The following op-ed by Hanne Nabintu Herland concerns the Norwegian government’s persistent soft spot for the Palestinians. It was originally published in. Murakami Haruki, Norwegian Wood. Tokyo Blues, Super ET - DISPONIBILE ANCHE IN EBOOK Haruki MurakamiReading BooksBooks To ReadBook ArtSay ToIn IndiaTokyoFragranceShelf.

Print bookselling remains artificially silo’d by country even today, for variety of legacy historical and logistical reasons. But by contrast, the global ebook marketplace is a seamlessly international one. For authors, selling an ebook to a reader in a different country is just as easy as selling to a reader in your home country.

Barriers to reaching an international audience no longer exist. Today, with the click of a button, any author can start selling any title they wish simultaneously in 12 country-specific Amazon stores, 36 country-specific Kobo ebook stores, and over 40 country-specific Apple ebook stores.

As of yet, most of these non-English-language ebook markets are still fairly early-stage. But that’s not true of the four other major English-language markets outside the US. In those markets, too, as we’ll see, a substantial share of all new-book purchases has already gone digital. And, as we’ll also see, untracked, non-traditional suppliers make up a high percentage of ebook sales in those countries as well. Which means that these other digital markets have also been consistently underestimated and under-reported by traditional publishing-industry statistics.

Back in November 2015, we did a deep dive into. In examining how sales in the world’s second-largest English-language market broke down by publisher type, we saw firsthand the large nontraditional share of that market. And in October 2015, when we looked beyond Amazon.com to characterize, too, our “wide” report validated that indie self-publishing wasn’t just a massive market sector at only one ebook retailer, but rather represented an industry-wide trend.

However, both of those reports are already more than a year old. Since then, we’ve substantially overhauled and refined our AuthorEarnings. We can now measure each retailer’s total sales in each country with far more precision. So this time, we rolled up our sleeves and basically went for the whole enchilada: • The top five English-language countries • The fifteen largest ebook stores • 750,000 top-selling ebook titles, in all genres and categories. • All of it calibrated against 700,000 points of raw, unfiltered daily sales data, from over 20,000 distinct ebook titles across all 15 stores. When we were done, we were looking at the most comprehensive international picture of English-language ebook sales available anywhere.

And now, we’re excited to share it with authors everywhere around the world. Total Ebook Sales by Country (Top 5 English-Language Markets) Population Reported Print Book Sales (annual units) Ebook Sales (annual units) Ebooks as% of all book sales U.S.A. 325,700,000 675,000,000 487,298,000 42% U.K. 65,400,000 187,500,000 95,623,000 34% Canada 36,500,000 50,500,000 26,017,000 34% Australia 24,500,000 56,400,000 22,463,000 28% New Zealand 4,600,000 5,300,000 *1,306,000 20%* 5-Country Total: 456,700,000 974,700,000 632,707,000 39% *(New Zealand ebook total only includes Apple & Kobo stores; Because Amazon has no country-specific store for New Zealand, Kindle ebooks are purchased in NZ through Amazon.com and thus included in the US total) Of particularly interest is how each country’s ebook sales are divided up among the different retail channels. Total Ebook Unit Sales by Country and Retail Channel (The relative size of each pie reflects total sales volume for that country) Amazon Apple iBooks Kobo Barnes&Noble Nook U.S.A. 406,000,000 44,041,000 1,246,000 19,395,000 U.K.

84,029,000 7,201,000 1,132,000 – Canada 14,892,000 3,760,000 6,479,000 – Australia 13,604,000 6,694,000 1,399,000 – New Zealand * 831,000 416,000 – 5-Country Total: 518,526,000 62,527,000 10,672,000 19,395,000% of Total: 82% 10% 2% 3% • Unsurprisingly, Amazon is the majority retailer in just about every market. • But in Canada and Australia, Amazon is a lot less dominant than in the US and the UK. • Taken all together, Amazon accounts for more than 80% of English-language ebook purchases, Apple another 10%, Kobo 2% and Nook 3% • The remaining 3%–ascribed to GooglePlay and all remaining channels–is most likely overly optimistic. Their true share might well be even lower. (If you’re comparing retailer breakdowns for the US against our, note that that report mistakenly used global Kobo sales totals instead of US-only totals. We’ve rectified that here. We hope that no one making the comparison will misinterpret it as a drop in Kobo’s actual market size or share.

