USA Kindle Store Analysis January 7 2013
Every once in a while, I want to check in on the bestseller list in the Kindle store to see what’s happening.
I last did this on November 18, 2012…and a lot has changed in just a couple of months!
Back then, I analyzed the top twenty. This time I did the top fifty:
| Rank | Publisher | Price | Agency? |
| 1 | Indie | 3.99 | No |
| 2 | Hachette | 3.99 | No |
| 3 | Indie | 0.99 | No |
| 4 | Random House | 12.99 | Yes |
| 5 | Indie? | 3.99 | No |
| 6 | Indie | 0.99 | No |
| 7 | Indie? | 3.99 | No |
| 8 | Scholastic | 5.99 | No |
| 9 | Hachette | 9.2 | No |
| 10 | Scholastic | 5 | No |
| 11 | Scholastic | 5.99 | No |
| 12 | Simon & Schuster | 3.99 | No |
| 13 | AmazonCrossing | 3.99 | No |
| 14 | Random House | 9.99 | Yes |
| 15 | Houghton | 7.99 | No |
| 16 | Thomas & Mercer | $1.99 | No |
| 17 | Random House | 12.99 | Yes |
| 18 | Montlake | 2.99 | No |
| 19 | Indie | 0.99 | No |
| 20 | Hachette | 8.28 | No |
| 21 | Hachette | 9.2 | No |
| 22 | Hachette | 8.28 | No |
| 23 | Simon & Schuster | 3.99 | No |
| 24 | Simon & Schuster | 7.99 | No |
| 25 | Hachette | 8.89 | No |
| 26 | Indie | 3.99 | No |
| 27 | Indie? | 0.99 | No |
| 28 | Indie | 2.99 | No |
| 29 | Indie | 3.99 | No |
| 30 | Indie | 0.99 | No |
| 31 | Indie? | 6.65 | No |
| 32 | Random House | 12.99 | Yes |
| 33 | Montlake | 2.99 | No |
| 34 | Penguin | 9.99 | Yes |
| 35 | Indie? | 3.99 | No |
| 36 | Penguin | 12.99 | Yes |
| 37 | Indie | 0.99 | No |
| 38 | Algonquin | 6.99 | No |
| 39 | Penguin | 9.99 | Yes |
| 40 | Montlake | 1.99 | No |
| 41 | Montlake | 3.19 | No |
| 42 | Macmillan | 2.99 | Yes |
| 43 | Penguin | 14.99 | Yes |
| 44 | Penguin | 10.99 | Yes |
| 45 | Indie | 2.99 | No |
| 46 | Houghton | 8.63 | No |
| 47 | Indie? | 2.99 | No |
| 48 | HarperCollins | 2.99 | No |
| 49 | Hachette | 3.99 | No |
| 50 | Macmillan | 11.99 | Yes |
In November, nine of the top twenty were Agency Model books…45%. Right now? Three of the top twenty…that’s only a third of the last number, and only 15%!
Looking at the top fifty, the Agency Model books are only 22%.
That is partially, of course, a result of the DoJ (Department of Justice) getting settlements from publishers. While we don’t see the impact yet, Penguin has agreed to settle…and if there merger with Random House is approved, Random House would also be under the same conditions. That hasn’t all happened yet, but it’s pretty likely. If that had been the case now, only two out of the fifty would have been Agency Model…only four percent. They are both from Macmillan, and that publisher (along with Apple) is still fighting the DoJ.
Non-Agency Model books are ranked higher than the Agency Model ones: the average for the Agency Model books is 32.3, for non-Agency Model, it’s 23.6. Lower numbers are better, since the #1 ranked seller is doing better than the #50 ranked seller.
The average price is also very different. Agency Model books average $11.17, and non-Agency Model books average $4.47.
Looking at the distribution of publishers, that is also astonishingly different from the pre-Kindle days. AmazonCrossing, Thomas & Mercer, and Montlake are all traditionally published books from Amazon. Six of the top fifty are Amazon tradpubs…that’s twelve percent! That is more than any of the Big Six tradpubs except for Hachette, which has seven.
I counted ones as indies if they didn’t have a publisher or the publisher’s name was the same as the author’s name. The ones where I wasn’t sure had a different name, but were likely to be indies.
If we count the ten I called indies as published by Amazon, we are up to sixteen out of fifty. If the six indie question marks are also indies, that gets us to twenty-two out of fifty…very interesting for the bargaining dynamics, even though I am only looking at the top fifty.
So I could compare to November, I also looked at features for the twenty. It’s worth noting that these may not be the same as the top twenty out of fifty above, since it updates every hour and I did this analysis later in the day.
| Rank | TTS | X-Ray | Lending | KOLL | WSV |
| 1 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| 2 | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| 3 | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| 4 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| 5 | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| 6 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| 7 | Yes | No | Yes | No | No |
| 8 | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| 9 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| 10 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 11 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 12 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 13 | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| 14 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| 15 | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| 16 | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| 17 | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| 18 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 19 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| 20 | No | Yes | No | No | No |
- TTS: 85% (in November: 85%)
- X-Ray: 95% (in November: 90%)
- Lending: 55% (in November 45%)
- KOLL (Kindle Owners’ Lending Library): 35% (in November: 25%)
- WSV (Whispersync for Voice): 50% (in November: 45%)
Interesting! Every feature either stayed the same or increased. I think some of these features do matter to people. I also want to point out that The Hunger Games trilogy is on this list (published by Scholastic), and they are yeses in every one of these categories. They’ve been selling for a very long time, and it’s possible that having these features have helped sustain the Kindle sales (although there are other factors, like the movie).
