James Piper, Author

Sunday, November 06, 2011 ... trying to make sense of the amazon bestsellers and pricing for e-books ... I Each hour Amazon updates its bestsellers lists. I have taken a daily snapshot of the top 20 bestsellers in the e-book fiction list for the past week and analyzed the results. Click here for the current listing. What can be learnt from these data? 1. 4 out of 5 of the titles are from traditional or brand-named authors. The trend continues. Further, comments I wrote last week about the list apply this week. 2. The prices for books by traditional authors is substantially higher than those of indie authors. See chart below for comparisons. 3. A core group of titles appear on the list each day. Certain titles shoot up into the list for a day or two then fall back down. More below. 4. While pre-release titles appear on the list, the sales for these titles do substantially better after the release date. (e.g., Zero Day by Baldacci). It appears that some people w...

Sunday, October 30, 2011 ... trying to make sense of the amazon bestsellers and pricing for e-books ... E ach hour Amazon updates its bestsellers lists. I have taken a daily snapshot of the top 20 bestsellers in the e-book fiction list for the past week. See here . What can be learnt from these data? 1. 4 out 5 of the bestsellers are from print or traditional authors. Most are brand-named authors who dominate the print bestsellers. 2. Almost all of the authors have multiple titles to their credit. The author of The Help is a notable exception. 3. The e-book prices of indie authors are substantially lower than print authors. For the most part, their titles are priced at $0.99. 4. The books on the list fall into four categories: (i) pre-release from brand-named authors, (ii) new or recently released titles (iii) long-term bestsellers (greater than one year), (iv) backlist titles. Indie authors fall into (ii) and (iv). 5. The indie authors includes authors who ...