If anything, we think Kobo has actually grown some since then.) Total Ebook Consumer $ Dollar Sales by Country and Retail Channel In total consumer $ dollar spending terms, Amazon’s ebook dominance is slightly less pronounced than it is in unit terms. But we were still surprised to see that nearly 80% of consumer dollars spent on ebooks in the US now go through Amazon. Our focus, however, is always take-home author earnings, rather than gross consumer dollars. And authors choosing different publishing paths are banking a very different share of the gross dollars consumers are spending on their titles–ranging from 17.5% to 70%–depending on how they chose to publish. So, naturally, we’re most interested in how ebook sales in each country, and at each retailer, break down by publisher type: Ebook Unit Sales in Each Country Broken Down by Publisher Type As always, • blue bands (at the bottom of each bar) represent ebook sales in each market by Self-Published Indie Authors • red bands represent ebook sales by Small/Medium Traditional Publishers: i.e.

The combined sales of all traditional publishers other than the “Big Five” • green bands represent ebook sales by Amazon Imprints: Montlake, Thomas & Mercer, Skyscape, Little A, AmazonCrossing, etc. • purple bands represent ebook sales by imprints of the Big Five Trade Publishers: PenguinRandomHouse, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon&Schuster, and Macmillan. • cyan bands (at the top of each bar) represent Uncategorized Single-Author Imprints: the vast majority of which are also self-published indie authors creating their own imprint names, but we haven’t taken the time to verify each individually as a self-publisher.

(for the curious, on how we classify each author & publisher into one of these five categories). Our main takeaways from the above chart: • Self-published indie authors are verifiably capturing at least 24% – 34% of all ebook sales in each of the five English-language markets; it’s not just a US-only phenomenon. When you also include the uncategorized authors, the vast majority of whom are also self-published, the true indie share in each market lies somewhere between 30% – 40%.

• Indies are competing particularly well in the Canadian and Australian ebook markets, nearly approaching the level of dominance they currently hold in the US. • The Big Five, on the other hand, are letting themselves progressively get squeezed out of nearly every English-Language ebook market. They make up only 38% of Canadian ebook purchases, and that’s the country where they are holding their ground best; in the US, the Big Five now account for barely 26% of all ebook sales. • Amazon Imprints have made the most market headway in the US. Despite being single-retailer exclusive to Amazon Kindle, the dozen or so Amazon “house” publishing imprints between them account for 14% of all US ebook sales, 10% of all UK ebook sales, and 8% of Australian ebook sales. In Canada, the Amazon Imprint footprint is a much more modest 3% of all ebook sales, largely due to the substantial shares of the overall Candian ebook market held by Kobo ( 25%) and Apple ( 14%). Ebook Unit Sales at Each Retailer Broken Down by Publisher Type Our main takeaways from the above chart: • Self-published indie authors are verifiably capturing at least 20% – 35% of all multi-country ebook sales at each retailer.

When you also include the uncategorized authors, each retailer’s true multi-country indie share lies somewhere between 25% – 42%, with Amazon staking out the high end at 42% and B&N and Apple holding the low end at 25%. • The Big Five have managed to hang on to more than half of all ebook sales at Apple and Barnes & Noble Nook. At B&N, in particular, their share tops 61%, but that merely makes them the largest fish in a rapidly-shrinking pond.

