At Frankfurt Book Fair, a literary agent leans across the table to make her point: “It’s a choked market,” she says. “And it’s finally getting across to the writers.”
She’s talking not about the issues reported by some with their page counts in Kindle Unlimited (see our separate item) but about the new third-quarter report from Author Earnings by Data Guy. The report registers the first major turnaround in what had been a 27-month upward trajectory for the share of indie titles in the Amazon market.
As he writes: “During the five short months since May, it seems that indies have somehow lost their market share gains of the preceding 18 months. This has been counterbalanced to a limited extent by a slight uptick in traditionally published unit sales: both Big Five and Small/Medium Traditional Publishers have each gained roughly 1 percent in market share. But most of the lost indie market share seems to have instead gone to Amazon [Publishing] imprints, who have gained a whopping 4 percent in market share.”
Conceding that “this October surprise flat-out blindsided us,” Data Guy and his Author Earnings associate Hugh Howey are looking at an “indie ebook market share [that] drops all the way back to early 2015 levels.” Furthermore, “For the first time since Q1 2015, readers are spending more money on ebooks by Small/Medium Publishers than they are spending on indie ebooks.”
Author Earnings speculates on several possible reasons for the sudden decline—but it’s only speculation:
- There’s more-aggressive ebook marketing by traditional publishers.
- Amazon isn’t discounting print editions as much on traditionally published titles.
- Amazon is tweaking its algorithm to favor non-indie ebooks.
In his latest column, longtime industry commentator Mike Shatzkin recalls the recent post from Bob Mayer—hybrid author and creator of Cool Gus, which publishes other authors—who in the past has been among the readiest to describe (and first to experience) indie author successes and challenges. Mayer writes, “Over a half-million titles uploaded to Amazon last year. Ninety-five percent sell less than 100 [copies], but still, there’s a lot of good stuff. Then there are so many cheap ebooks…. What are indie authors doing? Writing faster, trying to put out more titles. But unless they have a dedicated following, they’re part of the content flood.
As we wrote in our last edition, the recent revelation that Bowker could count 625,327 new indie titles in 2015 is not without importance: while Bowker cannot count the titles that have no ISBNs on them, this is the first time we’ve had verification of any number of indie titles published in a year’s time, and that’s a big number.
And what Shatzkin latches on to—the fact that Author Earnings sees publishers hanging on better in this saturated context than indies—is the salient point here. Producing more and more books for readers appears to be a problematic long-term strategy and may have diminishing returns for indies.
Shatzkin’s conclusion is one of the best yet on the developing condition: “A lot has been made of the fact that big publishers are seeing topline revenue erosion across print and digital. But the ability for readers to consume books has, at best, remained flat (there are so many more distractions immediately available these days) and the number to choose from has exploded.”
Bottom line: Curation, marketing and branding, readership development: these are the keys to what may be the most successful routes forward. Ironically, the struggle to sell in a glutted marketplace could be the basis for a new bond developing between indies and trade publishers. “Per-title sales are plummeting,” Shatzkin writes. “Per-title sales are what tell us whether publishers or independent authors can make any money. And the math is clear: it is getting harder and harder to do so, but it seems to be getting harder faster for the indies than it is for the established publishers.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
