There’s a new report from Author Earnings:
Amazon makes up a higher percentage of the total US ebook market than the oft-cited 65% figure: when indie books without ISBNs are included in the statistics, Amazon accounts for 74%of all US ebook purchases and 71% of all US consumer dollars spent on ebooks.
Outside of Amazon.com, 4 other major online retailers comprise nearly the entirety of the remaing 26% of the US ebook market: the Apple iBookstore, the Barnes & Noble Nook store, the Kobo US bookstore, and GooglePlay Books.
At those 4 other stores, self-published indie ebooks make up 22% of all ebooks purchases and take in 32% of all author income generated by ebook sales.
Between 14% and 25% of all ebooks sold at Apple, Nook, and Kobo store lack Bowker-issuedInternational Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs).
In total, more than 33% of all ebooks sold in the US each year have no ISBN.
Across the entire US ebook market, ebooks without ISBNs now command a greater share of consumer ebook purchases, reading time, and author earnings than all of the AAP’s 1,200 publishers put together, including the Big Five.
The true US ebook market, which includes non-ISBN sales, is at least 50% larger than ISBN-limited market statistics from Nielsen and Bowker are estimating.
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According to most industry accounts, 65% of all US ebook sales happen through Amazon’s Kindle store. Or, more accurately, 65% of traditionally-published ebook sales do — because as we’ve seen, the media reporting on the industry almost always confuses the sales of only 1,200 traditional AAP publishers with those of the entire US ebook market. And as we’ve also seen, those 1,200 AAP publishers now represent less than half of the broader US ebook market — a market which, despite all the misleading media coverage of the AAP’s collapsing ebook sales, is still growing while the AAP’s minority share of it falls.
Over the past 7 quarters, we’ve charted the rise of non-traditionally published ebooks on Amazon. We’ve watched the share of the US consumer ebook market held by independent authors and Amazon-imprint authors grow quarter after quarter, while the share of the market held by traditionally published ebooks shrank. Today, indie authors and Amazon-imprint authors sell more ebooks daily than all traditional publishers put together, a remarkable fact that most industry observers — ourselves included — still find hard to believe. And it’s also a reality that the publishing industry statistics from Nielsen, Bowker, and the like — which all rely on counting ISBNs — are completely blind to… for the simple reason that 37% of all ebooks sold on Amazon.com each day do not use ISBNs.
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Some traditional industry spokespersons have speculated that more than 85% of indie ebook sales are wholly dependent upon Amazon. They presume that indies sell very poorly outside the Kindle store and make up an insignificant percentage of ebook sales elsewhere.
Among indie authors themselves, there is little consensus. Anecdotes about sales at other retailers run the gamut. Some indies are now going all-in with Kindle Unlimited, choosing to make their books Amazon-exclusive because the sales they saw at other ebook stores were so anemic in comparison. Many of these authors report seeing a significant increase in their earnings under KU, not only in the form of KU payments for page reads, but also in additional direct sales of their books as a result of the side benefit of enhanced best-seller-list visibility which the lift from KU borrows gives them. These authors say the combination of the two more than offsets whatever lost sales they have given up in other stores. At the same time, other indie authors are doing the exact opposite, by opting out of Kindle Unlimited exclusivity to “go wide.” They report doing very well as a result, with some high-earning indies making more revenue on non-Amazon channels than on Amazon itself. Many authors who have gone wide report seeing the relative share of their earnings coming from non-Amazon channels increase month after month.
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In the US, more than 95% of all consumer ebook purchases — and probably closer to 99% of them — go through just five major ebook retailers. Among those five, Amazon is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. Amazon accounts for almost two thirds of the traditionally-published total… and significantly more of the true overall ebook total, making up 74% of US ebook unit sales and 71% of US gross consumer dollars spent on ebooks (once you include all no-ISBN indie sales and those of Amazon’s publishing imprints.)
Next up in size after Amazon is Apple’s iBooks store, accounting for roughly 10-12% of US ebook sales — or a third of what’s left. After iBooks comes Barnes & Noble’s Nook store, which despite its steepening downward slide over the past two years, still remains the #3 ebook retailer with about 7-8%of all US ebook sales. Fourth up is Kobo, with about half of Nook’s sales — or maybe 3-4% of the total US market. And finally Google, with around a third of Kobo’s sales, making up 1-2% of today’s ebook market — a surprisingly meager showing for the internet giant.
