Amazon Top 100 Kindle Books - Indies versus Trads, Part 1

Recently, Amazon released lists of its 100 top selling titles, in four categories: adult Kindle ebooks, adult print books, children’s Kindle ebooks and children’s print books.  There is a lot of interesting information in these lists, if one is prepared to do a little extra work to mine and analyse this publicly available data.  In this blog, we will look at the adult kindle ebooks, with particular emphasis on comparing Indie books versus Trad published books.

Some nomenclature and definitions are in order.  Firstly,  Amazon uses the term “adult Kindle books”, but that really just means “not children’s kindle ebooks”.  Though there is some erotica in the top 100, the vast majority of the books are not of this sort, so some of the usual connotations of the term “adult” don’t apply.

 Secondly, there is the matter of the terms “Indie” and “Trad”.   By “Indie”, I mean books that have been published under the new publishing model:

-          ebook published first (generally on Amazon, nook, iBooks, Kobo, etc),

-          little or no presence in bricks and mortar bookstores,

-          self-published or published by a very small publisher,

-          no query letters, agents or other “gatekeeper” functions,

-           most of the money from sales flows to the writer.

By “Trad”, I mean books that have been published under the Traditional publishing model (Trad can also be considered short for “Trade”):

-          print book published first or at the same time as ebook,

-          usually the print book is given a run in the bricks and mortar bookstores,

-          the publisher is a major corporation, with significant editorial and other infrastructure,

-          agents or editors provide “gatekeeper” functions,

-          most of the money from sales do not flow to the writer, unless that writer has a great deal of bargaining power due to consistent best-seller status.

Now, the Amazon top 100 list doesn’t lay these distinctions out precisely, so we have to make some categorization decisions.  Or as we say in data analysis, we have to operationalize the variable.  For this analysis, I considered a book “Indie” if it had a little known name listed as “Publisher” and Amazon Digital Services listed under “Sold By” in the Amazon metadata.  For example, books by Indie H.M. Ward are listed as “Laree Bailey Press” for Publisher and “Amazon Digital Services, Inc.” for Sold By.  On the other hand, the archetypal Trad published book “Inferno” by Dan Brown had “Doubleday” for Publisher and “Random House LLC” for Sold By.  No doubt there is some room to quibble about these categorizations, but one has to start somewhere.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at some results.   First and foremost is the matter of how many books each publishing model had in the top 100.  As we can see in the table below, nearly one-quarter of the books in the top 100 kindle list were Indie published.  Furthermore, if we look at individual publishers, Indies actually accounted for more top 100 kindle books than any of the Traditional publishers (though the recent merger of Penguin and Random House (Randy Penguin) would still be in first place):

Publisher1	Total
Traditional	76
Indie	24
Grand Total	100

 

Publisher2	Total
Indie	24
Penguin	20
Hachette	19
Random House	15
Simon & Schuster	13
Harper Collins	4
Harlequin	2
Doubleday	1
MacMillan	1
William Morrow	1
Grand Total	100

However, we have to take some care in interpreting this finding.  Though Indies have broken into the Top 100 list, they still tend to be found somewhat further down the list than Trads, on average.  In the table below, we see the number of Indies versus Trads by quartile (i.e. Quartile 1 is ranks 1-25, etc):

Quartile	Indie	Trad
1	4	21
2	4	21
3	7	18
4	9	16
Grand Total	24	76

Looking at the gender of the writers, we see that female writers dominated the top 100, with the Indie model being more friendly to women than Traditional publishing houses, though the difference is not all that large.

	Female	Male
Indie	79%	33%
Traditional	67%	21%
Total	70%	30%

Looking at price points, I have categorized prices into three ranges: low (under $4.00), moderate ($4.00 to $7.99) and high (over $8.00).  Not surprisingly, the majority of Indies were in the Low price category, while the majority of Trads were in the Moderate price group.  That said, there were some Trads in the Low price group, but no Indies in the High priced group.  When thinking of price, one always has to bear in mind the fact that Indie writers get much higher royalty rates, so they can actually earn more than Trad writers even when selling at lower price points (much of the Trad book’s money goes to the corporation, rather than the writer).  Here’s the detailed breakdown of Indie versus Trad by price:

	1-Low	2-Mod	3-High
Traditional	17%	59%	24%
Indie	71%	29%	0%
Total	30%	52%	18%

As the table below shows, the top 100 kindle books were almost exclusively fiction, whether by Indies or Trads:

	Fiction	Non-Fiction
Indie	96%	4%
Traditional	96%	4%
Total	96%	4%

Genre is also interesting, with some major differences between Indies and Trads.   The Indies are heavily weighted towards Romance, though a substantial percentage of the Trads are also in that category.  In fact, nearly half of the Top 100 Kindle books are best categorized under the general category of Romances.  Thrillers (which includes suspense, mystery, crime, etc) make up a large proportion of the Trads, but none of the Thrillers in the Top 100 were written by Indies.  That’s interesting, since some of the bigger names in Indie publishing write in the general category of Thrillers (e.g. Konrath).  I guess you can make a lot of money but still not necessarily break into the Top 100 in a given year.  Science Fiction was also a significant Indie category (Hugh Howey was a big part of that).  Literary Fiction may win most of the awards, but it only made up about one-tenth of the Top 100 list.

Genre	Indie	Trad	Total
Romance	75%	38%	47%
Thriller	0%	37%	28%
Literary Fiction	0%	14%	11%
Sci-Fi  and Fantasy	13%	5%	7%
Other	13%	5%	7%
Grand Total	24%	76%	100%
Romance includes erotica
Thriller includes suspense, crime, detective
Other includes historical fiction, humour, and non-fiction

So, what’s the story so far?

-          Indies have definitely broken into the big time (i.e. Top 100 list).

-          Indies still haven’t cracked the very top, but are getting closer all the time.

-          Women writers now dominate both Indie and Trad Top 100 lists, though they do a bit better as  Indies.

-          Indies still sell at lower price points, though Trads have been forced to come down a lot in price to compete.  Higher royalty rates for Indies allow them to sell at lower price points and still make substantial amounts of money for the writer, as opposed to the publisher.

-          The most popular Kindle books are still almost exclusively fiction, Indie or Trad.

-          The highest selling Indies are still predominately in the Romance category, with considerable success in Sci-Fi and Fantasy as well.  Trads still dominate Thrillers and Literary Fiction.

This analysis just scratches the surface of the data available.  We haven’t considered numbers of Amazon reviews per title (which can be considered a rough proxy for sales) and average Amazon review rating.   As we will see in some later blogs, these also reveal some very interesting Indie versus Trad differences.

In addition, in the future we will also do a blog comparing the Top 100 Amazon Kindle ebooks versus the Top 100 Amazon print books, as comparisons by reader format are also likely to reveal some interesting distinctions.