Saturday, March 12, 2011

Amazon 100 - 3/11/2011

If I have the time, I'm going to try and do these Amazon 100 analysis weekly as things are just changing so fast. This week I was surprised to see the following:

  • 18% of the Top 100 changed (61% Debuts, 39% returning to list)
  • No major price changes (One book from $12.99 > $9.99, One from $9.99 > $7.99)
  • #3 is a new book (Heavily helped by the $0.99 Promotion of Alone)
  • A lot of non-Fiction additions (27% of Debuts) - but many of the non-fiction also fell off
  • Only one new game
  • 71% of returning titles were Magazines
  • John Lock continues to dominate 7 titles in top 50 (#1, #5, #10, #16, #29, #33, #46)
  • Amanda Hocking sliding slightly in ratings (#6, #20, #21, #47, #61, #68, #77)
  • No indie author greater than $2.99 (excluding Seth Godin)
  • Color of Heaven from a former traditionally published author stayed on the list even though the price has gone up from $0.99 to $2.99 (though it has slipped in ranking)
  • 3 books are now priced $14.99
  • 40% are under $5 and 60% are over $5

To see the full list see this post on kindle boards.

The types of items on the Top 100 break down as follows:

  • Shorts 1% (Steady)
  • News 3% (Steady)
  • Games 4% (down from 5%)
  • Magazines 9% (up from 4%)
  • Non Fiction 10% (Steady)
  • Fiction 73% (down from 77%)

Looking at just fiction titles (73 titles):

  • 2 - Small Press (3%)
  • 27 - Indie Authors (37%) (74% at $0.99, 26% at $2.99)
  • 44 - Traditional Authors (60%) (3% at $0.99, 5% at $5, 50% at $3-#5, 43% Over 10%)

Other information about indies:

  • 14 - Indie Authors 5 of which have multiple titles (down from 15)
  • 52% of Indie books came from 2 authors (14/27) (up from 45%) John Locke (7), Amanda Hocking (7)

The price distributions are as follows:

  • 32% Less than $1 (23)
  • 14% $1 - $3 (7)
  • 3% $3 - $5 (2)
  • 30% $5 - $10 (22)
  • 26% Over $10 (19)

Dividing into three groups we see:

  • Low ($2.99 or Less) 30 41%
  • Med ($5.00 - $8.99) 16 22%
  • High ($9.99 and up) 27 37%
Dividing into two groups we see:
  • Under $5 30 40% (33 - 43%)
  • Over $5 43 60% (44 - 57%)

4 comments:

Gisele said...

This is great!

Thank you for taking the time to crunch all this up.

Robert Bidinotto said...

Hi, Robin!

Once again, fascinating and valuable information.

I certainly don't want to suggest that you should take more work upon yourself; we are grateful for what you already give us! But it strikes me that one particularly valuable set of statistics to focus on would be ebook pricing trends, tracked over time.

How rapidly are ebook prices falling? To what levels are they gravitating? Are Traditional Publishers slashing their prices, too, or are they able to hold the line somewhere?

To answer questions like that, we'd have to know the numbers and percentages of Top 100 ebooks at the various price intervals, tracked month to month. A spreadsheet could be set up to do this.

For example:

* How many titles/what percentage in the Top 100 were priced above $10 in December, January, Feb., and March? How many/what percentage were below that level? How many at the lowest price?

* How many/what percentage of Traditionally Published ebooks on the list were priced at various levels each month? How many Indie titles were at each of those levels?

* How many/what percentage of $.99 books were on the list on each of the past few months?

Etc.

Seems to me that these numbers could be tracked on a monthly spreadsheet, and from that, you could easily spit out charts and graphs. The trend lines would tell some interesting tales about the extent and rapidity of price changes, and whether Trad Publishers think they can sustain certain price levels above Indies.

Again, I'm not asking you to do more number-crunching than you're already doing (which is amazing!) -- unless you think that such information would be valuable to YOU, too! Thanks again for providing such great insights into the ebook market.

--Robert Bidinotto
RobertTheWriter.com

Robin Sullivan said...

Already on it Robert - Great minds think alike - that's eactly what I'm shooting for but I don't have enough historical data yet to make it meaningful. But I'm collecting it.

There was definitely a trend to lower price by the big 6 just befor the NYT ebook list went live - they have all now gone "back up". Indies seem to be falling more for the $0.99.

Anonymous said...

This article was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday.