One of our customers, David Wogahn, carried out a very interesting survey, and has published the results here: http://www.sellbox.com/self-publishers-claim-amazon-represents-85-ebook-sales/
It turns out that 85% of authors’ sales are on Amazon. That’s a pretty big share: if you’re just starting out on your self-publishing journey, it means you can concentrate on Amazon and Amazon alone at the beginning, in order to focus your marketing and sales efforts on one place and one platform. In terms of converting your Word file, you can also concentrate on Kindle formatting, and not worry too much about the others, initially.
Amazon even has a program to make it worth your while to publish on their platform exclusively: http://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/KDPSelect – so that you can earn a bit of extra money through them at the same time you lower the number of sites and platforms you have to worry about. The survey does indicate that it’s not terribly effective, but if you’re going to concentrate on Amazon at the beginning, you may as well in order to reap some of the benefits.
There are some other interesting numbers in the survey:
- Most people spent less than $250 on their cover design, which is roughly in line with our cover designers.
- Most people are regular or at least occasional eBook readers, meaning they are familiar with the experience.
- Doing a Print on Demand version is a popular option.
- 70% of authors charge $4.99 or less, with the most popular price point being $2.99, which makes sense given the pricing brackets Amazon has.
- Many authors have blogs – given that they are writers, this isn’t surprising. Blogging frequency is fairly infrequent, on average.
It’s worth a look if you’re interested in some of the numbers from other people who are self-publishing.
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