Comments on: July 2014 Author Earnings Report

By: Marc Cabot

Marc Cabot — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 15:52:12 +0000

On the Internet, no one knows your statistician is a dog.

By: Marc Cabot

Marc Cabot — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 15:50:52 +0000

Could it be that authors savvy enough to disable DRM also happen to produce books of significantly higher *wincing* quality, and thus they sell better anyway?

By: Marc Cabot

Marc Cabot — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 15:46:10 +0000

Claire, with all due respect, absent mischievous Gallifreyans it's not possible to write a book after it's published. You may be right about this, but lashing out before getting your facts in a row will not help your position. If Wiki's timeline of the writing and publication (and inspiration for) Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is in fact that far in error, the thing to do is not to point and scoff, but to fix it. In the meantime, while of course one shouldn't rely on Wiki for serious scholarly matters, the notion that a simple and verifiable statement about one of the most famous books in literature is that far off beggars imagination.

By: Sarah Stegall

Sarah Stegall — Sat, 19 Jul 2014 00:26:16 +0000

Thanks for pointing that out, Hugh. Don’t know how I missed it.

By: M Frank

M Frank — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 21:36:16 +0000

Author Earnings is the Haliburton of SelfPub?

By: M Frank

M Frank — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 21:32:14 +0000

As well as Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin…

By: Data Guy

Data Guy — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 20:55:44 +0000

Had a chance to check the effect of outliers. Eliminating the top 1% of all titles as suggested has an unintended consequence of unfairly skewing the averages against non-DRM titles, because there are more non-DRM titles than DRM titles in that top 1%.

A far fairer way to eliminate outliers in each category is to separately eliminate the top 1% of each.

After doing so, we still see the non-DRM titles outearning the DRM titles by 55%.

The remaining Non-DRM-enabled indie titles are also selling better than the remaining DRM-enabled indie titles at every price point:

http://authorearnings.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/drm-author-earnings-by-price-no-onepercenters.png

I also looked at it by publication year, thinking that perhaps more recent books might both be selling better than older titles and be more likely to not have DRM enabled. Nope. Non-DRM titles published in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 are all outselling DRM-enabled titles from the same year:

http://authorearnings.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/drm-author-earnings-by-date.png

The correlation between DRM and lower sales stands.

By: Elka

Elka — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 18:03:58 +0000

I would love to see that data.
And thanks to you and to Data Guy for doing this. It must be quite a time suckers, so I really appreciate it.

By: Hugh Howey

Hugh Howey — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 18:02:08 +0000

You can bet we’ll be looking at the rankings of Select vs. non-Select books in quarters to come.

By: M Frank

M Frank — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 17:44:43 +0000

Thanks for all the responses. We’ll have to see how it’s received by the LitFic community. It should be an interesting distraction…