From TeleRead:

If you were worrying you might run out of traditional-publisher vitriol since it’s been a week since Hugh Howey uncorked a gusher of it with his original post on Amazon web crawl analytics, fear not! Not content to analyze 7,000 genre titles, Howey and his Stats Guy went back and crawled the top 50,000 books on Amazon across all genres and categories for a single day (Febuary 7th) and ran some analyses on that data set (and, naturally, offered up all the raw data for other statisticians to crunch however they like).

. . . .

However, the most interesting analysis comes when he removes the top 1,000 titles and crunches the data for the other 49,000—since, after all, if the chart was being skewed by a few excessively popular outliers, removing the most popular titles should show a different picture. But not only does the chart look similar, the percentage of Big Five published books drops from 39% to 32%. The proportions of Amazon-published books also drops, also, while indie-published, small- or medium-publisher, and uncategorized single-author publisher each gain some points.

This would seem to suggest that, whereas Big Five publishing is more reliant on bestsellers, indie publishing draws its numbers from lots of smaller sales. The pieces of pie each indie book gets might be smaller, on average—but on the other hand, in terms of revenue, they don’t have a traditional publisher going around with a fork and taking away everything but the crust.

Link to the rest at TeleRead

UPDATE: PG just tried the Author Earnings website and it came up right away.

Hugh Howey and some associates have been busy doing some really cool things.

It’s no great secret that the world of publishing is changing. What is a secret is how much. Is it changing a lot? Has most of the change already happened? What does the future look like?

The problem with these questions is that we don’t have the data that might give us reliable answers. Distributors like Amazon and Barnes & Noble don’t share their e-book sales figures. At most, they comment on the extreme outliers, which is about as useful as sharing yesterday’s lottery numbers [link]. A few individual authors have made their sales data public, but not enough to paint an accurate picture. We’re left with a game of connect-the-dots where only the prime numbers are revealed. What data we do have often comes in the form of surveys, many of which rely on extremely limited sampling methodologies and also questionable analyses [link].

This lack of data has been frustrating. If writing your first novel is the hardest part of becoming an author, figuring out what to do next runs a close second. Manuscripts in hand, some writers today are deciding to forgo six-figure advances in order to self-publish [link]. Are they crazy? Or is signing away lifetime rights to a work in the digital age crazy? It’s hard to know.

. . . .

When I faced these decisions, I had to rely on my own sales data and nothing more. Luckily, I had charted my daily sales reports as my works marched from outside the top one million right up to #1 on Amazon. Using these snapshots, I could plot the correlation between rankings and sales. It wasn’t long before dozens of self-published authors were sharing their sales rates at various positions along the lists in order to make author earnings more transparent to others [link] [link]. Gradually, it became possible to closely estimate how much an author was earning simply by looking at where their works ranked on public lists [link].

This data provided one piece of a complex puzzle. The rest of the puzzle hit my inbox with a mighty thud last week. I received an email from an author with advanced coding skills who had created a software program that can crawl online bestseller lists and grab mountains of data. All of this data is public—it’s online for anyone to see—but until now it’s been extremely difficult to gather, aggregate, and organize. This program, however, is able to do in a day what would take hundreds of volunteers with web browsers and pencils a week to accomplish. The first run grabbed data on nearly 7,000 e-books from several bestselling genre categories on Amazon. Subsequent runs have looked at data for 50,000 titles across all genres. You can ask this data some pretty amazing questions, questions I’ve been asking for well over a year [link]. And now we finally have some answers.

. . . .

The first thing that jumped out at me when I opened my email was these next two charts, which our data guru had placed side-by-side. What caught my eye was how they seem to be inversely correlated:

 

On the left, we have a chart showing the average rating of 7,000 bestselling e-books.1 On the right, we have a chart showing the average list price of the same 7,000 e-books. Both charts break the books up into the same five categories. From the left, they are: Indie Published, Small/Medium Publisher, Amazon Published (from imprints like 47North), Big Five published, and Uncategorized Single-Author.2

It’s interesting to me that the self-published works in this sample have a higher average rating than the e-books from major publishers. There are several reasons why this might be, ranging from the conspiratorial (self-published authors purchase their reviews) to the communal (self-published authors read and favorably rate each others works) to the familial (it’s friends and family who write these reviews). But the staggering number of reviews involved for most of these books (over a hundred on average across our entire sample) makes each of these highly unlikely. As I’ve seen with my own works—and as I’ve observed when watching other books spread organically—the sales come before the reviews, not after. There are a number of more plausible explanations for the nearly half a star difference in ratings, and one in particular jumped out at me, again from seeing these two charts next to one another.

