Coincidentally with our look at Author Earnings—which is rooted in the US Amazon retail system—The Bookseller in London has given us advance word of its rollout of a new call for voluntary ebook sales data sharing among UK independent authors.
As Bookseller editor Philip Jones puts it: “We’ve long acknowledged that there is a big and growing part of this sector that we cannot track in any of the usual ways….Of course, there is much the survey won’t tell us, but there are some usual things it will reveal, and hopefully the results will allow us to build out a more comprehensive solution for indie writers.”
UK indie authors and “small digital-only publishers” are being asked to use this site to register their ebook sales numbers for 2015. As significant numbers of submissions arrive, The Bookseller will use them in an indie ebook market report as part of its Review of the Year work. Participants will be given a free copy of The Bookseller’s influential Review of the Year report on the industry.
Participants are asked several additional questions, including how their 2015 sales compare to 2014 in units and value and which ebook retailers factor most in their transactions. Authors must also identify themselves for verification purposes.
Bottom line: We welcome this effort while acknowledging, of course, that it relies on voluntary provision of its information. When the self-selected nature of a survey’s respondent base is claimed at the outset, it goes a long way toward helping everyone understand that it’s not comparable to standard scientific procedure in the most expensive and extensive studies. We hope that UK small digital-only publishers and indie authors of ebooks will respond with full and accurate information, and we look forward to seeing some results.
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.
