![]() ![]() (His data takes into account self-published and Amazon imprint-published books, which many traditional data sources do not.)Ĭentral to Amazon’s gambit-and authors’ pay-is Kindle Unlimited. The self-published share of paid US e-book units increased to 46.4 percent from 44.7 percent between the second quarters of 20, Data Guy told me in an email, while the traditionally published share of paid e-book units decreased to 43.2 percent from 45.5 percent. ![]() Industrywide, self-publishing is gaining readers as traditional publishers are losing them, according to Author Earnings, a site produced by an anonymous marketing analytics expert who calls himself Data Guy. This is, of course, threatening to the traditional publishing industry, which seems to be in a state of everlasting free-fall. The site that got its start by radically changing where books are sold is now reshaping how books are published and read. Its store has created a place for readers to go and easily find inexpensive self-published books. But now its self-publishing service, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), has made it easy for people to upload their books, send them out into the universe, and make money doing so. ![]() And Amazon, the world’s biggest e-commerce site, with its bookstore-beating prices, was painted as an enemy to authors. ![]() “It can expose me to millions, or tens of millions of readers.” (Peter Hildick-Smith, the founder of Codex Group, which consults with the publishing industry, told me that Amazon’s rankings and sales information are not reliable because they also count books that are borrowed, like Harry Potter books, which are consumed in a different way than books that are bought.)įor decades, self-publishing was derided as an embarrassing sign that an author couldn’t cut it in the “real” publishing industry-“the literary world’s version of masturbation,” as Salon once put it. “What made this possible is Amazon,” he told me. Omer told me he has now sold more than 10,000 books through Amazon, and that his books have also been borrowed more than 10,000 times on Kindle Unlimited, the subscription service in which readers pay $9.99 a month to access over 1 million titles on Amazon. “I’m making a really nice salary, even by American standards,” he said.Īfter the success of Omer’s first book series, Thomas & Mercer, an Amazon imprint, published his most recent book, a mystery called A Killer’s Mind, which was also promoted on Amazon’s First Reads, a new subscription service in which the company recommends a handful of books and allows subscribers to download them before their official publication date. Now, he makes more money than he did as a computer engineer. Sales of his first e-book, Spider’s Web, and its sequels, allowed him to quit his job and become a full-time author. While he may not be as familiar a name as the big authors marketed by traditional publishing houses, and may not have as many total book sales, Omer is making an enviable living from his writing. Omer is one of a growing number of authors who have found self-publishing on Amazon’s platform to be very lucrative. (The company does not disclose the metrics behind Author Rank, which is still in beta.) His most recent book is ranked tenth on Amazon Charts, which Amazon launched after The New York Times stopped issuing e-book rankings, and which measures sales of individual books on Amazon. He was-and at the time of this writing, still is-ranked above J.K. For most of Prime Day, Amazon’s annual sales bonanza, an unfamiliar face topped the site’s Author Rank page: Mike Omer, a 39-year-old Israeli computer engineer and self-published author whose profile picture is a candid shot of a young, blond man in sunglasses sitting on grass. ![]()
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