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Like the Amazon store, Apple has many category bestseller lists and sub-lists from which our AuthorEarnings software spider was able to pull thousands of books and their sales-ranking data. Unlike the Amazon store, however, only the Top 200 books reveal their absolute ranking among all other books in the iBookstore. From the other lists, we were able to obtain a rich matrix of relative ranking data for that genre or subgenre, but no absolute rankings. This required a slight change in our methodology. Fortunately, many of those category best-seller lists included several books that were also in the overall Top 200. This gave us a mathematical “master key” for each category list, from which we could calculate a rank scaling factor to apply to the rest of the books on that list. Thus we could project with reasonable accuracy the absolute sales rankings for 5,300 more of the iBookstore’s top-selling books (out of the 33,000 total titles that our spider had collected from Apple’s lists). Those top-selling 5,500 books comprised roughly half of all Apple ebook sales that day, giving us a very representative cross-section of sales in the iBookstore.
11% of all best-seller listed ebooks and 20% of all ebook purchases in the Apple iBookstore are verifiably books by indie self-published authors. Another 3% are books by lower-selling single-author publishers — most likely also indies, but we didn’t check them one by one, so we left them uncategorized. The Big Five traditional publishers — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette — make up 58% of unit sales, while small and medium publishers make up the remaining 19%.
With 20% of Apple’s unit ebook sales now going to indie authors, that puts the iBookstore about on par with what the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook stores used to look like, back in late 2012 or early 2013. But this is our very first look at the iBookstore, so it remains to be seen whether the indie share of Apple’s ebook sales is currently growing, stable, or shrinking. Only time will tell.
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In gross consumer dollar terms, indies currently make up only 9-11% of Apple’s ebook dollar sales, while the Big Five, with their higher agency ebook prices, take in nearly 75% of the gross consumer dollars spent in the iBookstore. But our focus is as always author earnings, rather than how much traditional-publishing middlemen are taking out of the pie. So the bottom chart — which looks at onlythe author’s share of each book’s earnings — is a lot more interesting to us, because of what it reveals:
At least 28% of the total income received by authors from iBookstore sales is going to indie authors.
Indies are taking a big bite out of the apple, when it comes to author earnings. Perhaps some of that 28% results from Apple’s more generous across-the-board 70% revenue share, which applies at any price point rather than only for books the $2.99-$9.99 price range… or it might be that Apple offers special featuring to indies with more frequency. But whatever the reason, while that 28% pales in comparison to the 43% of all author earnings that indies command on Amazon, it’s still more than we expected to see.
With indies capturing well over a quarter of the author earnings generated by the iBookstore, it’s pretty safe to say that that a healthy market for indie books exists at Apple. But quite a few indies use third party distributors to get their books into the iBookstore, while others choose to deal with Apple direct. So let’s take a look at how indie books distributed via the different paths are performing relative to one another.
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When we put it all together, we can present a complete picture that reflects not just ebook sales on Amazon, but rather the ebook sales of the entire US ebook market.
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Indie ebooks without publisher-purchased ISBNs now make up at least 33% of all retail ebook purchases and author earnings across all US ebook stores.
In past reports, we have referred to these no-ISBN ebooks as the “shadow industry,” a catchy moniker originally coined by Joe Konrath which has gone on to become popular shorthand for the officially uncounted, ISBN-lacking sector of publishing.
But the term “shadow industry” is not really an accurate descriptor. Not anymore.
Ebooks without ISBNs now command a greater share of US consumer ebook purchases, reading time, and author earnings than all of the AAP’s 1,200 publishers put together, including the Big Five.
From a reader perspective and an author perspective, no-ISBN ebooks are by far the biggest sector of digital publication.
Today, no-ISBN indie ebooks pretty much ARE the digital publishing industry.
If you’re an indie author who sees little point in buying ISBNs for your digital editions, it looks like you’re in very good company. At this point, it’s unclear how the ISBN could possibly rescue itself as a meaningful measure of anything at all in the digital publishing world. Perhaps if all ISBNs were made universally free, and retroactively offered to all indie authors for their existing books… but even then, without any tangible benefit from using an ISBN, many authors still wouldn’t bother. The ISBNs irrelevance in the modern digital publishing world is a problem for which we don’t see an answer.
Link to the rest at Author Earnings and thanks to Jane and many others for the tip.