This from an interview by http://blogs.forbes.com/suwcharmananderson/:
“If you follow the trends over the last few years and project them out, it sets the stage for yet more significant disruption. Over the last few years there has been an exponential growth in ebooks. Just a few years ago, print books accounted for 99 percent of the overall book market, so ebooks really didn’t matter. But now in US, ebooks account for 25 to 30 percent of sales. The UK is right behind us and coming up very quickly.
We’re seeing ebooks capturing a greater piece of the book industry pie and at some point in the future, print sales will become, if not insignificant, then less significant. For many self-published authors and small independent presses, ebooks as a percentage of their overall business have already reached that tipping point; they already account for greater percentage of their sales than print because they don’t have the same access to brick and mortar print distribution as large publishers. Indie authors and small presses are an indicator of where things will go over the next couple of years.
Indie ebooks are starting to sell in a big way. Our revenues are going to be over $12m for 2012, which means that our retail partners are going to sell between $18m and $20m of books. And our books are starting to appear in bestseller lists. Today, when I look at the Apple iBook stats for the US store, Smashwords’ authors occupy five of the top 20 bestselling slots, and one of the top ten, maybe even two today. A year ago, we didn’t have any books in the top ten at Apple. I think that’s really exciting!….
…And if you look at the top sellers on Barnes & Noble or Amazon, indie authors are appearing more frequently in their bestseller lists. They’re starting to dominate and take significant sales away from traditional publishers.
This is a great time to be an author. The opportunity to reach readers has never been greater. The benefit of fully democratised distribution, negligible book production & distribution costs, the ability to reach a worldwide market instantly with low-cost ebooks is, to me, really exciting.
What we’re seeing is that most successful authors are those who are adopting many of the best practices of the best traditional publishers. These are the authors who honour their readers by producing high quality books that are as good or better than what the big New York or London publishers are putting out. They’re hiring professional editors and proofreaders to make sure that the books are high quality. They’re hiring professional cover designers, and their books are starting to become indistinguishable from what New York is putting out.
And their books are lower cost. At Smashwords, the average price of a book put up for sale is $3.15. The average price of a purchased book across all of our distribution networks is $2.99, that’s also the median price. The economics of indie authorship are very powerful and alluring….”
Read the whole article at forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2012/07/25/mark-coker-significant-disruption-for-traditional-publishers-still-to-come/
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