February 2016 Author Earnings Report is Now Available

Author Earnings is an extensive report that looks at Amazon e-book sales and the digital publishing industry at large. The February 2016 report has just been released and they have revised some of the ways they compile their data. They have updated their methodology for correlating rankings to sales and also added print and audio data/analysis.

The key takeaways from the new report is that The Big 5 now account for less than a quarter of e-book purchases on Amazon, while indies are closing in on 45%. The report also found that overall US e-book sales have actually gone up in dollar terms. The blue indie line shows where most of that increase is being funneled. Today, a quarter of all consumer dollars spent on e-books in the US is spent purchasing indie-published e-books.

4 of Amazon’s overall Top 10 Best Selling e-books were self-published indie titles
10 of Amazon’s overall Top 20 Best Selling e-books were self-published indie titles
56 of Amazon’s overall Top 100 Best Selling e-books — more than half — were self-published indie titles
20 of Amazon’s overall Top 100 Best Selling e-books were indie titles priced between $2.99 and $5.99

You can read the full report HERE.

Michael Kozlowski (7246 Posts)

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about electronic readers and technology for the last four years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the Huffington Post, CNET and more. Michael frequently travels to international events such as IFA, Computex, CES, Book Expo and a myriad of others. If you have any questions about any of his articles, please send Michael Kozlowski an email to michael@goodereader.com

News Items of Interest

John Aga

Author Earnings has done some amazing analysis. Some of their other findings:
Payouts to indie authors participating in Kindle Unlimited have grown to over 13 million dollars a month with a total payout in 2015 of 140 million dollars.
Amazon e-book sales are generating $1,756,000 in author earnings a day. Less than 40% of those dollars are going to traditionally published authors. Less than 25% is going to authors of the Big 5 publishers.
Despite the Big 5’s return to agency e-book pricing, Amazon’s overall U.S. ebook prices have grown throughout 2015 both in unit terms and dollar terms.
Their analysis suggests that Big 5 publishers pricing may have had the unintended effect of pushing even more people to Amazon to take advantage of deeply discounted paper books at the expense of physical bookstores. Amazon paper books sales for 2015 were also up significantly while the largest book chains reported flat or down book sales. Further this means people are shopping at Amazon where indie books take up a significant presence, and gaining exposure they do not get from physical book stores.
Another interesting fact. 11 out of Amazon’s top 35 best selling print books were adult coloring books. 5 of those 11 adult coloring books were self published coloring books by indie authors.
The report is full of interesting data and I highly recommend checking it out.