Self-published eBook sales skyrocket

David Gaughran wrote a very in depth and fantastic post analyzing sales information from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo to come to some conclusions about how much of the overall eBook market is self-published. What he came up with is an impressive piece of blog scholarship and well worth your time to read. I immediately signed up for his email list when I read this. The man knows how to write a blog post.

But I want to pull out two highlights from his article and talk about what they mean for the industry.

1. 25 percent of Nook sales are self-published eBooks.

He pulled this from a recent press release that Barnes & Noble put out there. It surprised him and it surprises me. Put another way, that means that one out of every four books purchased by a Nook reader is self-published. That's pretty incredible strictly from a production standpoint. Self-publishers are making up a huge part of the eBook market.

2. 30 percent of the top-selling eBooks on Amazon are self-published

Gaughran uses a very clever method of tracking sales to come to this percentage. Essentially he looks at what is ranked #100 on the Amazon self-published best-sellers list, then sees where that book falls on the overall best-sellers list, then subtracts a few of the non-books that are also available in the Kindle store. Very smart.

And I am, as he is, stunned by this number. Amazon is probably the biggest book sales mecca in the world, and 30 percent of the best-selling books are self-published? WOW.

What those two stats say to me is that as a whole, self-publishing is making more than an impact, self-publishing is a force to be reckoned with. While this doesn't mean that self-publishers are making a ton of money off of all those units they are moving, it does mean that people are willing to buy from self-publishers - and, more importantly, buy again and again.

Image courtesy of oskarsson photography via flickr