As the industry enters another year unable to see itself clearly in terms of sales data (Amazon continues to refuse to disclose ebook sales, as proprietary information), Author Earnings’ Data Guy will be at the Digital Book World conference (DBW) in January in New York City with a new report.
He speaks at the industry conference on Jan. 17 and 18 and at DBW Indie Author, the writers conference that Hot Sheet is programming for DBW, on Jan. 19. (See our directory below for a special discount to join us.)
In case you’re not familiar with Data Guy, he is the technologist and author who created Author Earnings in collaboration with author Hugh Howey and who produces quarterly reports highlighting indie sales based on data scraped from Amazon sales pages. As we reported in October, Author Earnings’ most recent report was something of a shocker, showing an abrupt drop in indie market share.
At the DBW industry conference, Data Guy will present what he terms “a 360-degree look at US trade sales.” To create this, he has “combined public data on print sales in Nielsen’s four top-level genre categories with Author Earnings’ data on digital and indie sales of 1.5 million bestselling digital titles in the same genres.”
His study shows that traditionally published book sales are 28 percent digital and 72 percent print. No surprises there, right? (You can see how he charts this in our Closing Image below.)
But eyebrows will be going up at DBW when he pulls in his Author Earnings data points. “When the sales of the nontraditional publishing sectors are included,” he says, “the digital share of overall US consumer book purchases changes significantly. And while we can see a surprising number of untracked indie print sales, too (about 17 million annually), the vast majority of all nontraditional book sales are digital.”
A few hot-button points:
- “When we look at consumer book buying as a whole, close to 45 percent of all books purchased in the US in 2016 were digital.”
- Adult fiction is primarily selling in digital form.
- In adult fiction, sales in the US are nearly 71 percent digital now.
- 30 percent of all US adult fiction book purchases are by self-published authors.
At the conference, Data Guy will break down by genre what he’s seeing in this combined analysis approach in both juvenile and adult fiction and nonfiction.
Bottom line: Data Guy’s white paper for DBW outlines these points and offers more information on his approach. The “October surprise” that caused Author Earnings to show a downturn in indie share has made Data Guy’s efforts look less biased in favor of self-publishing. The intent of his incoming DBW study is to “chart which categories and genres of books have gone mostly digital, and which still remain mostly print; which have remained primarily traditionally published, and which have gone mostly indie.” Hot Sheet will be reporting in January from DBW and will update you on what this new effort produces.
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.
