E-book Sales Up 115%
The Association of American Publishers recently reported that e-book sales for the month of January were up a whopping 115% from the sale period last year. In dollar terms, the net sales in January were $69.9 million, up from $32.4 million for the same period last year.
Of course, there’s a flip side to this news.
Sales of paperback books were down 30 percent over the year and there was also a drop in adult hardcover book sales.
Why?
Well, why not?
I’ve said it before. Hard-copy books are on the way out. The final bell has yet to toll, but the guy with the gong is pulling his arm back to let swing. I just bought two e-books. Both of them took less than a minute to arrive on my Kindle.
I don’t know about you, but if I decided to go out to buy a book, I couldn’t get my shoes and socks on in under a minute. So where does this leave traditional publishers?
No place where up-and-coming writers should be.
The gatekeepers are gone. It’s time for writers to realise that agents and print publishers are still standing at the front door. Writers can enter through the side entrance and now be their own publishers.
But a little word of warning.
If you’re going to self publish, you have to also run all the other departments as well—editing, marketing, artwork and so on. It’s a lot for a writer to do, but we now live in an era where an independent writer can make millions doing just this.
Take Amanda Hocking for instance. This 26-year-old is selling around 100,000 copies of her 10 ebooks each month. She earns 70 percent from each Kindle sale (Amazon get the other 30 percent).
Without going too much into the math, she's making about two million a year. Hmm, not bad bucks for someone who was unknown just a few short years ago.
So the demise of the hard-copy book is not all bad news (in fact, it’s rather good news for the trees). It means writers are now able to control their own destinies—or at least their own publishing.
But if you want to really want to make it as an author, there’s really only one secret.
Keep writing!
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