I received this question, “Do I stand a chance of self-publishing my book?” According to the website https://justpublishingadvice.com/how-many-kindle-ebooks-are-there/, there are 48.5 million titles on Amazon, but only about 10% of them are Kindle books. Many sources list the number of books published daily as 2700 new titles or just short of a million titles a year. The competition for readers is stiff.
From my work with Kindle e-books, you will continue to sell books only if you continue to advertise on their site. I can take a book I published several years ago and run an ad campaign which is nothing more than displaying my book when somebody is searching for a book in that genre. I will get approximately the same number of sales as I did when the book first came out. I have published in the following genres, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and occasionally publishing a mystery/romance novel using Kindle.
According to the website https://proactivewriter.com, The top five more profitable categories on Amazon.com are:
- Romance/Erotica ($1.44 billion).
- Crime/Mystery ($728.2 million).
- Religious/Inspirational ($720 million).
- Science Fiction/Fantasy ($590.2 million).
- Horror ($79.6 million).
It’s interesting to see they combine romance and erotica. They used to be separate categories. More and more, romance novels have sex scenes. That combination has approximately twice the number of sales as the following two categories. I searched on Amazon using the word “romance” in their bookstore, and the response came back to over 70,000 novels. I then searched using the word “erotica.” The response came back over 60,000 novels.
All those figures might seem discouraging to the person who asked the question. But you will never know if your novel is successful without it being traditionally published or published as an e-book. If you’re going the traditional route, find an agent. If you self-publish on Kindle, use a site like https://www.fiverr.com/ to find proofreaders, people to format for Kindle, and find an artist for cover design. Go for it! You never know!
