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I'm Contributors Editor at TheStreet.com, a business news, market data and stock analysis website. I was Editorial Director of Digital Book World, a website dedicated to covering the world of e-books and digital publishing. I've been a reader since 1986, a journalist since 2005 and an e-reader since 2011. I live and work in New York City.

Contact Jeremy Greenfield

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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Which Publishers Are the Best at Selling Ebooks in 2013?

Everyone knows that The Hunger Games was a huge hit in 2011 and 2012 and that the next movie based on the series, Catching Fire, comes out soon, but who knows which publisher has been the beneficiary of such success?

Everyone knows self-publishing is growing by leaps and bounds, but who can say how well self-published authors in aggregate are doing against the big publishing houses?

To answer these questions, we at Digital Book World created Ebook Publisher Power Rankings to rank how well each publisher is doing at ebook sales. The methodology is simple: look at the 13 weekly top-25 ebook best-seller lists from the first quarter of 2013 and count how many times each publisher had a title that appeared on the list.

Here are the top-five publishers so far in 2013:

1. Hachette: 88 appearances
2. Random House: 87 appearances
3. Penguin: 42 appearances
4. Self-published: 22 appearances
5. Macmillan: 18 appearances

See the rest of the list.

 

Three things we learned:

1. Self-published books are making more waves this year than ever before. Some 7% of all weekly best-sellers were self-published in the first quarter of 2013 and two No. 1 best-sellers in that time. In the weeks since, there have already been two more No. 1 best-selling self-published ebooks.

2. Penguin Random House will dominate the best-seller list when the merger between the two large publishers closes in the second half of 2013. Between the two of them, they published 40% of the best-sellers in the first quarter of 2013.

3. Harlequin has begun to figure out how to find mass-market success with ebooks. Harlequin has not benefited from the rise of ebooks despite the huge popularity of romance ebooks. The largest publisher of romance titles has seen more of its paperback business disappear than it has been able to replace with a rise in ebook sales so far. But in the first quarter of 2013, Harlequin had a handful of hits on the best-seller list, indicating that it might be turning its digital performance around.

Read more.

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