Self-publishing survey results

A few months ago, I published a survey aimed at self-published authors.  The results are in.  Here are some of the key points:

• Writing more correlates strongly to more sales.  Which way the causation goes is difficult to say, but few people with just one or two books make a living from writing.  The average number of books published by authors responding that they make a living was above 6, and that’s probably on the low side, since I only had an option for 10+ books on the high end for the survey.
• Most authors don’t make enough to live off of, but many aspire to.
• The top categories were: fantasy, science fiction, mystery, romance and thrillers, in that order.
• Most people self-published first, although a significant number – around 25% – first published through a traditional publisher.
• Fiction was significantly more common than non-fiction.
• In terms of pricing, between 1 and 6 dollars is where the bulk of authors are selling their books.
• “Social media”  – Facebook and Twitter – are a popular way to market books.  This is something people could probably learn from, as email is reportedly a much more effective means of reaching a lot of people, yet fewer people report having mailing lists.

For anyone who has been following the self-publishing world, I don’t think the results are all that surprising, but it’s good to see some confirmation.

Here are some charts created with the results:

The results can be found here if you’d like to make your own charts from them.  Just be sure to link back to this post:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qsmjO-9CqLQe0lr4Ek8WowHLtUL9ahWZrYYcgRNEjBE/edit?usp=sharing