No doubt that she is successful and has had a strong response. More power to her.
However, I always distrust number claims. So I did some investigating. She has eleven titles now up at Amazon. One four-title series has all four books in the top 50 of Kindle books, though none is in the top ten. Is 100,000 copies a month a reasonable number? Maybe. Maybe not. The linked article (which appears to have been stolen from The Huffington Post) doesn't give a source for its numbers. But there is a better article at USA Today, from February. http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-02-09-ebooks09_ST_N.htm "By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000 books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital downloads. "More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of her nine titles. More than 99% were e-books. ... "For every $2.99 book she sells, she keeps 70%, with the rest going to the online bookseller. For every 99-cent book she sells, she keeps 30%." That is astounding. It's unlikely to be sustainable, but it's astounding. None of it adds up to millions of dollars, since some of her sales were at the 30% rate, but that's a hefty chunk of change. The real question is what this implies. I'm not sure it implies much. Every indicator shows that e-books are taking off and that statistically meant that the top outlier would be to the rest of the pack with Rowling is to the rest of print book sales. Rowling brought forth a small number of young adult success stories in her wake and Docking appears to appeal to the same readership. But Rowling's success meant only a mild increase for young adult as a whole and nothing outside that. I think it's probably unlikely that Docking is a leading indicator. More likely she's the same statistical fluke that the print book market has seen for years. E-book sales will increase regularly from here on out, but nothing predicts for them any different pattern than the lightning strikes success of most things that go viral on the net. As every tv reporter signs off, "what will happen in the future remains to be seen." Steve -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
