{"id":146,"date":"2013-11-02T14:32:53","date_gmt":"2013-11-02T06:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.haguepublishing.com\/?p=146"},"modified":"2013-11-03T14:29:43","modified_gmt":"2013-11-03T06:29:43","slug":"did-the-average-ebook-really-earn-just-297-in-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/did-the-average-ebook-really-earn-just-297-in-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Did the average eBook really earn just $297 in 2012?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"income-graphic\"<\/a>As a\u00a0small publisher this is obviously an important question: both for us, and for our authors. The question being, of course,\u00a0how well is an author doing compared to their peers.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately this information\u00a0is difficult to obtain, as\u00a0from the publisher’s perspective it is often commercial in confidence. Alternatively the information may\u00a0rely on a small, non-representative sample of self-disclosing authors. What\u00a0information\u00a0is around\u00a0seems to indicate, however,\u00a0that the goal of earning enough to get a cookie and a mug of chocolate each week on the royalties from eBook sales is probably going to be well beyond the experience of the average author.<\/p>\n

Back in May 2012 The Guardian ran an article with the headline ‘Stop the press: half of self-published authors earn less than $500’<\/a>. The article was based on\u00a0a survey of 1,007 self-published writers that was originally published by the website Taleist<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Unfortunately I was unable to view the results from the original survey from the Taleist site due to its age, so this information is gleaned from the Guardian article.<\/p>\n

What the survey shows is that \u00a0the average amount earned by self-published authors in 2011 was just $10,000, with half of those responding making less\u00a0than $500. While self-published superstars such as Amanda Hocking and EL James\u00a0raked in enormous sums of money (Hocking attained sales of $2.5 million), the overall figure\u00a0 is significantly skewed by the top earners, with less than 10% of self-published\u00a0authors earning about 75% of the reported revenue, and half of writers earning less than $500.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, given our own area of genre specialisation\u00a0the survey found that science-fiction writers earned 38% of the $10,000 average, fantasy writers 32%, and literary fiction authors just 20%. On the other hand romance authors earned 170% more than their peers, so perhaps I’m in the wrong business.<\/p>\n

In April of this year Mike Cooper calculated that the average e-book earned just $297 last year<\/a>.\u00a0Once again this is the average, with Mike warning that the\u00a0figure was pushed higher by a small number of very, very successful books. While I’ll explain the background to his figures below, any discrepancy between the two figures could be accounted for by the\u00a0Taleist figures being based on an\u00a0author’s total income across all their books, while\u00a0Mike’s\u00a0figures are for individual\u00a0book sales. In addition Mike’s figures are based simply on Amazon, and disregard sales from Apple, B&N, and Kobo which, if added it,\u00a0could add significantly to\u00a0an eBook’s earnings.<\/p>\n

And now to explain how Mike calculated this figure given the notorious secrecy of Amazon when it comes to actual figures. (And yes I was impressed, after having worked in the Australian Bureau of Statistics for over ten years these real world figures just blew me away!)<\/p>\n

First of all Mike calculated\u00a0the US share of worldwide book sales based on 2011 global\u00a0book sale figures of\u00a0$27.2bn (Association of American Publishers, AAP<\/a>) and US sales of $6.7bn (also AAP<\/a>), giving the\u00a0US\u00a024.6% of the total.<\/p>\n

2012 US book sales were $7.1bn (AAP<\/a>), so extrapolating Mike came up with\u00a0a 2012 worldwide number of $28.8bn.<\/p>\n

Then Mike calculated\u00a0how much money Amazon made from \u201cofficially counted\u201d printed books.\u00a0 Bowker Market Research reports<\/a> that AMZN has a 27% market share, of a total pie that is 78% printed (non-ebook).\u00a0 Applying these percentages to the total $28.8bn above, Mike estimated Amazon\u2019s total (worldwide) 2012 revenue from printed books at $6.07bn.<\/p>\n

Now, one of the very few statistics Amazon actually reports is \u201ctotal media sales,\u201d and in 2012 they amounted to $19.9bn<\/a>.\u00a0 However, this figure includes DVDs, CDs, music and streaming media.\u00a0 After some further calculations, however, Mike establishes that\u00a0 total Amazon book sales in 2012 are an estimated\u00a0$6.98 billion. And given that\u00a0Amazon\u2019s printed-book revenue had previously been calculated to be $6.07bn this means their\u00a02012 Kindle book revenue is\u00a0 $910 million.<\/p>\n

The determine the average sales per book, however, Mike had to do some further calculations. At the\u00a0time\u00a0he did his calculations\u00a0there were 1,933,163 ebooks in the Kindle store (of which 59,720 were\u00a0“free ebooks\u201d).\u00a0 For the purposes of this analysis Mike needed\u00a0to ignore the free books, so that means a total of 1,873,443.\u00a0 Divide this into total revenue (again, $910m) and we get an average revenue per Amazon ebook in 2012 of $484.<\/p>\n

The last step was to estimate out how much\u00a0authors <\/em>are making from these sales.\u00a0 At the time Amazon paid royalties of 35% for books priced < $2.99 and 75% for books priced $2.99 or more. By counting the number of <$2.99 books in the Kindle Top 100 Mike calculated that approximately 25 per cent were receiving the lower royalty rate. Which means that for the\u00a0average of $484, Mike estimated that the author is getting $297. For Australian authors this figure will be even lower that Amazon only pays 35% for sales made to Australia.<\/p>\n

Sure, the figures may seem a little fuzzy, but the logic <\/a>appears to hold up, and for the moment these are the best figures I’ve been able to come up with.<\/p>\n

If you want to have a closer look at his calculations Mike has made his\u00a0spread-sheet available\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a\u00a0small publisher this is obviously an important question: both for us, and for our authors. The question being, of course,\u00a0how well is an author doing compared to their peers. Unfortunately this information\u00a0is difficult to obtain, as\u00a0from the publisher’s perspective … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writers","category-general"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haguepublishing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}