(B&N’s overall ebook sales have contracted dramatically over the past few years, to where they are now make up less than 4% of the US total (or 3% of the five-country total)). *As a side note, in comparing these new US retailer market-share breakdowns to our data from October 2015, indie market share has grown a little since then at Apple, Kobo, and Amazon (even after Amazon’s sharp 2016 May-Oct indie drop). At B&N, However, indie share has actually contracted (leaving indies there with a reduced slice of the now much-smaller B&N pie). Hi, Karen, One of these days, we’ll find some time to look into non-English-language markets, too. In Germany, according to the latest public ebook sales data I could find, the size of the traditionally published ebook market seems to be roughly 27 million units a year–roughly the same volume as Canada’s.

I suspect that if we were to include self-published and Amazon-published German ebooks, too, which those stats don’t include, we’d end up with a total of somewhere between 35 million and 40 million units a year for Germany. Great information as always, thanks! There is a recurring assertion in these reports that Indie authors can have it both ways when it comes to exclusivity on Amazon – they can put some titles in KDP Select and let other titles ‘go wide’. This is ignoring a unique twist if an author decides to distribute exclusively through IngramSpark. IngramSpark will not distribute ebooks to Amazon if the author has had ANY ebook(s) available at Amazon for the past year. For someone who hasn’t published at all yet, like myself, the decision to use IngramSpark for ebook distribution does negate the availability of KDP as a distribution channel. I suspect the one-year ‘dark period’ for ebooks at Amazon was a result of the recent tussle between Amazon and Ingram, since it discourages the ability of IngramSpark to poach Amazon KDP authors.

I was wondering if you had any data on authors who are distributing exclusively through IngramSpark. I have my reasons for going this route, but would like to hear of any lessons learned. In comparing indie results by distribution-path against what we saw in our late-2015 wide report, I noticed something else interesting: The per-title performance gap between the two main third-party distributors seems to have widened.

D2D’s average per-title sales have now almost caught up with indies who “go direct” on Apple iBookstore & Barnes&Noble Nook, while Smashwords per-title performance has dropped somewhat since late 2015. The per-title sales of other distributors (Pronoun, Inscribe, Streetlib, Ingram, Bookbaby, etc.) generally land somewhere down near Smashwords’, but all of those smaller distributors put together still account for less than 2% of all “wide” indie sales (see above pie charts).

Any idea why there is such a discrepancy? One theory that comes to mind is that perhaps Smashwords attracts a lot of very casual indie writers, while more serious and professional indies may in general be using D2D or going direct. If so, the thousands of additional titles on Smashwords by authors who are not promoting or even properly editing and professionally creating their ebooks could be bringing the average sales per title way down.

I have heard anecdotal reports of people who switched to D2D and then experienced an increase in sales, but I can’t think of a good reason why this would be so. Any one have ideas or theories about why D2D might be better, not in its average sales per title, but in greater sales on the same title?

My wife and I have over 30 books published on Smashwords, and it would be a painful task to switch them all or even some to D2D. So I guess I am wondering if it is really worth it. PS: Going direct seems like way too much work 🙂. As promised, I am reporting back. After moving 10 of our titles (8 paid and 2 free) from Smashword over to D2D a month ago, the results are not very promising. We went from about 25 total paid sales for those titles in the month prior through Smashwords, to a total of 7 sales in the first month on D2D. Also, one of the free ebooks was downloaded a total of 7 times on D2D in the past month, compared to the average of around 30 downloads a month for that free title on Smashwords.

This might not be a fair comparison as it might take a while for the new D2D listings to become as visible as the books were when they had been published through Smash for years. But for now, it does not seem that the identical titles are doing better on D2D. I will check back in again after 90 days to see if things change. I like the D2D interface, but my own experience with our non-fiction self-help/spiritual titles is that it is not helping our sales to be on there instead of Smash.

Hi, Geoffrey, As of now, Ireland’s ebook market is still much smaller than New Zealand’s, despite the two countries’ similar populations. It takes the same amount of effort to extract ranking data from each store in each country, correlate it with raw sales data, and categorize the unidentified publishers, regardless of whether that store adds another 20% or less than 0.01% to our total.

