Once again the incomparable Wade Finnegan will be hosting. If you can’t understand him, it’s because your audio sucks–just kidding. 🙂 Wade has a monster cold and is losing his voice. Don’t be surprised if we swap hosts tonight.
We start our first show of 2014 with some breaking news from 2013. During a recent Amazon press release it was announced that 150 KDP authors had sold over 100,000 copies of a single title.
The arrival of 2014 brought in a flurry of industry predictions. We’ll be covering these, as well as doing some predictions of our own. 🙂 You can find the juicier predictions below. 🙂
Digital Book World’s 2014 Predictions
Hugh Howey’s response to all the predictions and then he throws out some of his own
Joe Konrath’s predictions
Author Media Room’s Predictions
In other news during the past two weeks
After this past Christmas season half of the people in England are using tablets
Ebook services are being used to document reader behavior-
From the article—”Scribd is just beginning to analyze the data from its subscribers. Some general insights: The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all.
At Oyster, a top book is “What Women Want,” promoted as a work that “brings you inside a woman’s head so you can learn how to blow her mind.” Everyone who starts it finishes it. On the other hand, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s “The Cycles of American History” blows no minds: fewer than 1 percent of the readers who start it get to the end.
Oyster data shows that readers are 25 percent more likely to finish books that are broken up into shorter chapters. That is an inevitable consequence of people reading in short bursts.”
Author Kristen Lamb blogged about the five mistakes killing self-published authors
Livia Blackburne did a comparison between her debut indie title and her debut traditional title. She covered everything from editing to marketing.
An interesting experiment and analysis of the serial format–including sales comparisons and marketing by Ed Robertson
And now, to INSPIRE everyone as we head into 2014 we are posting a list of great Kindleboard success stories from 2013!
SM Reine
Daniel Arenson
Elle Casey
Kyle West
VJ Chambers
Here’s a list of self-published authors, their sales figures and the genres in which they write. Interesting reading.