Derek Canyon recently posted some general financial analysis on his ‘Adventures in e-Publishing‘ blog. In the ongoing debate on self-publishing, any information and tips on profitability are useful, so have a look:

I based this data on the list created over on Self-Publishing Success Stories, a blog which frequently has interesting and enlightening posts. You should check them out. I also researched the authors’ Kindle books on Amazon to come up with the following data points:

• Number of ebooks sold (as claimed by the author)
• Number of etitles available (as listed on the author’s Kindle page)
• Average sales per title (calculated)
• Primary genre (as estimated by me)

I then put all this data into a nifty Excel spreadsheet and generated some charts and graphs.

Minor spoiler:

In case you didn’t notice, the table above shows that some of these authors have an average of as low as 1100 sales per ebook. It’s just that they ahve [sic] so many titles that it all adds up.

It’s pretty interesting. Check out the full analysis with pretty pictures here: http://derekjcanyon.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/keys-to-epublishing-success-2012.html

I’ve featured posts from Derek Canyon before, from his ‘Adventures in e-Publishing‘ blog.

Today he posted an article comparing his earnings for the year to a hypothetical traditional publishing contract, just to give us some analysis. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this kind of financial information being shown off is still relatively uncommon, so it’s worth having a look.

I have a year’s worth of sales data to assess the results of my self-publishing efforts. I thought it would be a fun exercise to compare my actual self-publishing revenue results with a hypothetical legacy publishing contract. That is, assume that I could have gotten an agent and publisher.

No spoilers! I do note, however, that Derek has spent considerable funds on professional editing and other services. Remember this when you think self-publishing is a cheap alternative: if you want to look professional, it costs professional.

If you’re interested in how it all balances out according to Derek, read the rest here: http://derekjcanyon.blogspot.com/2011/11/self-publishing-or-legacy-publishing.html