Hunting Data from the Big Dog--veinglory You know my friend the wiggly graph here. Well it is about to get some friends. I have enough data for several publishers to begin to track the sales levels of books specific to that press. But in order to really demonstrate the range I would be very interested in getting more data relating to publishers at the upper and lower end of the scale.

So far authors at Loose Id and Liquid Silver have been the first to step up, representing almost half of the total data set. These are the 'upper middle list' publishers and I think tend to produce an average that is maybe a little higher than is typical. In fact this is already some evidence for this in that the mean first month sales are 176, but the median (the sales of the book that falls in the middle when they are orders from most to least sales) is only 94 copies.

It is all a matter of statistics really. It may be that 80% or more of ebooks make less than the current average of 176--but some of the books that make more, make a whole lot more. I am thinking here primarily of Ellora's Cave. The average first month sales I have for them is based on a small and highly variable data set--coming in at 1440 copies. This Makes Elloras Cave apparently quite literally in a class of its own.

So in the interests of getting a clear picture I want to specifically encourage authors at Ellora's Cave to send me your sales figures so we can start to track just how ahead of the pack they are, and how the gap varies over time. I would also encourage those of authors publishing with smaller, newer presses to send me your information to help balance the picture. Just email veinglory at gmail.com with as much as you can of the following: first month samles, first year sales, total sales to date, sales to end of contract.  ¶ posted at 5:44 PM by Emily Veinglory