So instead of stopping at the point
where ebook sales appear to be plateauing, Jane Tappuni looks at how different genres are performing in digital, and how, in turn, that skews the overall picture.
Regardless of
where your eBook sales numbers fall, there are several strategies you can implement to break through the ceiling and start selling more eBooks.
But the impact on smaller markets is large Take for example Ireland (I could as easily choose the English language markets in Spain, Slovenia or San Marino),
where ebook sales are lower than 1 % right now.
,
where ebook sales have stagnated, where bookstores are on the verge of extinction, where wholesalers and distributors are disappearing all the time, and where the major publishers focus on celebrities alone, selling books is no longer the way to go.
I read recently
where ebook sales far outweigh conventional paper books.
Not exact matches
In SaaS 1.0, a tremendous amount of money is spent on
sales and marketing to take the potential buyer on a journey
where they have to provide their name and email to download an
ebook, watch a video, or get a piece of content.
I could see
where if you have a radically different product (print books) than the pirated
ebook, familiarity with the author's work which was a function of reading a pirated copy could boost paper
sales.
Plus, Amazon is the retailer
where I receive the largest percentage of my
ebook sales every year.
Let's not forget that another great place to sell your
eBook is on your own website,
where you get to keep 100 percent of each
sale.
This would be consistent with earlier claims by Amazon's Jeff Bezos that,
where a book is available in both e - and p - formats, about 35 % of
sales are
ebooks.
They make up only 38 % of Canadian
ebook purchases, and that's the country
where they are holding their ground best; in the US, the Big Five now account for barely 26 % of all
ebook sales.
The information in the «
Sales Report» is updated throughout the quarter to give you a good idea of how and
where your
eBook is selling.
If this was just print books it would be a big hit but not like if it included
ebook revenue
where Kindle is 60 plus percent of the
ebook sales.
I imagine in years to come publishing will just be an open market
where authors publish e-books and they become successful if people tweet about it, i.e. a viral effect for
ebook sales.
Secondly, we can be sure that
eBook sales are rising at an amazing rate — according to the Guardian, citing The Publisher's Association, over 300 percent per year since 2010, and print is declining, except in parts of the world
where eBooks have yet to make inroads.
My
sales numbers for August were pretty thin on the ground, so as of last night I lowered the
ebook price for Faerie Blood on the various sites
where it's being sold.
The Publisher's Association's Statistics Yearbook, as reported in the Guardian, talks about a massive growth in
eBook sales,
where consumers spent in 2011 # 92M, while print lost 7 % to previous year, totaling
sales to # 1.579 B. Notice the M versus the B.
Furthermore, in these days,
where eBooks still account for a small percentage of overall book
sales («only 1 % to 2 % of total book
sales, as measured by dollars» according to the WSJ article), publishers maintain essentially the same overhead because the bulk of thir
sales are through tradtional bricks - and - mortar channels.
The bigger issue is that, just as in the bad old days of music
sales,
where songs were DRM» ed (copy protected), commercial
ebooks today are copy - protedted.
Probably the only benefit that you might get from purchased reviews is the
sales rank increase — in the cases
where the reviewers actually purchase the
ebooks.
They take 10 % from
sales at Amazon, Apple and all the other bookstores — or in other words, about the only place
where eBooks really sell.
Whether or not the industry is ready may still remain to be seen, but with publishers like Hachette reporting record
ebook sales even in 2013, it's a clear sign that readers are responding to digital publishing, regardless of
where it originated.
Adlibris has been selling
eBooks for a number of years and doubled
sales in 2012,
where it made $ 2.2 million dollars.
For some non-fiction writers,
where your book's content is more likely to be read non-sequentially, it means if the reader starts their reading deeper in the book at Chapter 10, a
sale could be triggered after reading only 20 % of the book (As an aside, this underscores the importance of authors building fully functional navigation into their
ebooks so that all their book's content is easily discoverable.
First,
ebooks sold better in 2013 by numbers of total
sales, but actually resulted in less overall revenue than they have in the past; this may stem from the understanding of
where ebook pricing should fall, and the fact that Amazon was able to discount
ebooks again after the stripping away of agency pricing following the DOJ lawsuit against the Big Five publishers.
Barnes & Noble is considered the No. 2 or No. 3
ebook retailer, although in the last year or two, it has suffered dramatic
sales declines and pulled back on its international presence; now the only country
where you can buy Nook
ebooks is the United States.
