January 2015 Author Earnings report

[fjtorres]

Dig up your munchies of choice, there's a new report from AUTHOR EARNINGS:

http://authorearnings.com/report/jan...rnings-report/

The executive summary says it all.

Executive Summary

AuthorEarnings reports analyze detailed title-level data on 33% of all daily ebook sales in the U.S.

• 30% of the ebooks being purchased in the U.S. do not use ISBN numbers and are invisible to the industry’s official market surveys and reports; all the ISBN-based estimates of market share reported by Bowker, AAP, BISG, and Nielsen are wildly wrong.
  
• 33% of all paid ebook unit sales on Amazon.com are indie self-published ebooks.
  
• 20% of all consumer dollars spent on ebooks on Amazon.com are being spent on indie self-published ebooks.
  
• 40% of all dollars earned by authors from ebooks on Amazon.com are earned by indie self-published ebooks.
  
• In mid-year 2014, indie-published authors as a cohort began taking home the lion’s share (40%) of all ebook author earnings generated on Amazon.com while authors published by all of the Big Five publishers combined slipped into second place at 35%.

Details and raw data, with lots of pretty charts, at the source.

Here's a taste:

This is our fifth quarterly Author Earnings report. It is based on a data snapshot of 120,000 of the best selling ebooks on Amazon, giving us a deep cross-sectional data sample comprising roughly 50% of Amazon’s daily ebook sales. According to the publishing industry’s most oft-cited estimate, Amazon controls 67% of the U.S. ebook market. Thus the title-level data used in our analysis includes roughly 33% of all daily ebook sales in the U.S. No other industry survey or ebook market-size estimate comes close to this level of accuracy or detail.

(Later in the report, we’ll discuss some of the widely-cited official ebook market surveys and industry-wide sales estimates that the industry news sites and pundits rely on for their numbers — and we’ll show you why those surveys and estimates are so remarkably wrong.)

The methodology used in this report is identical to our four previous reports, published in Feburary, May, July, and October of 2014. We capture real-time data from Amazon.com’s thousands of public ebook bestseller lists and sublists. Using a software “spider,” we grab a snapshot of each of the hundreds of thousands of listed books and how well they are selling.

We then group these 120,000 bestselling Amazon ebook titles by publisher type, separating them into:

Indie Published (self-published titles)
Small or Medium Publisher (any publisher that publishes more than one author, but is not an imprint of one of the Big Five Publishers, not an Amazon Publishing imprint, and not a known self-published author collective)
Amazon Publishing (Amazon’s semi-traditional publishing imprints, such as Montlake, Thomas & Mercer, Skyscape, etc.)
Big Five Published (the imprints of Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster)
Uncategorized Single-Author Publisher (publishers who published only a single author in our dataset, but that were not the self-publishing DBA or LLC of a well-known indie author)

Edit: the section on ISBN usage is especially illuminating.
Turns out it isn't just indies that are forgoing them.

[SteveEisenberg]

40% of all dollars earned by authors from ebooks on Amazon.com are earned by Indie self-published ebooks.

AFAIK, most major publisher author income is from advances.

How do these folks find out those figures?

Perhaps they ignore the advances major publisher authors receive, instead basing statistics on the royalties authors would receive if they ever earned out their advances -- something they usually don't. If so, a lot of the statistics make little sense.

[crossi]

It doesn't make any difference if authors get an advance unless of course they don't sell enough books to pay back the loan. The advance isn't a gift in addition to the royalties it's just a loan against future sales and it comes out of their royalties until it is all paid back. So for counting total income it doesn't matter if they get an advance or not. The only thing that matters is how many books they sell and what they got for them.

[Barcey]

I didn't believe that the Indie market share on Amazon was that high until the Author's Earning Reports started coming out but you can't argue with that aspect of the data. I can understand why the Industry market surveyors ignored the non ISBN sales, "if we can't count them they don't exist". I don't know how they can continue to claim that they're insignificant though.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

AFAIK, most major publisher author income is from advances.

How do these folks find out those figures?

Perhaps they ignore the advances major publisher authors receive, instead basing statistics on the royalties authors would receive if they ever earned out their advances -- something they usually don't. If so, a lot of the statistics make little sense.

Good question since most of that information isn't public. Amazon sure isn't publishing it. There is an old expression in the computer world, Garbage in, Garbage out. My guess is that they take the information that's public (i.e. author blogs, Amazon rankings, etc) and extrapolate.

After going back through their expressed methodology, I'm fairly skeptical. As far as I know, Amazon lists ranking, not actual number of sales. Am I wrong about that?

[murg]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

AFAIK, most major publisher author income is from advances.

How do these folks find out those figures?

Perhaps they ignore the advances major publisher authors receive, instead basing statistics on the royalties authors would receive if they ever earned out their advances -- something they usually don't. If so, a lot of the statistics make little sense.

If BPH authors aren't selling on Amazon (and elsewhere), then the advances will continue to get smaller and smaller.