Most Amazon bestselling authors aren’t making minimum wage
By Charlie Jane Anders
Yesterday we posted a chart from Hugh Howey’s new report on author earnings, showing indie and self-published authors pulling ahead of people published by the “big five” in terms of total unit sales. Now here’s another chart from an e-book publishing expert who’s calling some of Howey’s conclusions into question.
Chart:
E-book sales. Source: Hugh Howey
Writing in Digital Book World, Dana Beth Weinberg points out that there are a number of questions about Howey’s data, even beyond the potential flaws that you’d already noticed. For one thing, Howey isn’t representing all self-published and indie authors — just the top 1.5 percent, or the cream of the crop. There are also some questionable assumptions in Howey’s methodology, writes Weinberg, and some statistical problems.
But leaving that stuff aside, even if you accept Howey’s data and his conclusions, it’s not clear that most of his indie/self-published authors are doing better than people published by the big mainstream publishers, argues Weinberg. What is clear, though, is that the people who are doing best, on Amazon e-book sales, are those published by Amazon’s own publishing imprints.
The really depressing thing? Weinberg estimates that most of the authors in the survey, whether self-published or published by a New York publishing house, are not making minimum wage:
Sales figures:
A different look at e-book sales.
Full article at: http://io9.com/most-amazon-bestselling-authors-arent-making-minimum-w-1522482723
Source material at:
The Report, by Hugh Howey, Feb. 12, 2014
Full article at: http://authorearnings.com/the-report/
The Principal of Digital Abundance — thoughts on author earnings, by Damien G. Walter, Feb. 12, 2014
Full article at: http://damiengwalter.com/2014/02/12/the-principle-of-digital-abundance-thoughts-on-author-earnings/
Note: This post suggested by Research Assistant Ashlie
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