Oops. Errors in last post.

I read that Forbes article in my last blog post (Online publishing is winning SF&F) too uncritically. When it said, "Indie-published authors may be just 48% of the SF&F market", it was taking its earlier statement,

unit sales of self-published and Amazon-published ebooks ... constitute a full 48% of all SF&F sales across print, digital, and audio.

and pretending that it had said

unit sales of self-published ebooks ... constitute a full 48% of all SF&F sales across print, digital, and audio.

But a whole lot of those Amazon-published e-books are by major publishers.

Let's figure out the real figure for ourselves, from the slides it cited:

Traditional publishers account for 37% of e-book sales in units.

37% of traditionally-published F&SF books are e-books (by units).

So... e-book sales from traditional publishers are 37% of total e-book sales, and also 37% of total traditional-publisher sales.

That means that e-book unit sales from indy publishers = print unit sales from traditional publishers. Call that number of units X.

Let Z = total traditional-publisher unit sales. Then Z = X+Y.

Let Y = total traditional-publisher e-book sales. Then Y = .37Z.

Z = X + Y = X + .37Z
.63Z = X; Z = X/.63 = 1.59X

So fraction of SF&F book copies sold (ebooks and print) that were published by indy publishers = X / (X + 1.59X) = .39 . Not half, but pretty darn high.

Comments

[Georg]

And to paraphrase Hoyt, it's about (censored) time. Most published authors of multiple books seem to have a story that goes "I was (censored) by this company, then passed over to this company who (censored) me worse, then tried this other company and boy did they (censor-censor-censor) me over, until
A) I found (__________) who treated me like a human being (Normally Baen books)
B) I went self-publishing and never looked back.
C) I sold enough books that a major publisher gingerly extended a glove-clad hand and has been hesitantly supporting me ever since.

Then the last line of their story always seems to end with "And X of my books are still being held by Y companies who will not publish them or give the rights back to me or went out of business and had their assets bought up by some sleazy fly-by-night company (and onto another story about getting taken to the cleaners)

I love reading through According to Hoyt and Monster Hunter Nation Sarah and Larry have some of the most interesting articles. Recent example in point where Larry expresses his opinion of certain idiots who hounded a new author into withdrawing her story. (caution: language warning)

[Southpaw]

5008635 Thank you. That last link (Larry Correia's rant) was absolutely hilarious and full of MIRVs all aimed at SJWs. It was glorious.

[Corejo]

5008635
Thank you for the final link in this comment. It made my day.