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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
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