Britain,
where Amazon launched its Kindle
ebook reader in 2010, is further down the digital road, with consumer
ebook sales making up about 13 percent of combined print and
ebook sales in the first half of 2012, according to The Publishers Association.
Amazon, who manufacture the Kindle reader, say that the retail website has sold 114
ebooks for every 100 printed books, and that this number includes the
sales of harcover and paperback books
where no Kindle edition is available.
Publishing expert, Jane Friedman also asks whether
ebook buyers are migrating to audiobooks (
where sales are on the increase) and whether the more voracious readers have opted for unlimited subscription models.
All of these features make fixed - layout
ebooks ideal for such projects as children's books, cookbooks, travel journals, photography and design books, game guides, and any other project
where page presentation is important to reader experience and
sales.
In a world
where traditional publishers are still basically brokering to sell and warehouse paper rather than books (i.e. sticking to an antiquated business model in a market
where ebooks are rapidly growing to be the majority of
sales and shouldn't be ignored), this is a landmark deal.
The IAN is more agnostic, authors can list their
eBooks now matter
where they are for
sale.
The Luzme site itself offers
ebook fans the ability to not only locate
ebooks quickly across several platforms, showing consumers
where particular titles are available and from which platform, but also allows consumers to be alerted when a title goes on
sale or
where it can be found at the best price; users can even incorporate their Watch Lists from their widely used
ebook retailers to be alerted when a book on that list becomes available at a lower price.
Published by Ballantine Books Also in hardcover &
ebook Another twelve - year - old is front and center in this novel about a world
where everything is for
sale.
In exchange for incentives such as paid royalties when Kindle owners borrowed the books, authors were not allowed to list their
ebooks for
sale anywhere else, including their own websites, and were not able to use platforms like Wattpad
where users could interact with the book.
This is because
ebooks are sold under the agency model
where the publisher sets the price and gets 70 % of each
sale, and the retailer gets the remaining 30 %.
The steepest decline in
ebook sales last year was in the children's category,
where sales massively declined by 22 %.
The monthly fee is around $ 9.99 US and the intention is to kickstart the
ebook market,
where they only account for 2 % of all book
sales.
He says people are falling out of love with
ebook technology and moving back to print,
where sales are up.
But now Amazon is also running a second
sale where the
ebooks are even cheaper!
Choose either Free
eBook Promotion, so your readers can get your
eBook free for a limited time, or Kindle Count Deals,
where you can discount your book for a limited time while still earning royalties up to 70 % on
sales.
«Audiobooks have been at a higher price point typically, but I don't know if that's going to continue as the business expands further and further, but right now I feel that's
where the most revenue is made in terms of book
sales versus an
ebook.
Even
where sales of EPUB
ebooks lag behind Kindle
sales, many publishers have now built their workflow around EPUB as their primary source files.
We don't know if the reason trade paper
sales have gone down (which Nowell reports) because most people don't like the format or because the number of retail outlets carrying trade paper books has gone down (witness the loss of many chain bookstore locations,
where most trade papers were sold) or because given a choice between trade paper and
ebook, the average reader will choose
ebook.
eBook sales have been on the rise thanks to growing segments like Young Adult Fiction,
where we have seen growth by over 233 %.
E-reading platform Kobo may be a quiet company
where retailing is concerned, given that many US consumers may not have even heard of the company that falls just slightly behind Amazon and Barnes and Noble is
ebook and device
sales, but the company who has made more international headway than either of the two larger platforms combined has now increased its retail partnerships in France.
The day before the event Good e-Reader sat down with Michael Tamblyn, executive vice president of Content,
Sales, and Marketing for Kobo, to talk about
where the
eBook market is going and what might be driving it.
PubSoft's publisher dashboard currently offers far too many features to identify, but highlights include a publisher - branded interface for the growing number of readers who are seeking out publisher websites for information on their favorite authors, a branded
ebook store
where their readers can purchase titles, real - time data on tracking book
sales and royalties, and more.
Yet, only Amazon currently has the scale to see such a plan become an industry standard,
where it dominates
ebook sales with an estimated 65 percent market share.
He mentioned specifically the massive
sales of English - language
ebooks in markets such as the Netherlands,
where English - language instruction begins early in school but also
where the market for native language
ebooks hasn't quite caught up to other markets.