The Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing SurveyHow are you doing as a self-publisher?

It’s a hard question to answer isn’t it? What are you measuring against?

Steven Lewis, better known as The Taleist to many of you, is taking a professional snapshot of the self-publishing industry.

There are self-publishing authors like JA Konrath, Amanda Hocking, John Locke and (on a smaller but perfectly formed scale) Joanna Penn who are generous with their figures but they’re selling books from the tens of thousands to the millions. So does that mean you’re a failure if your figures are more modest? Or are you actually doing better than most? What is the average royalty earning for self-publishing authors? How long does it take for a self-published book to reach peak sales?

What are the most successful authors doing to market their books?

The Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey will have the answers.

Steven has partnered with Dave Cornford, an experienced consumer researcher and himself a self-publishing author and designed a survey that asks:

Who is self-publishing? (age, sex, background, experience)
How are we doing it? (full time, part time, on what platforms)
Why are we doing it? (can’t find a publisher, had a publisher but preferred to go indie, indie all the way!)
What’s working for us? (having more books for sale, marketing like a fiend, giving books away)
How are we doing? (sales and revenue)
Drawing on Dave’s experience we’re asking these questions in a way that we can follow all sorts of interesting threads, like looking for what successfully self-publishing authors have in common.

We need your help.
There are 61 questions in the survey so it will take you a little time to complete it but just imagine how useful it will be to have a professional snapshot of what our “industry” looks like and whether you’re on the right path.

The target is to reach 1,000 self-published authors to have a truly meaningful amount of data to work from. To do that we need your help.

If you would like to assist, please go to The Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey to participate in this worthwhile project.

The Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey
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One thought on “The Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey

  • 18/02/2012 at 11:11 am
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    I read the article in question yesterday. One thing its author pointed out, which makes complete sense to me, was that the sales figures for so-called ‘successful’ indie authors like Konrath are based purely on what they themselves tell everyone.

    This makes it difficult in the extreme for someone interested in collecting the official data necessary, to gain a true understanding of exactly how well the self promoting indie author is really doing.

    Lets face it, if you are an indie, you need to promote yourself like crazy. High figures impress after all – god knows why. I tend to take everything Joe Konrath says on his blog with a very large grain of salt.

    In my own case the sales of my first published science fiction novel are pretty much as expected for a first timer – in the high hundreds.

    I use a small press publisher. I’m not confident enough with technology to use any of the self publishing software currently available. Although, given the way my publisher is operating at the moment – exceeding slow – I may just have to become a self publisher.

    With two novel length works awaiting publication. I’ve already been told that at best it will be late 2013 or even 2014 before the first of them gets published!

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