closed for most authors in these genres to go the 'big6 route.' If your foot isn't already in the door... I just do not see where the money is going to come from to support new authors.
Harlequin's crew the author royalties, non-compete clauses,, low publisher support of new authors, and low publish royalty rates. How are the publishers gaining new authors?
Numerous old school authors are self-publishing their old works. Why wasn't this already done by the big6 (as much as legally possible)? Indie authors shouldn't fear the back list. Indie authors should cheer on the backlists coming to ebooks. Why? Further pull of readers to ebooks only grants a larger potential audience to new authors.
I do my own estimates of indie author sales... However, all indications are that I'm being too conservative. Does anyone have a good link on indie author market share?
Neil
I think the top 100 lists are a good indicator on Amazon. Obviously the books in those lists are selling the most and a remarkable number of them are Indie. While it's not an exact sort of number, if the top three spots were Indies, you could say something like, "thirty percent of books sold were Indie". It's a dreadfully inaccurate way to measure, but still a good indicator, I think.
ReplyDeleteI think you'd be incredibly hard-pressed to find a collective on how many indie books are being sold!
As far as I am aware, there are no reliable estimates out there, and I don't see them forthcoming while Amazon and the rest remain so tight-lipped.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's just one retailer.
There are also lots of indies selling books through their own sites.
Is there any other industry out there of comparable size that has no idea what it is selling and who is selling it?