The CEO of Smashwords, Mark Coker, is a man who is dedicated to the idea of democratizing publishing. His insights are enormously helpful for writers breaking into the publishing scene, and Smashwords' annual surveys provide valuable information about strategies for epublishing success.
Below are some of the findings from the 2015 Smashwords survey. You can read the full survey (with an informative slide show) HERE.
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Key Findings of the 2015 Smashwords Survey
Yet despite the low usage, two thirds of our top 200 bestselling titles were born as preorders.
3. Free still works to build readership. For each survey year, we've looked at how free ebook downloads compare to paid downloads using iBooks as our apples to apples comparison each year (bad pun, sorry!). In the 2014 Survey, we found that free books got 39 times more downloads than priced books, down dramatically from 91x in 2013 and 100X in 2012. I expected the power of free to fall further this year, given that this secret - which I've been advocating for nearly eight years - helps authors earn more money. The result for 2014? 41x. The effectiveness of free increased despite the glut of free books.
4. Longer books sell better than shorter books. This finding is consistent with each of the prior year's surveys, though as I mention in the presentation, this year's finding comes with a lot more caveats. In a nutshell, I suspect the rise of multi-author box sets, often at deep discount prices, is probably throwing off the data this year, and as I discuss in the presentation, some of the dynamics will cause it to understate impact of longer books and some will cause it to overstate it.
6. 99 cents is still good for building readership, but not as good as $2.99 and $3.99. And from an earnings perspective, 99 cents underperforms the average of all other prices by about 65%.
7. Avoid $1.99. For the fourth year in a row, $1.99 was a black hole in terms of overall earnings. On a unit sales basis, although $1.99 books outperformed all books priced $5.00 and above, it dramatically underperformed on overall earnings, earning 73% less than the average of all other price points.
8. Bestselling authors and social media. Bestselling authors are more likely to have a presence on Facebook and Twitter, and more likely to have a blog. Not a huge surprise, though it's worth noting there are plenty of successful authors who have minimal presence on social media.
10. Top 10 Non-fiction categories during the one year period: 1. Biography. 2. Health, wellbeing and medicine. 3. Business & economics. 4. Self-improvement. 5. Religion & spirituality. 6. Relationships and family. 7. Sports and outdoor recreation. 8. Education and study guides. 9. New age. 10. Computers & Internet.
You can read the full survey along with an informative slide show HERE.