Incorporating additional countries and stores, especially low selling ones, into analyses like this one rapidly runs up against the law of diminishing returns. That’s the main reason we don’t do international and multi-retailer reports as often as US-only Amazon reports. Hi, Patrick, As of yet, there’s a lot more media articles about “enhanced” eBooks than actual sales of those ebooks, at least as far as trade fiction and nonfiction are concerned. I’m not as familiar with the textbook/academic/professional digital market, though, so perhaps they are doing better there.

As you point out, the capability and tools to create enhanced ebooks has been available for years from Apple. And more recently, Amazon has launched the format, and is selling KIM versions of 16 well-known titles. The fact that “enhanced ebooks” haven’t yet made significant sales inroads might be telling us that actual consumer demand for this type of change to the text reading experience is a very niche one. Time will tell. Thanks, Data Guy, for your answer. I was not aware of this Kindle in Motion format. We believe that a better user experience using the full potential of all media formats available is the future.

The problem is the discoverability and accessibility of “enhanced” formats – due probably to the fact that there is no standard format around. Maybe HTML 5 will be the solution. We experience since a few years with a format called “videobooks”. We win prizes such as twice the German eBook award and the selection of “Best of App Store”. But we always wonder: Do we win prizes because we are the only ones that did not give up yet;-).

(here is a link to a trailer about what we do: ). Speaking for myself, I buy ebooks from amazon.com because I’m hooked into the US publishing ecosystem, and the sales, promotions and so forth that I become aware of are all for amazon.com, not amazon.com.au. Also, I suspect (on no evidence, other than this is how services like Netflix tend to work) that there are a number of books on.com that are not on.com.au, but very few cases of the other way around. And if I’m spending foreign currency anyway, whether it’s USD or AUD isn’t particularly important. Amazon.com is an international store. Amazon.com.au is an Australian store, different, limited, smaller buying books from either is neither here nor there, but as previous experience sends you browsing for physical items on the.com store, you leave the region set to that and shop for everything on the international store. I only switch to the Amazon Australia store when the I can’t find a seller on the international store that will ship an item to NZ (usually because of exclusive distribution deals).

Hi, Catdancing, It’s neither. I’m talking about a particular type of publisher, not a particular genre or subgenre. Not trying to be deliberately mysterious here; it’s just that I need to dig deeper into the data before I’m comfortable making definitive statements about this. Basically, I first need to spend some time categorizing the thousands of different publisher imprints in the “Small/Medium Publisher” category into smaller subcategories. And then I need to look at how sales have trended for each of those subcategories over the last 3 years worth of quarterly reports, to determine if this is a recent shift or a longer term trend. As always, everyone’s experience is unique.

But my wife, Gina Lake, and I are seeing audiobook sales earnings that now exceed our paperback sales and sometimes come very close to our ebook sales per month. And that is with many fewer titles available in audio than paper or ebook (only about 30% of our titles are available in audio format). We do write non-fiction (self-help and spiritual books), so that might explain somewhat why we are having such success with audiobooks. In any case, it is surprising to me that total audiobook sales are still so small compared to ebooks. For obvious reasons, we are going to convert more of our books to audio in the coming months. Great work, as always!

I am really gratified to see indie publishers continuing to gain ground. I have been watching these reports from the beginning and I love how your sample size has grown and your data analysis now takes into account distributors besides Amazon.

Like others, I’m interested in the small/medium publisher category. I founded an author cooperative with 20 authors and over 150 titles currently. And I know I’m not the only indie who has done this. There seem to be a number of publishing cooperatives and/or marketing cooperatives formed under a particular imprint. I assume they are categorized as small/medium “traditional” publishers because they have several titles and authors. However, at least in our case, the publishing house doesn’t do anything the “traditional” publishers do (e.g., provide editing, cover design, or distribution services). Those are each handled by the individual author.

