32
Only 40 Self-Published Authors are a Success, says Amazon
originally posted on February 7, 2016 on Claude Forthomme – Nougat ' s Blog
The cat is out of the bag, finally we know exactly how many self-published authors make it big: 40.
Yes, that’ s not a typo.
40 self-published authors“ make money”, all the others, and they number in the hundreds of thousands, don’ t. This interesting statistic, recently
revealed in a New York Times article, applies to the Kindle Store, but since Amazon is in fact the largest digital publishing platform in the world, it is a safe bet that selfpublished authors are not doing any better elsewhere.
“ Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years. Yes, 40 authors have managed that, and have even gone on to establishing their own publishing house, like Meredith Wild. Her story is fully reported in the New York Times, here, and well worth pondering over. That story reveals some further nuggets about the current fluctuating state of the publishing industry: it seems that last year, a third of the 100 best-selling Kindle books were self-published titles on average each week. Conversely, that means legacy publishers only raked in two-thirds. Perhaps this is not such a surprising result, given their habit of pricing e-books at stratospheric levels, from $ 12 to $ 16 or more compared to self-published authors who deem that $ 3 to $ 5 is the“ right” price … One has to wonder why publishers do this, even at times pricing e-books more than their own printed versions of the title. Perhaps they are afraid of digital?
The digital market is indeed scary, primarily because of its dimension: over 4 million titles today in the Kindle Store, compared with 600,000 six years ago( again, the data
32