Average ranks (the total average is 10.5…any number lower than that suggests that the feature is helping rankings)
- TTS: 10.6
- X-Ray: 10.7
- Lending: 10.1
- KOLL: 13.3
- WSV: 10.9
Within the top twenty, the features didn’t seem to make much difference to rank…except that books in the KOLL did noticeably worse.
The times are changing…Amazon may not need the publishers as much as they used to need them as time goes by. Will publishers figure out a way not to need Amazon? Perhaps…the good new is, they both need us readers. 
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
January 8, 2013 at 5:17 am |
If BN goes down, publishers will be in a world of hurt. In the mass market segment they are already dependent on Amazon for a big part of their sales. Your stats also show indies on the rise, which to me suggests they may not be getting as much quality source material — as more and more authors forego the the tradpub route for direct publishing.
One curious thing I noticed over the weekend was that a fair number of older backlist titles from the 30s and 40s (still under copyright) are not available as kindle ebooks only as epub titles from places like Google and BN. I wonder what game the tradpubs think they are playing at there??
January 8, 2013 at 2:04 pm |
Thanks for writing, Edward!
One of the questions is whether other channels can replace Barnes & Noble in terms of paperbook sales, and I do think that’s possible. This is just taking your postulate that B&N goes down…certainly, people are busily writing obits for it right now, but it might be too soon to tell. They might successfully shift to non-book items (more than they already have). There might be a time when a parent says to a child, “I remember when this store mostly sold books…made out of paper.”
The internet may be one successful replacement channel: tradpubs (traditional publishers) could sell p-books directly, and certainly, Amazon is still selling a lot of them. My reader Roger’s advocacy of print-on-demand could become a market force.
Your concern about what I have referred to as the different “farm team” is a really significant issue, and one about which, I am sure, publishers are thinking in depth. If an author doesn’t need the publisher to promote the book for it to sell, and if people are willing to buy essentially unedited, unproofread books, what can the publishers offer a new (or established) author to get them to go with them? Advances are still part of it…hm, this might be worth its own post.
Could you give me a couple of examples of those books? Certainly, Amazon has exclusive titles, even in well-known backlist (like the Ian Fleming James Bond books and the Ed McBain Precinct 87 books), but I’d like to look at this a bit more. Oh, I should say, Amazon isn’t the exclusive sales channel on those (at least on the paper versions).
January 10, 2013 at 6:45 pm
Two titles:
“The Quiet America” by Grahame Greene
“Decline and Fall\” by Evelyn Waugh
The former is available in both pdf and epub from Google books; the latter only in a very heavily DRMd epub also from Google although the DRM issues (very restrictive # of devices) is probably due to the publisher: Hachette.
I would also point out that these aren’t exactly out of the way backlist titles
On the direct publishing thing I would just make a couple of comments.
There are plenty of computer programs that do copy editing, and while not perfect, they may outweigh any perceived advantage of having a costly human do it for you.
Most authors with tradpubs don’t get advances (or only pitifully small ones) it’s only the big names who get them (and ironically they probably don’t need them).
Lastly I’ve been buying a lot of science fiction and mysteries over the last few years from indies; while the copy editing and language choices are not perfect, neither have they been all that bad — they certainly don’t detract from the enjoyment of the material (well at least for me:D ).
One of the things that BN tried to shift to was music and videos. Everywhere I go (Target, Walmart, BN, etc) the amount of shelf space and available music and video product has declined markedly. Recently I was in a couple of Books a Million stores, and my local BN. The shelf space given over to books seemed down, and other “stuff” seemed up. At the BN store about 20% of the floor space was just empty! I suspect they’re just running out the lease there.
There was some news that smaller indie booksellers had done well in 2012. I don’t know whether indies will pick up the slack or not. My own long view is that in the mass market segment, pbooks are probably doomed. The only question for me is one of timing.
January 8, 2013 at 8:09 pm |
I wonder how long it will be before Random Penguin settles? I’ve been waiting FOREVER for the Travis McGee novels to be available. Today is the day!. I’d already preordered the first book in the series. It downloaded at a price of $11.99, which is kind of high for a book originally published 39 years ago. The paperback edition is only $7.99! The book is being reissued through Random House. I’d planned to get the whole series on Kindle, but do I wait to see if the price goes down when the “Price set by publisher” notation goes away? Or do I risk that it goes even higher? Please polish up that amazing crystal ball of yours and give me your best prediction.
January 9, 2013 at 12:10 pm |
Hello, I have unsubscribed twice but am still getting your postings – please could you remove my details from your mailing list?
Regards Michelle Ingham
January 9, 2013 at 3:17 pm |
Thanks for writing, Michelle!
I’m sorry to hear you are having a problem. Unfortunately, I have no access to who subscribes, and can’t affect subscriptions.
As to who can fix it, it depends on how you are getting it. If you subscribed through Amazon’s Kindle store, you can contact them at
http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport
If you are getting it through an RSS (Really Simple Syndicaton) feed, I’d check with wherever you started that. It might be through WordPress, it might be through Google, just as two examples.
When I’ve worked with subscriptions like that, I know it sometimes takes a couple of days…if you don’t get it resolved, contact me again and let me know how you subscribed, and I’ll try and research it for you.
January 12, 2013 at 5:08 am |
[...] I did a recent analysis of the top fifty bestsellers in the USA Kindle store, 22 of them (44%) weren’t from the big traditional publishers [...]