Rocket Bomber - article - publishing - The Long - Long Tail

[blockquote]

“Writing Doesn’t Pay?

“This is a story that has been sensed by many. The clues are all around us, but the full picture proves elusive. It is being told in anecdotes on online forums, in private Facebook groups, at publishing conventions, and in the comment sections of industry articles. Authors are claiming to be making more money now with self-publishing than they made in decades with traditional publishers, often with the same books. I’ve personally heard from nearly a thousand authors who are making hundreds of dollars a month with their self-published works. I know many who are making thousands a month, even a few who are making hundreds of thousands a month. But these extreme outliers interest me far less than the mid-list authors who are now paying a bill or two from their writing.

“My interest in this story began the moment I became an outlier. When major media outlets began asking for interviews, my first thought was that they were burying the lead. My life had truly changed months prior, when I’d first started making dribs and drabs here and there. And I knew this was happening for more and more writers every day. But that inspiring story was being buried by headlines about those whose luck was especially outsized (as mine has been).

“Before we reveal the next results of our study, keep in mind that self-publishing is not a gold rush. It isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. There are no short cuts, just a lot of effort and a lot of luck. Those who do well often work ludicrous hours in order to publish several books a year. They do this while working day jobs until they no longer need day jobs. This is also true of the writers earning hundreds or even thousands a month. Please keep this in mind. The beauty of self-publishing is the ownership and control of one’s work. You can price it right, hire the editor and cover artist you want to work with, release as often and in as many genres as you want, give books away, and enjoy a direct relationship with your reader. It isn’t for everyone, but you’re about to see a good reason why more authors might want to consider this as an option.”

Hugh and Company have used web spiders to pull data from Amazon’s listings (why has no one thought of doing that before?) and then used that data to figure out some odds and ends about self publishing using Amazon’s Kindle ebook platform.

Several important items to consider:

• The data from the Author Earnings report is restricted to just three genres: Mystery/Thriller, Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Romance.
• The Author Earnings report is only for ebooks
• “Again, daily unit sales are estimated by sales ranking” – the Sales Ranking is pulled right from item listings on Amazon, but the ‘sales’ ascribed are estimates only. How good is the estimate? I don’t know. Good enough?
• However, that fact that “The Report” is based on a snapshot of a single day on Amazon is worrysome.

Howey and the Author Earnings website gave us the data, though, and practically begged us to use it.

The Long, Long Tail.

The y-axis, unit sales, are the estimates provided by “The Report” – could be anything, really, but these were the numbers chosen by Howey and associates and the same numbers they used to prove their points.

The x-axis is as labeled: Amazon Sales Rank. This is direct from the data provided. Sadly, in a graph like the one above there is no way to account for the 916 books that tied for their Amazon Sales Rank (458 pairs; first for #14, then #30, then #58 …and so on, go look). My guess would be that these pairs are a result of the collection method: Amazon updates at least hourly and the web scrapers obviously took more time than that.

SO… my “long tail” chart omits 458 books that tied. We’re looking at 5585 data points, and that’s fine — honestly, with the way LibreOffice Calc draws the chart, the teeny tiny blips on my graph are still plenty big enough to cover even a five- or 20-way tie. If anything, the line still looks too solid.

Anyway, that’s the data. Unit sales vs Sales Rank.

And we all already know about the Long Tail, from the Chris Anderson book, or from math classes about power law probability distribution.

And we look at the graph and we see a bog-standard long tail distro (it’s Amazon, after all) and we shrug and a select few in the reading audience are wondering what in the hell I could be on about with this.

Note again, the x-axis: in the picture above we’re creeping up towards 3500 and yes, it’s obvious where this is going, blah blah blah.

3500? Fine, but the data provided — 5585 books, from #1 to Amazon Sales Rank #99873 — means that we’re only about 3.5% done. Tippy toes in the water. In fact, if one were to extend the graph above, instead of taking up most of the width of your computer monitor, it’d be 25 feet long.

At least, it is on my computer: The pic I posted above is just a screenshot.

If I compress it down a bit to fit (sort of) on your computer screen, instead of a nice ski-slope leading into the long tail, we can see just how dire a drop off it is:

This isn’t even All Of It – there’s one more thing to consider. “The Report” went to great pains to find the top 7000-ish bestselling genre Kindle titles — And of those, 6042 had an Amazon Sales Rank under 100,000. An additional 845 books are listed in the .xls file available from Author Earnings — and these slide quickly further down the ranks, from Amazon Sales Rank #100054 for the book that didn’t quite make the cut-off to #752309 for the last, 6887th book to appear in their spreadsheet. 752,309th place sounds bad enough, but just how many ebooks are on Amazon, anyway?

2.4 Million. A very long tail, indeed. Amazon has absolutely no problem with this, by the way: The files themselves are small and only use bandwidth when downloaded. If the Number One Ebook sells a million copies, that more than pays for the lot — and the whole point of Anderson’s Long Tail is that sales are made along the whole length, not just the bestsellers on the far left end.

My first pic, the graph out to 3500, is about one-tenth of one percent of all Kindle ebooks. The odds may be slightly better with ebooks, as opposed to traditional publishing, and the payout better, but we’re still talking about lottery tickets. So, bright and shiny First Time Author, where do you think your book is going to end up on this graph? In that very slim top 0.1% way on the left, or somewhere in the long flat bottom with the rest of us?