Self-publishing has become very popular. As they say, there is a book inside of everyone and with all the self-publishing companies around it's very easy to publish one's book. "Become a published author!" is all over the Internet. All these print-on-demand self-publishing companies offer very easy entry terms most of the time. The author just uploads the book content on their website, they take care of everything else and it costs the author nothing or not much.
Now, in a blink the author is published with a link to his/her book on a self-publishing company's website. As soon as the self-publishing print-on-demand company gets a paid order for the book, the book is printed and mailed directly to the person who placed the order. A snap!
The question is - who is going to find the newly published author to order his/her books? Unfortunately, nobody, even if the book is a killer... If people search for books online, they go to... yes, that's right, Amazon. So, since all the author's relatives and friends have received an email with a link to order the newly published book and ordered it (or not), the next step is to show the book up on Amazon if the author is going to sell to public.
This step involves some money spent by the author to buy an ISBN and bar-code for the book as the Amazon inventory process requires them, but it's affordable. Also the print-on-demand self-publishing company will charge the author for putting the book on Amazon, the price varies from one company to another.
Now, the book is on Amazon and ready to be sold to any person in the world. How will it sell? Let's see...
I have made an honest attempt to analyze Amazon book sales of self-publishing print-on-demand companies. It's not easy to find numbers when it comes to money made ;-) but some evaluation can be done anyway.
First, the choice of print-on-demand self-publishing companies to analyze their Amazon book sales. There is a list of 48 such companies compared by their services and fees, available on the Internet. So, without inventing anything new, we'll go with this list.
Some of the print-on-demand self-publishing companies from the list are not on Amazon with their books at all, but most of them are represented by just a handful of titles which makes it impossible to get any stats on their sales. Out of 48 analyzed, we are left with only 7 (!) self-publishing print-on-demand companies that make some book sales on Amazon to general public. Their names are as follows: Authorhouse, Booksurge Publishing, iUniverse, Lulu, Publish America, Trafford Publishing and Xlibris. (It appears that there is no sense to compare the other 41 self-publishing companies' services and fees as their authors' book sales to general public are so minimal that they are almost invisible.)
Second, the book sales numbers evaluation process. I assumed that 6 months is quite a good period of time to let sales get some momentum for a self-published print-on-demand book and looked up for Amazon sales for representative samples of randomly chosen titles of the above mentioned companies published approximately 6 months ago. I have to mention here that only Amazon knows the exact number of books sold, but some information can be extracted from Amazon sales ranking system anyway.
Book sales for 1,265 titles of the above mentioned print-on-demand self-publishing companies were analyzed for this research. With the 95% confidence level I can say that from 0% to 1% of print-on-demand self-publishing companies' "best selling" titles sell approximately one book a day on Amazon, while from 100% to 99% of the titles sell less than that or none at all. A shocking discovery on print-on-demand self-publishing for aspiring authors, isn't it?
http://www.linkedin.com/in/olgakellen
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7 comments:
Well stated. Don't know about the others but from experience can assure you that PublishAmerica is a publishing fraud selling 99% of their books to their authors. Editing is non-existant and pre-publication marketing nil. AUTHOR BEWARE!
Olga - Found you through Linked In and follwed link to this article...
I think you might be surprised as the the relatively low volume of sales for ANY book. I recently saw articles that demostrate that authors can "push" their titles to higher Amazon scores.
Book sale distributions are leptokurtic and positively skewed. That is.. .a very high peak at a low frequency and a long shallow tail.
I think your observations are correct, but what point are you driving towards?
~Tom http://www.linkedin.com/in/ctcastro
My point is "no promotion, no book sales". Authors are in charge of their own book sales if they want to sell to public, PODs just do the tech part, nothing more...
Hi Olga. I also got here through your LinkedIn post.
Great post here. This is interesting research which leaves me curious to learn more:
- Who are the books in the 1% who do get sales?
- What do they have in common? Were they all using the same POD service?
- Wouldn't it be great to have a case study of the top 3 successes?
Best,
Eylon Israely
Redwood Visions - Digital Strategy
Eco-Libris :: Plant a Tree for Every Book you Read!
yes, Eylon, these are very interesting questions you asked
I was wondering myself, but it'll take much more time and effort to find the answers
Maybe one day...;-)
This is a great article that is empowering to those unpublished writers that buy into the hype that these vanity publishing companies actually contribute to the success of its paid users. The newest scam is the vanity publishing company setting up a free website for the public, with the illusion that the site is only members "sharing and helping each other." The truth of the matter is that the companies' employees are throughout the site posing as regular members. If anyone disgrees with the so called "greatnest" of the sponsoring vanity companies' ownership and control of the site, they are immediatedly slandered "by name" not only on the site, but through out the internet. The Attorney General of each state that these flakey internet web publishing companies operate out of, need an investigation of their dishonest advertising. From my experience, the only company that delivers quality on its promises and the tools for success with self published authors is Lulu.com. All of this delivered for a very low dollar amount in its program like, free instead of that $499. package price that delivers a fifty dollar product by former dog sitters who serve as advisors to the new author.
to the poster "john j.":
I agree that Lulu is the most author-friendly self-publishing site around as it allows to start for free. Anyway Lulu doesn't sell books either if the author doesn't do any promotion on his/her own - see my other postings on my own Lulu sales and other authors. No promotion - no sales!
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