Friday 30 January 2015

Hah! Read this Indies and cheer.

Author Earnings.com is doing a great job in dispelling the myths put out by the traditionalists about e-book earnings. If you haven't met them before go and read all their reports. They will cheer up any Indie author. The road to making us respectable as 'Real Writers' with good books is made shorter with people like these to present facts and back them up.

Here is a short extract. Please go to their website and read the rest.



The January 2015 Report
This time around, we measured the size of the invisible "shadow industry" of ebooks without ISBNs... and discovered why all the official (ISBN-based) ebook market-size reports from Bowker, AAP, BISG, and Nielsen are so wildly wrong.
Back in February, our first report analyzed the top 7,000 e-books in three bestselling genres [link]. Then we followed up with a look at all 54,000 ranked bestselling e-books on Amazon in a single day snapshot [link]. We then turned our attention to Barnes & Noble [link]. In May, we returned to Amazon to run another quarterly report on 85,000 of the bestselling books across all genres to see what it could tell us [link], and took a deeper dive into how newer authors were faring compared to their longer-tenured peers [link]. In July, we took our deepest dive yet, and looked at the effect of DRM and of genre across 120,000 titles [link].
In October, we went back to the data well again and this time, examined the effect Kindle Unlimited [link].

Now, at the start of 2015, we return once again to the Amazon bestseller lists with another all-genres grab of 120,000 titles, and take a look at longer term trends.

And we took a look at which of those 120,000 titles had registered ISBNs and which didn't, answering two long-standing questions about the ebook market:

How to time your book promos to create the perfect campaign

How to time your book promos to create the perfect campaign
Readers in the Know - www.readersintheknow.com - is proving a very helpful site for Indies.

Not long ago Simon ran articles on a sales campaign and then analysed it to show what succeeded. Very helpful.

Now here's another useful article for Indies. Last week Simon presented a list of good book promo sites as determined by the campaign.

Go and read them if you want to be part of the successful Brave New World of Indies! Any knowledge about what succeeds in a sales campaign is vital to the new Indie writer.