Instead we provide a single publishing imprint for a group of authors who agree to share knowledge, mentorship, marketing costs and economies of scale for product distribution and under a house name. Thanks as always. Great data and insight! This caught my eye: “Amazon Publishing’s growing share of all Amazon ebook sales is a fascinating, and somewhat unsettling, trend to watch.” I also find it unsettling because I think Amazon will effectively take more of the “virtual shelf space” and make it harder for indies to compete. It will be like gambling in a casino — the house lets you win enough to keep playing, but it is rigged just enough that they win in the end. Why did you call it “unsettling”? Hi, Allen, I actually think traditional publishers are losing a lot more ebook sales to Amazon imprints than indies are.

That’s certainly what the 3-year trend seems to show: indie and Amazon imprint market share rising rapidly, while traditionally published market share falls. The reason I used the word “unsettling” is Amazon’s ability to drive, via algorithmic merchandising, which books are marketed most heavily to their customers and which aren’t. For me the question isn’t whether Amazon Imprints will continue to grow their share of ebook sales; the question is where Amazon will decide they should level off. Perhaps traditional publishers are more affected but I also find it interesting that the recent sharp incline in Amazon Imprints matched the recent decline with indies. Do you think there’s any chance one of these algo “tweaks” in the imprint’s favor could be the cause?

I suspect it could be and suspect the recent uptake of AMS has helped mask or correct that problem. Is there any chance of future data scraping somehow analyzing the impact/use of AMS?

Granted, it helps make sales and advertising is a necessary expense, but AMS is also another piece of this mysterious algorithm fully under their control. It could represent a way to effectively recover paid out royalties, especially once they’re -the- only place to buy eBooks. Are there any hints about sales of ebooks in English in non-English speaking countries in continental Europe such as Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands,Norway, Latvia, Slovenia, etc., where Amazon doesn’t operate a local store so that customers buy ebooks in Amazon.com? In all these countries, significant strata of population speak English as a second languge and according to local reading surveys, anectodal evidence and to the data of local booksellers, books in English represent up to 15% of sales in local markets so it is a logical assumption that these countries are a serious market for ebooks in English too. That’s an incredibly valuable breakdown — thanks! I hear a lot of talk about producing translations, and one question is size of market. As the percentage of books sold by Amazon vs the other usual worldwide merchants (Kobo, Apple, Google Play — no print editions) vs local online merchants (all formats) changes from country to country (including all the places where Amazon is not), one clear takeaway is you better have your international distribution lined up for the local merchants first, and plans on how to market to their customers.

We can’t do everything simultaneously: write more product, create more formats, produce translations, widen distribution, widen marketing — we need to set priorities for spending our limited dollars and limited time. One clear takeaway is you better have your international distribution lined up for the local merchants first Hi, Karen, My own takeaway was pretty much the opposite of that. Any ebook market of non-negligible scale is already overwhelmingly dominated by the big international retailers we are looking at here; “Local merchants” make up a negligible share of ebook purchases in each country. Unfortunately, for most authors there’s hardly any incremental sales benefit to be had (yet?) by chasing distribution at a whole plethora of other micro ebook retailers that generate barely any sales. The time and effort required is probably far better spent improving one’s “wide” marketing efforts at–and relationships with–Apple, Nook, Kobo, and Google, which if approached correctly, can between them generate a significant share of an author’s sales.

But of course, YMMV. I would never discourage any author from seeking to diversify their income sources as widely as possible; as you say, it’s just a question of prioritizing the time and effort spent on it against opportunity costs and degree of diminishing returns. My assumption is just the opposite, that in many European countries Amazon’s sales of books in English are much bigger than its sales in local languages. In Slovenia for example, biggest retailer makes about 10% of its turnover in brick and mortar bookstores with English book sales, whilst bestselling authors such as John Green sell about 30% in English and 70% in translation. My guess is that situation is very much similar in Baltic states and in Scandinavia. As postal services in these countries are good and most of the population owns smartphones, it is logically to expect that many readers buy their print and digital English books via Amazon (even more so because Amazon’s prices for many print books are lower than in local bookstores, postage included).

