Author Earnings

I'm an indie publisher of utility nonfiction (i.e. how-to guides). Close to 90% of online unit sales are print. This number has actually risen in recent years as print has grown and ebook sales have remained flat or declined. There are lots of theories floating around on why this is so, but I have to say that Google and Apple have really dropped the ball while Amazon continues to blaze forward on many product and service fronts. For example: at one time the iPad ebook experience was vastly superior to the original Kindle, now with the Kindle Fire and Paperwhite (not to mention the Kindle iOS app) Amazon is in front. For an analysis of trends in the industry check out the Author Earnings reports here: http://authorearnings.com/

As someone pointed out in the comments, these figures ignore self-published ebooks that don't have ISBNs and thus don't show up in Nielsen, BookScan, etc. Most U.S. self-published ebook authors don't use ISBNs because they're outrageously priced in small quantities, and none of the major ebook outlets (Amazon, B&N, Apple) require them. The situation is somewhat different in other countries, where ISBNs are issued by government agencies for free. These books are a substantial portion of Amazon's ebook sales, the majority in some genres. For a more comprehensive take on sales numbers, see: http://authorearnings.com/

I've self-published 26 ebooks in the last three years. It's a great time to be an author. I hire a formatter, editors, and cover designers and we work as a team to create the books. I've also published 11 books in print. I use Create Space for print on demand paperbacks. Very happy with the quality and process. Here are two sites I highly recommend: To get powerful insight into ebook sales and the disruption of the publishing industry, be sure to visit http://authorearnings.com/report/july-2014-author-earnings-report/ Also, http://www.thepassivevoice.com is a tremendous resource for an overview and navigation of the disruption.

As of the beginning of this year, Amazon sells over 83% of ebooks in the US. [0] This is up from only 74% in 2015. [1] [0] http://authorearnings.com/report/february-2017/ [1] http://authorearnings.com/report/october-2015-apple-bn-kobo-and-google…

Most people aren't paying for the extra functionality of ebooks though. Most people are still buying physical books: http://authorearnings.com/report/print-vs-digital-report/ Also, your reasoning for selling a book at a higher price is not correlated to supply vs. demand. What you are talking about is a pricing strategy. There is a near unlimited supply of an ebook, so it's not supply vs. demand, it's a pricing strategy that's setting the price. A pricing strategy could also be used to sell the ebook at a cost below production costs to drive sales. Again, the ebook supply remains constant.

I think the real meat of the article comes from the linked article in the middle: > AAP Reports Own Shrinking Market Share, Media Mistakes It for Flat US Ebook Market [1] Aside from that, this is pretty badly written and *overuses* *emphasis* *poorly*. [1] http://authorearnings.com/report/september-2015-author-earnings-report…

This article makes the same fundamental mistake that the NY Times article did that it refers to. It ignores the rise of self publishing and bases everything off the AAP. Author Earnings has some other things to say, with data: http://authorearnings.com/report/september-2015-author-earnings-report…

Here's some data to support the shift to self-publishing as a major part here: http://authorearnings.com/report/september-2015-author-earnings-report…

The full report, as linked from boingboing write-up: http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-author-earnings-report/ Money quote: "What our data strongly suggests is that DRM harms ebook sales at any price point."