In what is likely a surprise to no one in the writing and publishing community, the latest statistics from Bowker reflect a continued increase in the number of self-published titles in the US market—about 8 percent between 2015 and 2016.
This latest report comes with the same caveat we always give: Bowker is an agency that issues and counts ISBNs in the US, which is not the same as measuring the size of the entire self-publishing market. Many authors self-publish without obtaining an ISBN. However, Bowker’s report is important because it’s one of the very few consistent and reliable data points we have. Furthermore, it breaks out the number of ISBNs used by specific self-publishing service providers—and that is where the real story gets told.
Last year, we pointed out that Amazon’s free print-on-demand service, CreateSpace, was the big leader in ISBN count and was seeing significant growth year on year. Other services, such as Smashwords and Author Solutions imprints, had experienced declines. Here’s how things have shaken out over the last year.
CreateSpace now has nearly 80 percent of the market—and they continue to grow. They issued more than 18 percent more ISBNs in 2016. We’ve heard speculation in the indie author community that Amazon will push indie authors using CreateSpace to the new KDP Print service (which we wrote about here). The sheer size of the CreateSpace business, along with its continued growth, make that exceptionally unlikely.
CreateSpace’s competitors are down. After several years of growth, Lulu’s 2016 count was down about 12 percent to around 75,000 ISBNs, compared to CreateSpace’s 500,000 or so. After growing significantly from 2010 to 2015, Blurb is down by 31 percent and issued about 23,000 ISBNs in 2016. Also, while not a CreateSpace competitor, Smashwords issued 8 percent fewer ebook ISBNs than in 2015 (about 90,000 total).
And what of Author Solutions? One big takeaway from last year’s report was that the overall Author Solutions business is declining; it saw a 40 percent drop in ISBNs between 2010 and 2015. This was welcome news to many in the writing community, who see the company as predatory, with high-pressure sales tactics and questionable, overpriced services. In 2016, there is yet another shift:
The biggest Author Solutions imprints are Xlibris and AuthorHouse, followed by WestBow (affiliated with Thomas Nelson). The ebook title growth came from these largest imprints, but also from ebook releases across smaller ones. Because Author Solutions print releases declined overall, an obvious question arises: How and why did Author Solutions release so many ebooks? Furthering the mystery: in the overall self-pub market tracked by Bowker, print book ISBNs are up overall between 2015 and 2016—through all services—and ebook ISBNs are down. But not for Author Solutions. *Ebook ISBNs change was actually +175%
Bottom line: One detail in Bowker’s report that’s easy to miss is the catchall “small publishers” category. This bucket is for authors or publishers who have used 10 or fewer ISBNs from Bowker—choosing to purchase and own their ISBNs outright rather than take one for free (or cheap) from an entity such as CreateSpace. Our guess is that a considerable number of such authors and publishers are using IngramSpark, which doesn’t offer ISBNs. In 2011, the number of “small publishers” was 39,000. In 2016, that count was 54,000—an increase of 47 percent. While that still represents a fraction of the overall self-published title count of nearly 800,000 titles in 2016 alone, we’re heartened to see this number edging up as Author Solutions numbers edge down.
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.
