Optimizing Income for Independent SF & F Authors

by J Lloren Quill

How much money does an author make selling a book?

It should be a simple question with a straightforward answer, but it’s not. With technology at our side, we now have the data to answer this simple question in about 1.2 million different ways.

Amazon’s Author Earnings Report

Author Hugh Howey and the Data Guy sent a spider crawling through the shelves of Amazon to bring back all the sales information from over 1.2 million books and published the results in the May 2016 Author Earnings Report. This report provides a ton of information about the books on Amazon, but it groups my initial publishing efforts as an independent author with giants like Brandon Sanderson.

Not helpful.

Even worse, my fantasy novel, Severance Lost, is in the same group as romance novels and textbooks. So I set out to get an answer more relevant to me, and to the thousands of other independent science fiction and fantasy authors.

After downloading their free, anonymized spreadsheet, I filtered the data to only include information from independent authors publishing in the science fiction genre. If science fiction/fantasy wasn’t the primary category of book chosen, I excluded it. Then, I excluded all entries that didn’t have daily sales information or daily earnings.  In the end, I was left with 2,047 samples from the original million+ in the Author Earnings Report (see infographic).

Digging Deeper

I found that the vast majority of book titles bring in less than $10 per day, but a relatively low number of authors (82), are earning more than $100 per day.

I wanted to know if there was anything that these highly successful book titles were doing that was different from the modestly performing books, so I kept digging. I ran a statistical analysis to optimize author earnings using the meta-tags associated with the sales information in the Author Earnings Report.

From this analysis, I was able to begin answering questions like:

  • Whether it is beneficial to sign up for Kindle Unlimited
  • Or get an ISBN number
  • Or bother with a pre-order period

I can now divide the data even further to investigate the effects of different price points on author earnings and perhaps most importantly, point to areas that can affect earnings that aren’t covered in my analyses.

What I Found

Sales rank has the highest correlation with author earnings (as you might expect), so do everything you can to climb those Amazon lists.

Somewhat surprisingly, a pre-order period correlated with increased author earnings across both modestly performing and highly successful books. So, it’s also worth the effort!

In Conclusion

I’m doing this analysis because I put a ton of work into my books, and if I’m going to publish them with my own money, I want to give them the best chance to succeed.

I also think this is an area that a lot of authors wished they had more information on, but lack the background or interest to do the analysis themselves. With a doctorate in engineering, I do have the background to perform this type of statistical analysis and now I want to share it with all of you.

We’re all in this together. Best of luck everyone!

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J. Lloren Quill is an independent author and inventor with a doctorate in biomedical engineer. He is the author of Severance Lost and Shadow Cursed and is currently writing the third installment of the Fractal Forsaken series. As an author, J. Lloren writes the type of books he enjoys reading – fantasy books that are heavy in actual science. He lives in Minnesota with his family.  This post first appeared on his blog, where you will find other analyses in his Optimizing Author Income blog series.