In short, the question that bothers me is how big are Amazon booksales in English in thes countries – any hints if this question can be answered at all? Hi, Miha, To get a quick rough idea, I took a look at the German Amazon site’s Top 100 Kindle best sellers. They were all German language ebooks (although many had covers that were titled in English, and thus were almost certainly German-language editions of English-language originals).

So I’d estimate the percentage of English-language ebook sales in non-UK, non-Ireland Eurpoean countries is less than 5% of each countries’ total ebook sales–possibly a lot less. But we won’t know for sure until we aim the data-collection spider at a non-English-language store and analyze it in more depth. Many thanks and just a hint – my assumption is that most of bestselling titles on Amazon.de are actualy written by the Germans using English pen names as in central Europe, there is an assumption that romances should be written by Us or English authors (even more so, almost all such titles have no translator names in the colophons). Nevertheless, German market is too big to be significantly English dependent – better cases are Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Netherlands, etc When put together, these markets are not so small (around 40 mio quite affluent and educated inhabitants) and might make a visible impact on Amazon.com. Hi, Michael, We looked at GooglePlay in some detail in an earlier report: GooglePlay’s US ebook market share remains between 1% and 2% at most– they are selling somewhere between 5 million and 10 million US ebooks a year: which is less than a fifth of Apple’s US sales and at best a fortieth of Amazon’s.

Despite their size in other areas, and some obvious advantages they could bring to bear in ebook sales, Google appears to have little if any interest in competing seriously in ebooks. It’s unfortunate; we’d all like to see a much more diverse ebook retail ecosystem, and Google is one of few players who could actually compete effectively with Amazon if they cared to. “So for indies contemplating whether to go “wide” with a title or enroll it in Kindle Select as an Amazon exclusive, there’s still no easy answer. (Sorry.)” No kidding. My wife and I have tried both approaches more than once and I know several other authors who have done the same.

Select is fab *if* you get KU reads, but not so hot if you don’t. The KU% your data shows as an aggregate can vary wildly at the individual book level. (A cautionary tale for authors making publishing/marketing decisions based on this data.) Also, an author’s ability to get a Bookbub ad can make a huge difference. We have books that sell almost nothing at other vendors between advertising campaigns, but do quite nicely when we manage to get a Bookbub promotion. It’s impossible to know for sure, but our anecdotal evidence suggests that the money we earn from those promotions would not be offset by KU reads were the books in Select. Meanwhile, Amazon keeps changing the rules (like the May-Oct 2016 disaster you mentioned), making yesterday’s conclusions obsolete.

*Sigh* All we can do is keep trying different approaches and measure the results, keeping in mind that the right approach for one series isn’t necessarily the right approach for another. Excellent report! Thanks for doing this and making all of the information available to us. My question is about KU payouts to authors. If I read your report correctly, KU author income is 52% borrows and 48% actual sales. (And a borrow pays the author less than a sale would pay — even assuming each book is a full read.) Can you estimate the size of Amazon’s eBook market share EXCLUDING the KU borrows?

In other words, I’m guessing it’s not as simple as taking the 80% market share attributed to Amazon and subtracting the 52% paid for borrows, leaving Amazon with 28% of the overall ebook sales market. But what is Amazon’s percentage of total actual ebook sales?

Bosch Fla 206 Software Definition. Hi, Diane, If we ignore KU paid reads altogether in our US unit sales calculations, Amazon’s market share in the US drops from 83.4% to 80.9% of all paid ebook units. (And the total # of annual US paid ebook units drops from 487M to 425M).

Interestingly enough, despite the generally-held belief that indies earn less from a KU full-read than a retail sale, the hard data shows that, on average, the truth of the matter is more nuanced. In February 2017, on average, KU indie titles earned their authors more per KU read-through ($2.21 on average) than retail sale ($1.72 on average).

