Digital Storm

Over the past week there has been a lot of online “noise” about self-publishing.

It started when acclaimed self-published author, Hugh Howey, launched authorearnings.com around 10^th February 2014. The site is dedicated to analysing Amazon’s “hidden” data in regards to publishing figures (sales, demographics, correlations between different factors – like review scores and pricing etc).

Amazon do not publish these statistics publicly, but Hugh and a friend of his had found a way to use a data-mining tool to siphon it from the website. As soon as it launched, authorearnings.com crashed due to high levels of traffic.

There have been pretty interesting findings in the data such as:

• “… 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the overall Amazon store are e-books”.

• 47% of Amazon’s daily revenue for genre bestsellers (mystery, thrillers, Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Romance) are e-book sales.

• Even though the revenue of self-published authors is half that of traditionally published authors (due to lower prices for e-books), self-published authors are making 50% more profit than the trad-published guys.

The list goes on, and it sounds like a sunny day in Self-Publishing Land. But we have to also take into account that there are always flaws in all data, so the figures are open to scrutiny. Also, authorearnings.com as a project, only studies Amazon’s data. This isn’t a bad start, as Amazon is the biggest online book retailer on the planet, but Apple’s iTunes Store, Kobo, SmashWords etc have all been missed out of the survey.

The Guardian newspaper has run a number of articles over the past week on this, and a look at the comments alone will see some divided opinions. But, whatever the data shows, and whatever the reader’s preference over print or e-book the fact is this:

times are changing.

Let’s take a look at some past examples of digitised media:

(VIDEO) Celluloid reel --> VHS & BetaMax --> DVD & BlueRay --> .AVI/.MPG/.MKV files etc

(AUDIO) Vinyl Disks --> Tape Cassettes --> CD’s --> Mini-Discs à MP3

(DATA STORAGE) Floppy Disks --> CD-ROMs --> USB Sticks --> “The Cloud”

With each passing decade we see ourselves stepping away from physical mediums towards the intangible. Even physical currency is being “challenged” by the advent of digital means – such as digital wallets and BitCoins. A recent article by Forbes states that mobile phone payment transactions will top $720bn by 2017, they were $235bn last year. Amazon, PayPal and Google are all scrambling to pioneer digital currency, and it may well be that within 5 years, our mobile phones will be the only device necessary to buy anything from groceries to real property

To wind this rant down, there will always be a place for physical books, which is a good thing. I want people to keep reading physical books (and not just because my mother is a librarian). But the fact is that e-books will eventually outsell physical ones, and that isn’t a bad thing.

All that matters is that readers keep reading, and that writers keep striving to write to the best of their abilities. If both hold up their end of the bargain, I'm sure they will eventually find each other.