I was wondering if there is league table of eBook sales. My interest is in the sales of first time authors, not established authors who stand to benefit by selling a backlog of novels for pennies.
It would be interesting to know how many want-to-be authors sell a thousand or more eBooks. I am willing to wager that is not many.
The reason I ask is because of the on-going debate between traditional and self-publishing.
I have watched many youtube videos on the subject. Most are poorly-presented and amateurish.
Perhaps I am being cynical, but I wonder who has most to gain by self-publishing. Has this newly-formed market merely been created to exploit want-to-be authors who have failed to secure an agent and access the traditional route to publishing?
Many small to medium publishers will not invest in authors. They only offer contracts based on eBook sales, with the promise that if the novel does well they will do a print-on-demand run. That is vanity-publishing.
There is no financial risk to the publisher and they stand to gain from sitting back and doing nothing if the book does well. In addition the author has probably signed all his/her rights away in the excited rush to get a publishing deal. For example, the foreign rights, a scale of royalties based on book sales and possible film rights.
I do not believe an author should sign a contract, if a publisher is not prepared to market a novel, and do a paperback print-run. If that is the case, then authors have nothing to lose by being independent.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.
Some of it must be about what you want to attain from your writing. If you want to make writing your career, then I think you must go for the option which will give you the opportunity to have your work properly assessed and to be given the help and guidance needed to take your career forward. But at the end of the day, it has to be about whether your work/ideas are good enough. If a career is what you’re after, there appears to be an awful amount of luck needed to make a success by self-publishing.
If you simply want to see your words in print, or you’re confident your work is strong enough the stand out from the multitude of work available, then self-publishing has to be a marvellous opportunity to do just that.
I don’t think either way can guarantee success, but I do feel any writer needs to seriously consider where they want to be in the future before deciding on either way.
I don't believe there are any ebook sales tables - I don't believe ebook sales are included in any of the usual Best Seller lists at all.
Not many self-published authors sell more than a thousand copies and you're right, 1000 copies isn't many.
The body with the most to gain from self-publishing are the people like Amazon, Smashwords, etc A single author may only sell 5 copies of a book, but the distributors have 100,000 authors doing that.
I don't think it's been created to exploit, but it *is* a business. There have been a number of success stories of books which were turned down - but it's important to remember that being turned down is not the same thing as "this book is not good enough". Sometimes it's a marketing issue and that's where self-publishers have the advantage over larger presses: they can market more directly and they probably know their audience better (they wouldn't be writing in a niche otherwise). Take "On The Island" by Tracy Garvis-Graves, in my opinion that would have found it very difficult to get a trade deal (I saw the query letter) because it sounded like something we've already seen a thousand times before, but as a cheap self-pubbed novel (with a little help from being featured by Amazon), it became an NYC Times bestseller and has been picked up by Penguin, got the rights optioned and so on.
Many small to medium publishers will not invest in authors. They only offer contracts based on eBook sales, with the promise that if the novel does well they will do a print-on-demand run. That is vanity-publishing.
I personally would always aim for mainstream publishing. I don't think you need to invest if your manuscript is ready for the market.