The Coming World for Indie Writers
A New Paradigm with Plenty of Change Around the Corner
For creators/writers, let’s start with the good news. Publishing 2023 and beyond remains a growth industry according to Statista.
The big publishers will continue to dominate but the avenues for non-traditional publishing expand as well. It creates both opportunities and questions about the best path(s) to go.
Jane Friedman has a great chart for what she calls Key Book Publishing Paths. In it, she lays out her breakdown of publishing avenues for writers. While I focus on what she refers to as indie self-publishing, I found her chart useful to determine where I want to focus my efforts. While I don’t necessarily agree with her separation of social publishing from indie but that’s only a quibble. She does point out that “social forms of publishing increasingly have monetization built in, such as Patreon”.
Since I believe that serialization of content is the coming wave for creators (in writing, comics, and other content), I’ll add my 2 cents. I’m pushing into other spots of social publishing like Wattpad, Web Novel, Scribble Hub, and, of course, SUBSTACK. Add to this list is spots for the comic/graphic novel creators including WebToon, Tumblr, and Tapas (I’m sure I’m missing a couple).
Several other publications I found tried to give predictions on where the trends for authors heading in the future. Here’s my take on some of the items for the next few years. First and foremost in assessing how to respond to these paths means determining your ability to balance even more while maintaining your writing and creating. Fair warning, in my experience, more opportunities also require more time/effort.
Multi-format books
From what I’m seeing, the broadening avenues for readers/users to get to your works means an indie author must juggle a lot of balls in the air. Because of the many formats available, (paperback, ebook, web novel, audiobook, etc.), I believe it’s important to review your strategy against where the market is going and where you have time/money to get the best bang for your marketing efforts.
Traditional publishing remains the dominant market with ebooks continuing to slowly gain market share. This blog lays out the details for you. The interesting stat for me was the nearly identical market share between ebooks (11.3%) and audiobooks (9.2%).
Since the print market is 71% of the total market, I need to make sure I’m promoting my print books (even if the return isn’t as profitable as ebooks). As an indie writer without name recognition, it’s a high hurdle to get into the bookstores.
Interesting stat to reflect this trend toward audiobooks: One-in-five Americans listened to a book in 2021
In my case, I want to see if an audiobook or two is worth it to push into such a format.
Podcasting and TikTok
I found this article from Jason Hamilton about TikTok. Looking over the information, it appears that getting involved with BookTok (a subculture of TikTok) with the hashtag #booktok can benefit authors. If you like to talk and put up videos, it could be a great place for those trying to push into the younger market.
Since I have a face for radio, I don’t see myself doing any video work, however, it might be useful from an advertising perspective. I think the author of the article does a good job of explaining the upside and downsides of the push into TikTok.
As for Podcasting (something TikTok is getting into), it appears to be a good avenue for building a relationship with readers. Again, like social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) taking this avenue will require finding more hours in the day or subtracting time from other things.
As an author or creator, building up your reader list would involve bringing them benefits of some type. Just off the top, I can see book reviews or interviews with other authors in your genre. Perhaps a round robin scenario can come with other writers interested in podcasts, or a place for writers to share poems and shorter pieces of work.
This also ties into a strategy of bringing in new readers and giving seasoned readers a new way to enjoy the stories they love.
Non-Fiction versus Fiction
Non-fiction books outsell fiction by a margin of nearly 3-to-2. Religious books and inspirational stories are the best sellers in this segment. Plus over 50% of all published books are related to education and science.
Those statistics don’t mean a lot to me since I write fiction but it does show the competition for the readers and their preferences at a high level. As an indie writer, I’m curious how many other indies write in the non-fiction category.
Fiction genres making the most money
I found this tidbit about Amazon sales by genre from 2022. I’m not surprised by the breakdown other than the relatively low number on horror.
Romance and erotica ($1.44 billion)
Crime and mystery ($728.2 million)
Religious and inspirational ($720 million)
Science fiction and fantasy ($590.2 million)
Horror ($79.6 million)
Overall, it looks like such a lucrative market for writers to make money. But looks are deceiving, at least in my case. Thinking as a new writer, I supposed you might use the numbers to focus your efforts. Obviously, it’s not that straightforward since someone might find the idea of writing one of the genres either tedious or unfulfilling. Still, the data does give one something to shoot for.