Self-Publishing Grabs Huge Market Share From Traditional Publishers

PubIt! Which went out of circulation was recently re-launched by Barnes & Noble as Nook Press which had all the things that a corporate press release can probably have. Some of their hard numbers were released that dealt with self-publishers. The new name is simple and straightforward unlike the somewhat baffling and hard-to-remember old one. Indeed, it is rather an enticing name.

The new publishing platform enables publishers to write, edit, format and publish books. Writers can register themselves in the forum and share their thoughts securely. They can exchange information on opportunities for merchandising in the Nook Store. Authors are allowed to price their books between 99 cents and $199.99 and can hope to receive 65% royalty.

• PubIt! attracts more than 20% independent authors each quarter.
• In the Nook Store, titles from authors of self-published books are increasing continuously – 24% every quarter.
• Nook customers are purchasing more self-published content, which represent 25% of their sales each month.

About 25% of sales by Nook are self-published books and that is only to be expected.
Self-publishing had started as an experiment and not many people had taken to it in a big way in the beginning. But before anyone knew it, it had formed a stable market.  Is it any wonder then that the traditional big time publishers are finding in the self-publishing segment a worthy competitor? This is happening in country after country.

Amazon’s Kindle Indie Store
To give the devil its due, Amazon Kindle has always been the numerationo since its launch in August 2011. This is hardly surprising. Publishers who were finding it difficult to get their books published, had, at one stroke, done away with the cumbersome procedures involved in publishing and saw revenue accruing to them as well.

Additionally, it had a Top 100 list like the regular Kindle Store list, ordered by Sales Rank. When there is a comparison between self-published work positions in Kindle Indie Store Top 100, where all the figures of Sales Rank are shown, quite an accurate idea of the proportion of highest-selling self-published books can be drawn. A book that is at #100 under the Indie chart can be at #346 under the Kindle Store overall ranking. This means that 29% of the highest selling books in the Store are nothing but self-published e-books. This store contains much more than only e-books, which include digital subscriptions to magazines, dailies, blogs, and games as well; that regularly appear in the Top 100 list. If you do not consider all of these categories, and take out only e-books, the figure crosses 30% in a jiffy.

Amazon’s self-published books comprise 30% of their top-selling e-book list – some of the biggest authors featuring from the most established publishing houses around the world, are beaten in this race. The subjects vary from fiction to subject material like what is six sigma.

When the respective market shares of Barnes & Noble and Amazon are tallied it leads to the estimation that self-publishers have come to conquer 25% of the e-book market in the U.S.