Note the shortest bar in one graph correlates to the tallest in the other. Is it possible that price impacts a book’s rating? Think about two meals you might have: one is a steak dinner for $10; the other is a steak dinner that costs four times as much. An average experience from both meals could result in a 4-star for the $10 steak but a 1-star for the $40 steak. That’s because overall customer satisfaction is a ratio between value received and amount spent. As someone who reads both self-published and traditionally published works, I can tell you that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between the two. Most readers don’t know and don’t care how the books they read are published. They just know if they liked the story and how much they paid. If they’re paying twice as much for traditionally published books, which experience will they rate higher? The one with better bang for the buck.

This raises an interesting question: Are publishers losing money in the long run by charging higher prices? Are they decreasing the value/cost ratio and thereby creating lower average ratings for their authors and their products? If so, this might have some influence on long-term sales, and keep in mind that e-books do not go out of print. What if in exchange for immediate profits, publishers are creating poorer ratings for their goods and a poorer experience for their readers? Both effects will hurt a work’s prospects down the road (a road with no end in sight). And since ratings on e-books also apply to the physical edition on Amazon’s product pages, this pricing scheme ends up adversely affecting the very print edition that higher e-book prices are meant to protect [link].

. . . .

It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100 best-selling books in these genres are e-books!

Link to much, much more at Author Earnings

PG says everybody needs to read this. You can show your appreciation to Hugh by buying one of Hugh’s books.

UPDATE: The Author Earnings site seems to be up and running again. While the original site was running slow, Joe Konrath has put up a copy here.

From Examiner.com:

Book publishing industry media seems to make out a war between indie authors and traditional publishing. A lot has been written about the lack of quality and the “slush pile” uploaded on Amazon for sale but Russell Blake and a host of other indie authors have proven time and time again that for authors, quality material, whether independently or traditionally published, can make the difference between hitting it big and barely scraping together a living.

Russell Blake was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal after quietly racking up sales from his 25 thrillers. The books, which often top the thriller bestsellers lists on Amazon, have netted him over a million dollars in the last 30 months as well as caught the eye of a certain bestselling author.

. . . .

The industry media talk about the decline in eBook sales and the over-saturation of competitive books. Do you believe any of that and if there is truth to it, how do you keep motivated and writing when people write that the walls are closing in on indie authors?

I think that data is misleading. For instance, after 50 Shades and Hunger Games, it might appear that there’s a decline in the growth rate because there simply hasn’t been another mega-hit that was largely sold as an ebook. That said, if you aren’t including indies in your numbers, it’s an unclear picture, or at best, incomplete. Indies make up 25-35% of the Top 100 any given week, and if you exclude those sales, many of which are substantial (think H.M. Ward w/3 million sold in 2013, for example), you paint a different picture – and the studies I’ve seen do exactly that. You’re essentially not counting at least 25% of the ebooks sold, and your data is biased against indies (because you’re ignoring them), who are a force in the market nowadays. I’d bet if you took both indie and trad pub into account, ebooks are somewhere from flat to rising as a percentage of the total mix. That’s just a gut feel – because Amazon doesn’t report in a granular fashion, we have to guess. And you also have textbooks skewing the data, most of which are sold as hard copy, which gives an unbalanced impression. Sure, if you factor in textbooks it makes it seem like there’s a huge appetite for paper. But I’d really like to see an analysis of only fiction books, paper vs. ebooks. I bet that’s a completely different animal.

. . . .

You mentioned in one of your blog posts (and I’m paraphrasing) that we’ve come to the point that authors cannot rely on cheap books, that we have to go back to writing great novels that are noteworthy, or spread-worthy as I like to call them. Please, tell us more about this.

The golden age of self-publishing, where you could put out almost anything, charge .99 for it, and sell a bunch, has passed, and now we’re back to where all the gimmicks – .99 books, free books, bundles – aren’t really having nearly the effect they used to. We’re back to what’s between the covers. The book itself. I believe that if you want to have a career as a writer, you need to be relevant and deliver a reader experience nobody else can, or you’re just another commodity. And commodities are very tough to differentiate. I don’t want to be just another author with just another book. My work isn’t fungible. There’s a palpable quality difference, I hope, that keeps the reader coming back, and makes them willing to pay to read it.

