Nathan Bransford - The Forums

There was an article in The Bookseller today analysing Amazon's quarterly figures.

In the first quarter of 2011, Amazon UK’s #1 selling product across all categories (presumably in terms of revenue rather than units) was the Kindle 3G.

Out of the top ten selling products across all categories, five were books.

But out of those, only one was a print book (the non-stop-selling Jamie’s 30-Minute Meals by Jamie Oliver was the third-highest-selling product)

The other four were e-books, in positions four, five, nine, and ten: The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris, The Basement by Stephen Leather, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and Stephen Leather's Hard Landing.

All of the e-books (and the print book) come from trade publishers, except for The Basement which is one of Stephen Leather’s self-published works (he has both, but has a long history in trade-publishing and was a bestseller for years in the UK before he decided to self-publish).

I'm pretty sure The Basement is one of the novellas that his publisher - Hodder - turned down because they didn't think it had enough commercial appeal. Oopsy!

The full article is here: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/e-boo ... umble.html

The Publishers Association (PA) has revealed staggering e-book growth in 2010 - up 300% on 2009.

In figures just released this morning, UK e-book sales – across all categories – have grown to over £16m ($26m), growing by over 300% on 2009 levels. By end of December 2010, they had captured 6% of the market.

They didn’t release a full breakdown of the figures, but did say that both fiction and non-fiction grew by around 300% and, bucking the trend we have seen in the US, children’s/YA grew faster – by over 500%.

These figures did not include what the PA calls “consumer reference” digital sales (presumably dictionaries and encyclopaedias etc.) which showed strong sales of £14m ($23m).

Very interesting.

Full article here from The Bookseller: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/digit ... -2010.html