They also earned slightly more per KU read-through, on average, than non-KU indie titles earned per retail sale ($2.19 on average). So pretty much the opposite of the generally-held belief. However, in previous quarters, while our data similarly showed KU indie titles on average always earned more per read-through than they earned per sale, they were earning slightly less than non-KU indie titles were earning on average per sale (around 15% less).

Hi, Diane, Total Amazon.com indie author income (measured in dollars) breaks down as follows: 66.4% is from retail sales of KDP indie titles 33.6% is from KindleUnlimited page reads of KDP indie titles EXCLUDING all payment for KU reads, Amazon.com’s “regular” indie retail sales alone still account for 85.5% of all US take-home indie dollars from regular retail sales, while the other retailers (Apple, Nook, Kobo, Google, etc.) together make up the remaining 14.5%. (to break it down further, 8.5% of all US indie dollars from retail sales come from Apple, 3.6% from Nook, and 2.4% from Kobo, Google, and all other US retailers combined). Columbo & Steve Jobs both, so you’re in good company. 😉 EXCLUDING paid KindleUnlimited read-throughs, there are roughly 150M “regular” indie ebook retail sales a year in the US. (126M from Indie Self-Published authors that we’ve individually verified as being self-published, with another roughly 24M more sales from “unverified” indie authors who make up the bulk of the lighter blue (cyan) category we call “Uncategorized Single/Author Publisher Imprint” because we haven’t checked ’em one by one, to make sure that each of the many tens of thousands of them is truly an indie). I’m going to nitpick your terminology slightly, though, and make the point that there really is no such thing as an “indie ebook market” where readers are concerned; instead, they see a single holistic ebook market in which titles are differentiated by: – pricing – author name recognition – availability at the retailer of their choice – professionalism & polish visible from cover, blurb, writing, and editing (i.e.

Thanks so much! I totally agree with you on the “indivisible ebook market” as far as readers are concerned. But for indie authors, who are constantly trying to decide whether to give KU a chance (with apologies to John Lennon this time 🙂 ) the question of the size of the indie market, and how it’s distributed, comes up regularly.

Specifically, the question we ask ourselves is whether our not-Select sales, overall, mimic the market’s distribution? If, for example, an indie author’s total ebook revenue pie is 60% Amazon and 40% everywhere else, does that mean she is selling proportionately too little on Amazon, too much or just right? It seems like you’re saying 66.4% of revenue on Amazon and 33.6% everywhere else would mimic the distribution of the market. Or am I missing your point? That’s a great question. For a non-Select (i.e.

“wide”) indie title or author, total sales by retailer break down–on average–as per the lower left blue pie in this chart (replicated from above): So “wide” indie titles/authors on average see 75% of their sales come from Amazon and 25% from other retailers. (Obviously, for an individual author or title, mileage will vary, but those are the averages across all “wide” indies). If a particular non-Select indie author or title has sales that are 60% Amazon and 40% everywhere else, then I would say she is doing disproportionately well at other retailers (or, alternately, disproportionately underperforming at Amazon) relative to the average sales breakdown for a “wide” indie. “For authors, selling an ebook to a reader in a different country is just as easy as selling to a reader in your home country. Barriers to reaching an international audience no longer exist.” This is untrue. Those of us who aren’t in your countries need to set up bank accounts in the US/UK/EU or we can’t get paid via bank transfer, and even when we manage that, we’re punished with a myriad of other rules. Tinyumbrella Free Download Windows 64 Bit there. For example, we pay tax on our income in our own countries and on top of that, we still have to pay an extra 30% super tax on all sales in or via the US.

Then we have to pay extra fees to get paid, too. Ask any Malaysian, South African, Singaporean based author. As for working directly with publishers, Apple won’t work with us, nor will B&N. It is not a level playing field.