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Welcome to episode 21 of the Self-Publishing Roundtable. The weekly indie news show that covers all of the news that matters to you, the indie author.
This week we are joined by our new co-host, Trish McCallan for the first time. Trish brings with her lots of indie and publishing success, and her ear close to the news that matters to you.
Let’s get on to the stories for tonight.
Quote from the article author: “Not long ago I bought a new release at full price and within the month it had been discounted for a book bub ad. I made a mental note not to buy this author immediately at release again, to wait until she discounted her books, which she seems to do with every release. Several other people have mentioned they’ve started doing this as well. This article brings up an interesting point- by running sales promos on our new releases, are we teaching our audience not to pay full price for our new releases, but instead to wait until the new release goes on sale?”
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Amazon is the market-share leader in e-books and allows refunds within seven days—long enough to read just about any book for free. By contrast, Amazon allows physical books to be returned only in unread condition and doesn’t allow returns of other downloaded virtual items. Major competitors Barnes & Noble and Apple don’t allow e-book returns at all.
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Effective promotion work. There is a fine line between running promotions, and building a fan base, and not pissing off your current fan base.
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The Gray Line Of Author Recommendations
We’ll be talking about the thin line between using your power with readers to recommend other titles, and betraying their trust as readers.
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Are traditional publishers starting to learn from indie success? This article may not bode well for self-publishers. Until recently one of our strongest advantages over the traditional houses was price- but that is changing fast. Last weeks NYT and USA Today’s bestsellers lists average price was 6.00. They broke the prices down. There were only 13 books priced above 8 dollars.
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Around a year ago, Digital Books Today started compiling a list of the top selling ebooks each week based on units sold. I think their list of the top 17 ebooks for last quarter is interesting for a couple of reasons. 1) self published came in as number four. And 2) Amazon publishing was number seven. Since none of the other online distributors will carry Amazon books, there’s little doubt that this blockade is hurting ebook sales as well as their paper sales.
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One of the biggest eye-openers in this article, between 40-70% of the books on Amazon Germany’s Kindle store’s top 100 books in the store were self-published. 4% of the self-publishers surveyed live full time on their writing and earn more than 2,000 euros a month. This is doubly interesting since I have been getting emails from self-published authors who have been approached by Amazon Crossing- their foreign translation department– about buying their german rights and having those translated. I’d also found out a couple of weeks back that they were translating FiF and FIA into German, and they have since moved on translating most the Montlake books. Looks like this is a hugely hot market right now.
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Sales Down 3% – More In Children Genres
Of course this data doesn’t take into account all of traditional publishers, only the ones who report to them. And they don’t take into account any of the self-publishing industry. I think the most interesting point made was that Kid’s ebooks dropped by 40%. YA is included in the kid’s category. Maybe because the Hunger Games books had all played out?
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See you live at 7PST / 10 PM EST.
