If you're pressed for time, here are the highlights. Details with graphics, data, analysis and conclusions follow:
- Cheap books are not likely to be read soon after downloading: 32% of the people who download 99p/99c books usually read
them right away, but 68% don’t.
- More than half of us will never get around to reading all the books on our
eReaders: 53% of readers admit that there are books on their eReaders that
they’ll probably never get around to reading.
- We're eBook hoarders: Nearly a third of us have more than 50 eBooks waiting to be read.
- More than 40% of book buyers read mostly on-sale books: 99c/99p or less books account for nearly all the books in 20%
of readers’ eLibraries. Another 22% read mostly on-sale books.
- Two thirds of people read a full-price book soon after they’ve bought it: In contrast to 99c/99p books, which are read promptly by 28%
of people, 67% of those who buy full-priced books read them soon after they’ve
bought them.
When I recently did a US BookBub promotion for one of my
books, the results made me wonder about something: Are all those 99c/99p books on
people’s eReaders actually being read?
As a full-time author, I earn my crust from writing, so
selling a lot of books is a good thing. But what I really want to do is build a
loyal fan base of readers who’ll remember me the next time they’re looking for
a book, and who'll look out for my next book because they enjoy the stories I
write. Selling loads of eBooks boosts my bank account, but does it actually
increase my fan base and exposure? That depends on whether the books that are
being bought are also being read or whether they get forgotten on
readers’ Kindles.
The US BookBub promotion was a success by any measure, with
3,400 eBooks sold in 4 days. Once I got over the euphoria of seeing my book amongst Amazon.com's
top 20 bestsellers, I then developed repetitive strain injury
refreshing the book’s Amazon page, waiting for reviews to come in. And the
reviews did come in… 12 of them in the next three weeks. So that got me
thinking: Did the other 3,388 people who bought the book have nothing to say
about it? Or was it that the vast majority of them haven’t read it?
To try to get an idea about the answer I created a short
survey for eBook readers to take. It’s not perfect* but it might give us a clue about what readers
do once they buy an eBook.
I could have asked just one question: If you bought two
books, one at 99p/99c and one at full price, which would you be most likely to read?
But the answer would probably have been: both, eventually.
And that wouldn’t tell us what we really want to know.
99c/99c books are not likely to be read soon after downloading
32% of the people who download 99p/99c books usually read
them right away, but 68% don’t. Taking my BookBub example, that means that 1,088
of my 3,400 BookBub-promoted books were likely to be read soon after
downloading. Not bad!
Now, I know (because I’m a geek who keeps track of such
things) that a little over 1% of people who read my books leave reviews, so I
should have seen 10 to 15 reviews for my book. And there have been 12, which
tells me that the survey results are probably reasonably representative of
eBook readers.
More than half of us will never get around to reading all the books on our
eReaders
Even if 68% of people who download on-sale books aren’t
reading them right away, they’ll probably get to them eventually, right? Well,
maybe not. 53% of readers admit that there are books on their eReaders that
they’ll probably never get around to reading.
As authors, of course we hope that ours won’t be one of
them! But a lot of eReaders are pretty crowded with unread books.
Nearly a third of us have more than 50 books waiting to be read on our
eReaders
It seems that a quarter of us keep tight control over our
to-be-read pile: 24% of readers have less than 5 unread books on their
eReaders. But almost half of us have more than 20 unread books on our eReaders.
So now that we don’t need to have the shelf space, are we becoming book
hoarders? And more importantly for authors, what does this mean for the chances
that our books are being read?
But surely higher book sales compensate for the lower reading rate?
“Ah!” I hear you say, “but more people download cheaper
books, so even if most don’t read them, the actual number who do will still be
at least as high as those buying the book at full price.” That’s true, if
people do buy at enough 99c/99p books to compensate for the proportion that
they don’t read. But do they?
Smashwords looked at this question in its 2013 study:
http://blog.smashwords.com/2013/05/new-smashwords-survey-helps-authors.html.
It analyzed a sample of over $12 million in sales for a collection of 120,000 Smashwords
ebooks from May 1, 2012 through March 31, 2013.
Smashwords aggregated its sales data from across its retail distribution
network, which included the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo
and Amazon (only about 200 of its 200,000 titles were at Amazon, so Amazon
purchasing habits were under-represented). Data and statistics are rarely
perfect!
The Smashwords data showed that people don’t buy more books
at 99c than they do at $2.99 or $3.99; in fact they buy slightly fewer (but
remember, Amazon is under-represented). The "cheaper books = more
sales" dynamic starts to show when compared to the higher price points – 3.9x as
many 99c books are bought as $10+ books.
We don’t have data to know how price affects sales volume
exclusively at Amazon, but I do have my data for my own books. Over the past
few years I’ve had most of my books in the Kindle Monthly Deals promotions
that Amazon runs in the UK, and on average I sell 6.8x as many books in those
promotions as when they're not in the promotions. However, these books are
heavily marketed by Amazon during the promotion period. They appear along with just 99 other books on the
website’s dedicated sales page and emails go out directly to women’s fiction
fans with links to the book’s Amazon page. So it’s hard to know how much of the
additional sales volume is because of the price and how much is because Amazon
pushes the book in front of its millions of customers. What is true is that
most books whose prices are reduced to 99c/99p don’t get the benefit of the
Amazon marketing machine.
More than 40% of book buyers read mostly 99c/99p books
99c/99p or less books account for nearly all the books in 20%
of readers’ eLibraries. Another 22% read mostly on-sale books.
Two thirds of people read a full-price book soon after they’ve bought it
In contrast to 99c/99p books, which are read promptly by 28%
of people, 67% of those who buy full-priced books read them soon after they’ve
bought them. This might be because they searched for the book they wanted to
read next and bought it, or maybe because they want to read the book they’ve
just paid full price for. We don’t know.
I guess the main conclusion that I drew from these results
is that because two-thirds of 99c/99p books aren’t read when they’re first
downloaded, I need to make sure that enough additional books will sell to
compensate for the lower reading rate. How to do that? Well, that’s another
question altogether!
I hope you found this interesting. Please don’t
email/tweet/FB me to take issue with the survey design or results. I put it
together to help me answer a question I had, and am sharing the results because
several people have asked for them. Do feel free to share the information if
you’d like to.
*This is a small-scale survey, meant to be a snapshot rather
than a statistically robust study: 391 people, who are men and women of
different ages from different countries, responded in a 24 hour period. They
self-selected to answer the survey when it was posted on Facebook and
Twitter. According to statistics bods, a
sample of 384 makes for a statistically survey size that is representative of
the US and UK eReading population.