I think what’s happened is that as the market’s matured, readers have realized that their time’s way more valuable than the two or three bucks they might save getting a bargain. My goal has always been to deliver books that readers feel are a steal at $5-$6. I’ve never been a fan of selling on price – it’s the rookie sales approach, and ultimately fails, because there’s no barrier to anyone lowering their price as well: a race to the bottom. But there’s a huge barrier to anyone duplicating your voice and your quality if you’ve really invested in differentiating it. You need to write books that would be great values at $10. If you’re writing books that are basically worth a buck, you’re going to be a bargain bin author, and there are tens of thousands of those, few of whom make any real money. In my opinion that’s over.

Link to the rest at Examiner.com and thanks to Ryan for the tip.

From The BBC:

The lawyer who revealed crime writer Robert Galbraith was actually Harry Potter author JK Rowling has been fined £1,000 for breaching privacy rules.

Chris Gossage, a partner at Russells Solicitors, has also been issued with a written rebuke from the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).

He confided in his wife’s best friend that Rowling had written The Cuckoo’s Calling under a pseudonym.

It was then publicly revealed by The Sunday Times in July last year.

Rowling took legal action later that month against Gossage and his friend Judith Callegari, who had revealed the information during a Twitter exchange with journalist India Knight.

Rowling accepted an apology from the law firm and substantial damages, in the form of a charity donation.

In a ruling issued on 26 November but made public on 30 December, the SRA said that “by disclosing confidential information about a client to a third party” Gossage had breached several principles of its rules and code of conduct.

The breaches included failing to “act in the best interests of each client” and a rule that members should “behave in a way that maintains the trust the public places in you and in the provision of legal services”.

Link to the rest at BBC and thanks to the many PV visitors who provided tips.

PG is not an expert on UK laws relating to the behavior of attorneys, but thinks this lawyer got off lightly. Talking about a client’s confidential information is a violation of one of the most basic tenets of legal ethics.

A great many US law firms would have fired a lawyer who did something like this.

From Digital Book World:

Below is a list of publishers who have made the Digital Book World Ebook Best-Seller list in 2013, ranking them by number of appearances.

While Hachette made a very strong showing in the first half of the year, leading all publishers in ebook best-sellers, Penguin Random House had almost as many best-sellers in the second half of the year (230) as Hachette had all year. If you add up PRH’s numbers with Penguin’s and Random House’s from the first half of the year, the company had an astounding 478 ebook best-sellers, about 40% of all the best-sellers from 2013.

. . . .

The other big story in the best-seller rankings in 2013 was the strong showing of self-publishing. Aside from Hachette and Penguin Random House, self-published authors (when viewed as one single publisher) had more best-sellers than any other single publishing house.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

From Digital Book World:

If there was any consistent feature of the ebook market in 2013, it was volatility – especially when it came to best-selling ebooks. Prices climbed and plummeted from week-to-week, self-published authors achieved more than one No. 1 best-selling title and a few from “big six” (and later, “five”) publishers clung to the top slot for weeks at a time.

The past year has reshaped what it means for authors and publishers to have a “No. 1 best-seller” and multiplied their ways of getting there.

. . . .

Nicholas Sparks’s Safe Haven held strong for eight weeks alongside the release of the movie based on the book; The Great Gatsby managed to slide into the top spot for a week of its own for the same reason.

There were surprises, too. Damaged by H. M. Ward and The Bet by Rachel Van Dyken shot to No. 1 for a week each, proving the lower-priced self-published model a force to be reckoned with in romance and new adult fiction.

. . . .

Here are few highlight stats:
- Eight of the No. 1 best-sellers were Penguin Random House titles. Hachette came in second with five.
- Three No.1 best-sellers were self-published.
- No. 1 best-seller prices ranged from $0.99 to $14.99
- Safe Haven held the No. 1 position from January through mid-February for seven consecutive weeks of its eight, the longest such stretch in 2013.
- Dan Brown’s Inferno dominated May and June and The Cuckoo’s Calling July, while The Husband’s Secret was No. 1 for three separate periods of two weeks each, from the end of August to mid-October, twice ceding that spot to other titles in between.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

From The Amazon Media Room:

Amazon today announced its best-selling adult books of 2013, best-selling Kids & Teens books, as well as the Most Gifted and Most Wished For books of the year.

. . . .

