What would you like to know about the report? Well, if you want to read it then you'll have to buy it, but the title story of Not a Gold Rush is about the 2011 earnings of the respondents. Their average earnings for the year was just over US$10,000. So, where's your 10k? Where's mine, for that matter. I shifted a lot of books but many were free copies of Peril with Amazon's price comparison (Peril reached #12 Amazon.com free on kindle in November 2011 in the days before KDP Select). Well, the earnings are distorted by a minority of 10% who earned buckets of money. The median (middle) income was $500. So if you earned less than that then you're in the company of half of the self-published author community (assuming the 1,007 respondent sample was representative of all of us).
The report is entertainingly written and well-balanced, clearly pointing out assumptions and sample limitations whenever any conclusions are drawn. There are one or two lighter moments, such as one bright spark of a correspondent who claimed to have published 16,000 books in 2011, probably meaning that they sold / shipped 16,000. That figure would have greatly distorted the average number of books published but the report authors took care to discount any such outlying data. What kind of twit would have made such a mistake in the survey? (I can say with some certainty that it must have been me!)
There are some indications and suggestions in the report regarding the effectiveness of different marketing methods but there's just no magic recipe to the marketing. I was gratified to find email considered as the least effective marketing tool, as I'm particularly bad at building a mail list myself.
All self-published authors are looking for the Holy Grail of epublishing success. This report doesn't reveal the location of the Grail. It does reinforce some things that we share in common knowledge - a correlation between high quality product + writing output volume and sales revenue. Financially successful authors are, in the main, writing more, publishing more and have been doing it longer than lower earners. So, back to work!
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So it was you! :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for mentioning the survey and 'fessing up! How funny.
I should mention, though, that the title Not a Gold Rush refers only partly to the income of the authors surveyed. The other part is that so many of our respondents have been writing seriously for years, i.e. the world of self-publishing hasn't been flooded by people reading about the success of authors like Hocking and Locke then suddenly deciding writing was the business to be in. (Ironically, as Locke himself did.)
Hi Steven and thanks for stopping by!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I slept well last night with a free conscience, despite not following the bloke's code of deny, deny, deny.
Point taken, it's not a get rich or get read quick scheme. Locke's book is interesting where he divulges that he initially failed miserably, despite throwing a lot of money and all his traditional business marketing tactics at the ebook market. He intimates that one of his blog posts going viral was a key catalyst and his mail list built upon that popularity, but I don't think that approach is reproducible. Just gotta keep on keeping on ;-)
Ruby, if email was a dismal failure (which I agree with), out of interest, what were the couple of top marketing approaches?
ReplyDeleteHey, Rob. Enjoyed The Rule Book, just finished it the other day.
ReplyDeleteThe top earners rated the following as having more effective impact on book sales than 'my email list':
- people have read my other books
- price
- my relationship with readers through social media
- Amazon or other sites' recommendation algorithms
- giving books away for free
- number of reviews on Amazon or other sites
I'm glad you clarified the 16,000, but just out of curiosity, how many books did you publish - not the number you sold.
ReplyDeleteI was beginning to wonder if Taleist had had a response from one of those dreadful people who download a book, remove any DRM, and republish under a different cover, author-name and title.
Hi John. I published two books in 2011 (Peril and The Baptist) and 2 so far in 2012 (The New Author which is free if you join Ruby's News on the right of this page) and The Crucible Part 1.
DeleteYeah, maybe they thought that too. No doubt a few shysters made a quick buck from that sort of carry-on, but I have a feeling it's less prevalent now.