No plan for book promotion and marketing apart from opening a Twitter account and joining Goodreads. A high proportion of first-time authors become one-time authors because they lack the drive, determination, and persistence that has always been necessary for any author to achieve some modicum of success.
It is only a small proportion of new self-publishing authors who understand how much effort it takes to succeed and that it rarely arrives by publishing only one or two books. They understand that yes, there are a lot of ebooks. But there are also a lot more ebook readers than there were five years ago.
Ebooks are no longer locked into proprietary ebook devices. More and more readers are buying ebooks and reading on smartphones and tablets. Ereader device sales are plummeting , but tablet and smartphone ebook reading is growing fast and will drive ebook sales in the future. New authors who find success also understand their genre, their niche market, and their potential readers.
They write to sell and have marketing plans, promotional plans, and more than likely, a budget to spend on launching new titles as well as on promoting their backlist. That there are millions of ebooks is proof that the ebook market is vibrant and here to stay and will obey normal market behavior. There have always been too many books published each year, and pulping books that do not sell well is still how the traditional publishing industry sorts its winners from its losers.
They can be withdrawn from sale, improved, re-written, re-targeted, recycled, and republished. The winners are highly likely to be not only great writers but also writers who keenly understand that their books are products and that only quality products sell well in competitive markets.
Not only will they publish great stories, but they will edit and proofread meticulously to make sure the manuscript is squeaky clean of errors. They will use professionally designed book covers to appeal directly to their target readers. They will have a plan and a budget for every new title and a means of assessing their return on investment. Yes, being a successful author today means having a very keen business instinct and an understanding that there are not too many ebooks at all. The truth is, in fact, that there are too few fantastic ebooks for sale and that this market is still very much a business opportunity for those who can see it.
My days are spent writing and blogging, as well as testing and taming new technology. Amazon, as per usual, serves itself but not the publishing industry from which is gains value — information like this is important to understand trends in the business and their withholding is, to me, scandalous. However, our development team is working hard to bring this feature and I am also communicating your concern for expediting the process. Feedback like yours motivates us to dive deep and unearth ways and means which helps us in making publishing on KDP convenient with most features.
We will make every effort to evaluate the information you have provided, and try our level best to lead it to program changes or enhancements. They used to have that info at the top of the page.
You could then dive into the categories and get how many of those books in each category. I have published 3 books.
Nothing on other channels, as I recall, though once some page reads on the Scrivner spealling? Your email address will not be published. Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment. To prevent spam, all comments are moderated and will be published upon approval. Submit your comment only once, please.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. In This Article Hide. How can you get an estimate of the number of Kindle ebooks now? What about other ebook retailers? What does it all mean? Updates to this article. So What? Many ebooks fade away. Success is always the product of hard work. For fiction, the average book tends to be longer, at 80, to , words. That runs to about to e-book pages. According to Writing World , books for very young children usually reach no more than 1, words.
For readers at this age, illustrations take center stage. Books for elementary readers run up to about 2, words. They often have some illustrations, but as children get older, these become less central to telling the story. Middle schoolers have far longer attention spans and stronger reading skills.
They can typically handle up to 12, words or so. A fiction book for this age group might not have any pictures at all, although a nonfiction book might have fewer words and more illustrations. By the time children reach adolescence, they are ready for longer books. A young adult novel might run 35, to 50, words long—around the size of an adult novella.
Nonfiction books are typically shorter than fiction books, averaging 50, to 75, words. They read nonfiction books for the information and ideas they contain. As long as the facts and concepts are clear, a short book could be as good as a longer one.
Novels are different. Book lovers read fiction to immerse themselves in a narrative—or even a new world. Unless the book is advertised as a novella, an eager book reader might be disappointed if it turns out to be shorter than expected.
It takes a certain amount of words for a writer to develop the layered plots and complex characters that make novels so immersive. Can a very short novel or novella still tell a gripping story that transports readers? It sure can! If the book proves shorter than expected, readers may feel cheated. Understanding these nuances is key to marketing your book to the right audience—and ensuring it meets their expectations for length and cost.
After all, poems are meant to be read slowly and savored. One poem might have dozens of stanzas. Another might feature ten words and a lot of white space. Many poets publish their poems in the form of a chapbook—a much shorter collection with as few as twenty-four pages. Another type of e-book becoming more popular by the day is the graphic novel. Before we delve further into the weeds here, a quick primer on how book prices are set. Then it will sell the book to resellers and distributors for a discount off that suggested list price.
But once Amazon owns the book, it has the right to set whatever price it would like for consumers. Under the wholesale model, Amazon is free to decide to sell the book to readers for as little as a single dollar if it chooses to.
Until , ebooks were sold through the wholesale model too. Amazon negotiates different discounts for itself at different times from different publishers, sometimes around 40 percent, but at other times higher and at other times lower. But we do know that Amazon was making very, very little money off ebook sales in , and was in fact probably losing money on most of them.
But publishers were terrified of what would happen once Amazon had established itself as the only game in town, ebook-wise. Would Amazon keep pushing prices ever further down? And once publishers had nowhere else to sell their ebooks, would Amazon start demanding lower and lower discounts from them to subsidize those low prices?
In , Apple launched the iPad, and with it, the modern tablet computer. And part of what made the iPad so exciting was that it contained iBooks, an app that publishers were hoping would do for ebooks what iTunes had done for music: be so convenient and easy to use that consumers would flock to it rather than turn to piracy.
Apple was offering publishers an incentive to root for it over Amazon. With its App Store, Apple had established a resale model that worked differently from the wholesale model publishers were used to. It was called the agency model, and it worked like this: publishers would decide on what the list price for their book should be, and then put it up for sale at that price in the iBooks store.
Apple would take a 30 percent commission on every sale. It needed some assurance that no one would have a cheaper product than it had. They were preventing Amazon from forming a monopoly, and thus they were promoting a healthier economy for books and for the American book-buying public, too. According to the Department of Justice, however, publishers were conspiring. They were colluding with Apple to fix prices. Apple: Competition in America.
And the presiding judge, Denise Cote, was not impressed by the argument that Apple and the conspiring publishers had only acted to prevent a monopoly. Today, the agency model that Apple developed is once again the standard sales model for ebooks. Would the ebook trajectory have continued to grow had that suit not happened? Probably we would be in about the same place. Ironically, by winning when it comes to ebook pricing, publishing seems to have hurt its ability to convince readers that print books are worth spending money on.
In this new market, high ebook prices make it harder than ever for young authors in particular to survive. Self-published authors, meanwhile, are flourishing.
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