Inferno by Dan Brown is the best-selling book overall, and Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed comes in at number two. Allegiant, book 3 in the popular Divergent series by Veronica Roth, is the best-selling Kids & Teens book, followed by The House of Hades by Rick Riordan. The top 20 lists take into account first editions that were published in 2013, consider only paid units, and combine print and Kindle editions.

. . . .

“Last year’s best seller list was filled with Fifty Shades and contemporary romance, but in 2013 Mysteries & Thrillers captured readers attention, with 11 of the top 20 books falling in that category,” said Sara Nelson, Editorial Director of Books and Kindle at Amazon.com.

. . . .

Adult Books Fun Facts:

• Lean In is the only book on the top 20 list to sell more print copies than Kindle editions
• David Baldacci, Sylvia Day and John Grisham also made the top 10 best-selling books list in 2012
• 2013 is John Grisham’s third consecutive year on the top 10 best-selling books list
• Dan Brown also took the #1 spots in 2009 and 2004, with The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code
• The best-selling independent book, published via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and CreateSpace, is Damaged by H.M. Ward
• And the Mountains Echoed, The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Husband’s Secret, Lean In and Doctor Sleep were also featured on the Amazon Book Editors’ Top 100 Best Books of the Year

. . . .

Kids & Teens Books Fun Facts:

• The same three authors—Rick Riordan, Veronica Roth and Jeff Kinney—also took the top three spots in 2012
• Two Young Adult authors—Abbi Glines and Morgan Rice—snagged five of the top 20 spots thanks to their KDP-published books
• The Day the Crayons Quit is the only picture book to make the top 20 best-selling list, and was also the Amazon Book Editors’ pick for Best Picture Book of the year.
• Allegiant, The House of Hades, The Day the Crayons Quit, and Requiem were all included in the Best Books of the Year for Kids & Teens.

Link to the rest at Amazon and here’s a link to the lists of Best-Selling Books of 2013

From The Los Angeles Times:

Did Charles Saatchi game British bestseller lists?

Elisabetta Grillo testified in court that she took taxis around London buying his book from a number of shops across the city, as many as four times a week.

“Charles had written a book, and he wanted it high in the list,” she told the court.

. . . .

According to Grillo, she was instructed to withdraw cash from the credit card accounts in order to make the book purchases. “He doesn’t like me to go with the cards to buy the books,” Grillo said. “Maybe because it was Conarco [Saatchi's company] and they would find out it was him.”

Link to the rest at Los Angeles Times and thanks to James for the tip.

From Digital Book World:

It’s a great feat for a publisher to have even one book make a best-seller list. Below is a list of the publishers who have made the Digital Book World Ebook Best-Seller List in the second quarter of 2013 — and how many times they’ve each made the list.

. . . .

Just behind Random-Penguin is, once again, self-published titles. It was a surprise that self-published titles were No. 4 on this list last quarter. The repeat here is likely no fluke, especially considering there were more self-published best-sellers in the second quarter than in the first — double, in fact: 44 vs. 22.

. . . .

Rank	Publisher	Appearances	No. 1 Best-sellers
1	Hachette	65	3
2	Penguin	60	1
3	Random House	59	6
4	Self-published	44	2
5	Simon & Schuster	23	1
6	Macmillan	20

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

Although this is from July, PG thinks DBW buried the lead by first mentioning self-published books in the fifth paragraph.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

The impulse to buy all books now—including bestsellers—comes from that produce model we were all raised in. Because brick-and-mortar bookstores have limited shelf space, books only remain on the shelf for a short period of time.

. . . .

Since its inception, traditional publishing was a gentleman’s business, and it played by very clubby rules. One didn’t poach another house’s authors (unless, of course, the author wanted to leave. Even then, the author’s editor might make a friendly phone call [or have a drink in a nearby bar] with another editor from another house in hopes of finding the author a happy new home). One didn’t discuss money (it was gauche). One took care of one’s friends (and we were all friends—unless we were vicious enemies).

And one thought of the good of the club when scheduling events, always.

Events in traditional publishing are Event Novels. Until 2012/2013, it was common practice for the editors in chief of traditional publishing houses to have a polite, if off-the-record, discussion with cohorts at other publishing houses. The editors would scatter their Event Books throughout the fall season—which is the big season in publishing.

Think of it the way that Hollywood thinks of blockbuster movies. Studios don’t want to schedule a tent-pole film against another—an Avengers, for example, will not open against the new Hobbit movies. James Bond always owns his weekend.

. . . .

