From Indies Unlimited:
“My sales have flat-lined. Nobody is selling any books.”
“There are no readers left. We’ve swamped them with too many free books.”
“Print is more popular, eBook sales are dead.”
Have we officially entered the season of dread and negativity? Is there no positive energy left in IndieBook Land? I heard variations of the above statements recently and I didn’t like it. And, I don’t agree.
I ran a contest the other day. It was simple. Click on a free eBook then email me the title and you’re entered to win one of two $10 Amazon gift certificates. I sent it out in a newsletter that also advertised a bunch of free eBooks from various authors. I wasn’t sure whether ten bucks would be enough to entice readers to enter but I thought I’d try anyway. It was enough. It worked. The results were really interesting.
The open rate for my newsletter was 70%, and the click rate was just a shade under 40%. Those are strong numbers. I’ve never sent out a newsletter with those kinds of returns.
. . . .
The readers who emailed me their entries talked to me. Some just sent the title of the book they had downloaded, but many of them sent me messages.
. . . .
“I’m on a limited budget. Thank you for sending me the links to the books.”
“I had already downloaded Pam of Babylon, and now I’ve found another that I liked. Thanks!”
“What a great project for us. I’ve already got lots of books from these giveaways.”
Link to the rest at Indies Unlimited
Author Earnings has also demonstrated that a huge proportion of ebook sales are by indie authors and don’t show up on any of the traditional sales reporting services.
Martin Crosbie is a successful Indie writer and long time contributor to Indies Unlimited. If you read the whole article, you’ll discover that it’s a pep talk rather than a defeatist post.
2016 was a year that saw quite a bit of change in the Indie world and some people who were making a decent living from their books no longer are. Some of those Indies are leaving. Most of us aren’t. 🙂
I’m not leaving, even though the election/Amazon changes/whatever did cause a big drop in my sales. One my works haven’t recovered from, even with 3 (or is it 4 now?) new releases.
My Kobo and B&N sales keep steadily climbing, so my fingers are crossed I hit prior sales levels, just spread out across more retailers instead of mostly at Amazon.
The election definitely hit my sales numbers hard. My sales essentially flatlined starting in mid-October and carrying through December.
January saw some recovery, February a little more, and March was finally back to normal levels. YMMV.
My late July series release didn’t do nearly as well as every previous release. And it went downhill from there, hasn’t really recovered in spite of um, three other new releases since (not in that series ‘cuz I had burn out where it’s concerned).
I’m working on #8 for that series now, hope to release it this month, and frankly I’m dreading the possible sales results as far as Amazon sites.
Crossing my fingers for you!
Thank you!
So, uh, people like free books, and also like to be given other free stuff.
Color me gobsmacked. Or not.
People will download free stuff they probably don’t even like, just because it’s free. We’ve seen this for years. Some people will never buy books. When you offer them an incentive to download freebies, then they’ll download more free stuff.
The trick to this whole thing is, what is the sell-through? Because without sell-through, it’s not much of an indication of anything except FREE!!!!!
EBook sales are dead, and yet they are still connecting with readers? Is this the beginning of the zombie eBook sales wars?
I hope so. LOL
If I understand this correctly, now you have to pay ($10 gift certificate) to give eBooks away for free? If you get new e-mails for potential new readers it may be worthed.
I’ve noticed big changes at Amazon over the last six months. Others have observed that the election took a toll on sales. That shouldn’t still be affecting us, except for the fact that Amazon made major changes to their site around the same time. It was a double whammy.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ve personally seen a huge sales drop (as much as 60% off, compared to the previous two years). There’s a lot of churn in the top few slots of my genres. I suspect this is exactly what Amazon wanted. A couple years ago, they changed the algorithms to reward longevity instead of free promos. That stabilized things, but led to a lack of fresh faces. Now, there’s a new flavor at the top of the charts every day, which quickly vanishes as the promo ends.
Strangely, while sales have dropped, I went from almost no page reads every month to hundreds of thousands. I have never ever seen page reads in these amounts. This tells me they’re actively promoting the library, possibly at the expense of promoting sales for indies. (Or readers have suddenly latched onto the Kindle Library in a big way!) I’ve put several more titles into Select and this seems to be proving true. It doesn’t quite compensate for the loss of sales, but it certainly eases the pain. Has anyone else observed this happening?
Lastly, my rankings have slipped a little, but still tend to stay close to the areas they occupied before, sharing the same slots with the usual authors, if a few numbers higher. This is a good indication that sales must be down across the board in my genres, otherwise my rankings would be much worse. Either that, or the relationship of sales to ranking has dramatically shifted as well. Or, I could could be full of it and completely off base with all of this.
It’s a big slump
I would actually say that the politcal situation in the US still has an influence on sales. At least in my filterbubble, lots and lots of people are intensely involved with activism, or are emotionally invested in political observation, commentary and research.
It simply may not be a good time for reading, or maybe for certain kinds of fiction. I still believe there are lots of readers, but our books compete with time spent with other activities, and politics may be taking a larger share now. (But with luck, sometimes, books provide much needed escape.)
After years of no sales, no reads, my I. C. Talbot collection of short stories have taken a huge step up and the entire collection (17 short stories) is being read. About a year ago I started pulling them off the wide market and taking them to Select and Unlimited, without results. January a handful of copies went out on free days, February a few more and March’s pages read was very encouraging.
It’s worked so well that I’ve pulled all my K. A. Jordan e-books out of the wide market and into Unlimited and Select. Tomorrow will be the big experiment – the first book of Horsewomen of the Zombie Apocalypse, which has been perma-free for 18 months, goes free via Unlimited.
There are 3 books in the trilogy. We’ll see how it goes.
“My sales have flat-lined. Nobody is selling any books.”
“There are no readers left. We’ve swamped them with too many free books.”
“Print is more popular, eBook sales are dead.”
Hmmm, couldn’t possibly be caused by being priced to high by their ‘publisher’, right?
I also enjoyed those authors that were whining that Amazon was no longer discounting their books as much as they had been. Another case of the publisher setting the wrong price in the first place — and refusing to fix/change it.
I think these were comments from indies. Martin Crosbie is certainly an indie, with his books priced at a typical and reasonable indie price.
From the link:
“Have we officially entered the season of dread and negativity? Is there no positive energy left in IndieBook Land? I heard variations of the above statements recently and I didn’t like it. And, I don’t agree.”
“So, discard your tinfoil hat. We’re still on the correct path. All is well. Real, living, breathing readers are out there waiting to feast their eyes and minds on our words. And, if we look hard enough, we’ll find them. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, they might just talk back.”
Martin Crosbie was just saying that he doesn’t believe those statements either.
.
I’ll admit my trickling sales have fallen off, but that’s because I’m late getting the next one out there, not because all ebook sales are ‘dying’.
Not all indies have “reasonable” pricing for their genre.
AE has documented a rise in average indie prices over time and a lot of Indies have practiced stairstep pricing on their series books.
Some might have pushed their fans just a wee bit much…
For months now I’ve heard indie friends who are active indies, prolific, and do market that they’ve had losses, some really big drops in sales at Amazon. But only a couple are tempted to give up (out of dozens and dozens I know). They just discuss how to gain more visibility or hunker down to write faster or try a new cover or new ad tool, etc. I think indies have to be hardy, flexible, and experimental, more than ever.
Others, interestingly, and maybe naturally, are having rising sales and feeling optimistic, even if they have to work harder (faster, smarter).