So, until last year, they would have “informal” discussions, designating September 24 Stephen King week, and October 22 John Grisham week, and so on. No one would schedule a tent-pole book—a blockbuster, if you will—against another tent-pole. Unless those tent-poles were in radically different genres. Sure, a romance publisher might release a sweet contemporary romance blockbuster on September 24, under the assumption that romance book-buying dollars are different than horror book-buying dollars. In other words, the romance reader wouldn’t be buying the King, and the King reader wouldn’t be buying romance. (Obviously, the people in these brain trusts never met me. But I digress…)

The blockbusters got stretched out throughout the season. Sometimes, books by authors whose sales were good enough to hit the New York Times list in a less competitive year, but not good enough to go against King or Grisham or J.K. Rowling, would get moved to a different season—spring, maybe.

Store shelves are like movie theater screens. There are only so many prime positions in a brick-and-mortar store. If that prime position is being occupied by a major bestseller, than a bestseller with lower numbers will get shunted to a different part of the store, and frankly, that would hurt sales.

. . . .

Staggering the competitive books is both a gentleman’s concept (“Well, old boy, if you claim September 24 for your man King, then I’ll take October 22 for my lad Grisham.”) and smart business. Your book gets more attention if it’s not competing against a book by a novelist who can suck all the dollars out of a bookstore (not to mention hog the great shelf space and have all the limited reviewer spots).

It also enabled the all-important velocity to work the way it was supposed to. As I’ve mentioned many times before, bestseller lists are built on two factors—time and sales. The faster a book sells, the higher it climbs on a list. If a book sells consistently, even if it builds, it probably won’t hit a list.

Velocity in book publishing means how fast a book sells in a given week. If a book sells 5,000 copies in its first week of release, and only another 1,000 in the next six months, that book might still hit several bestseller lists.  If the book sells 6,000 copies in its first month, 6,000 in its second month, and continues to do so for twelve months, it might not make any lists at all, because it will have no velocity even though the book has sold more copies than books on the “bestseller” list.

. . . .

That’s why traditional publishers and traditional tastemakers/list makers went insane when indie published titles started hitting the lists.  A lot of indie writers are adept at letting their fan base know that the next book in a series is out. That book sells to every true fan, and knocks some “worthy” traditional book off the list—because the indie book has a natural fan-built velocity.

That shake-up has been happening for the past 18 months, and traditional publishing isn’t sure what to do about it.

. . . .

Dean Wesley Smith was the one who reminded me that the Apple lawsuit had blown the gentlemanly habits of traditional publishers to smithereens. Publishers had to start behaving like real businesses—only they’re so dumb about it that they haven’t thought this through either.

Here’s the other thing you need to know about bestseller lists. To hit a list in the busy fall season, a book has to sell many more copies than it would have to sell in, say, January. Maybe ten or twenty times more.

. . . .

Publishers weren’t prepared for this mess. At least two of the big five didn’t compare lists within house. In other words, two of the biggest companies are pitting their own blockbusters against each other in the same week. (Damn those summer mergers.)

Critics got as overwhelmed as everyone else, so a lot of these big titles aren’t getting reviewed. There are only so many big ad spots available, particularly in those front-of-the-store displays (yes, they’re paid for advertising), so some of the middling sellers didn’t get the usual display slots.

Booksellers are completely overwhelmed. They have limited shelf space. Sheldon was waiting for readers to ask for some titles before ordering them, when he would have ordered them automatically in the past.

. . . .

And traditional writers are clueless about what’s going on in the industry. Those who are used to their comfy slots on the top of the lists have already felt a shake-up. Their sales numbers have been going down steadily as bookstores closed and indie writers started competing for publishing dollars. (Readers have only so much time and so much money—if there’s a wider availability of titles, then the sales will spread out over those titles, rather than all going to the best of the small pond.)

Now, these traditional writers are going to look at their expected #1 berth or their usual place on the New York Times list, and their names won’t be there. At all. And they won’t know why.

So they’ll guess at the wrong reasons. Scott Turow, who is clearly no businessman, already went on one of the morning talk shows last week and blamed Amazon for declining book sales—even as Amazon is selling his books. (Get a clue, Scott.) He’ll probably blame his poorer-than-usual showing on Amazon itself, rather than publishers who must now act like real business people, subject to the same anti-trust laws as everyone else.

And many many many traditional writers will suffer because of this. Their advances will decline, because their latest novel did not hit #1 on the New York Times list or didn’t hit the list at all. Traditional publishers are good at blaming authors for the publishers’ stupidity, especially when there’s money at stake.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch