2025 Author Survey Results

Ferol Vernon (00:38)

Hello and welcome to the Written Word Media podcast. I am Ferol Vernon here with Ricci as always. Today’s episode is a really interesting one. So today we are going through the annual Written Word Media author survey. So Ricci this is a really exciting pod and a really exciting event for us each year because we actually get to see what authors care about, what they’re doing, what they’re spending, where they’re spending their time. So it’s a really, really exciting time.

Ricci (01:06)

Yes, I am super psyched about this. We have been running this author survey since 2016. So a pretty long time. And I remember the very first time that we did it and how thrilled we were when we got our first results back. And back then, I think it was, you know, a few hundred. This year, as always, we ran it. We, you know, try to distribute the survey to as many people as possible. And I’ll talk a little bit about where it was distributed.

⁓ but we got over 1300 responses. so it’s a ready, robust data set and the survey itself, asks a ton of questions, covering everything from income to KU versus not KU to genre to direct sales, to marketing. So it covers all the pertinent areas that authors care about and that authors are dealing with on a daily basis as part of their author business.

Ferol Vernon (02:01)

Yeah, it’s really exciting. so one of the things usually Ricci and I are just talking, but we may, for those of you watching on video, you may see us look over to the side because there’s a lot of data. So we have notes this time and we’ll go over them. But let’s go in, Ricci, you said you’re going to talk about like who took the survey. So I think that’s an important place to start before we get into like what the findings are, who took the survey, how did we get it out there so that the audience knows the distribution for the survey.

Ricci (02:02)

Okay.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I’m a data geek. love data. And every year when we put the data out, there are other data geeks out there who have very specific questions and, you want to know who took it and what the biases are and all of that. So we’re to start right off with that. Prefers it so you know who took it and what potential biases might be in the data. So total responses, 1,346, so almost 1,350 authors took this survey. Of those,

96 % were published and 4 % have not been published. the data skews very, very heavily to ⁓ authors who actually have at least one published book. What we did is we set the survey up as we always do every year. We send it out to all of the authors on the written word media mailing list. We also put it out on all of our social media. In addition to that,

⁓ Ally sends out the email ill for us, and so did a bunch of our partners, including people like James Blatch of the self-publishing show. So we try to not only have it be our audience, we try and have a more diverse audience as much as possible. And we do know that a significant amount of responses came from our audience, but also ⁓ audiences and authors who are not on our list. When you do look at the data,

Some of the limitations that I want to talk about are one is just the sample bias. So the survey over represents serious prolific indie authors. For sure, that is our audience. ⁓ And that traditionally has been the people who answered the survey. The second caveat is that everything is self-reported. So we don’t go in and actually, you know, validate whether what authors are saying is true, especially on the

income side. And then the last thing I wanted to say is correlation is not always the same as causation. So we are very careful when we look at the data to say, we see a correlation here, or we think there’s statistical significance and maybe some causation here. And we will try and point out those differences as we go through the data.

Ferol Vernon (04:29)

Yeah, that’s really important. We always get a few people each year who get on us about the sort of the statistical sampling. And like this is not a clinical trial, right? is we’re doing a service for the industry. We’re trying to get what independent authors are doing and then give that information back to the community in a way that’s digestible and add our own commentary on it so that we can sort of tell people not just what the data says, but what we’re seeing on the ground and how that matches with our anecdotal interactions with authors as well.

Ricci (04:56)

Yeah, for sure. So now that we’ve covered who took it and what some of the limitations of the data is, I would love to jump in and talk about some of the responses that we got and some of the trends that we’re seeing.

Ferol Vernon (05:06)

Yeah, so let’s do it. So let’s start with ⁓ sort of like what is the most important, at least for a lot of authors, which is income. And so we asked authors what they earned. Again, caveat from before, this is self-reported. But authors, as we know, to be an honest and genuine bunch, so we feel pretty good about it.

So this question asked authors what their monthly income was. They put in a number. And then when we did data analysis on it, we bucketed it so that you’ll see as we go through, there’s kind of five buckets of earnings that we use throughout the survey. And we often refer to sort of high earners and low earners throughout the survey. So you’ll hear that. But Ricci, how do we divide those income brackets? Like, how do we set that up for authors moving forward?

Ricci (05:48)

Yeah, so we just find it easier to simplify this. So the very first income bracket or where author is making $100 or less and about 44% of authors fit into that bracket itself. We then went from $100 to $1,000 and we had 28% of authors sitting in that bracket. Then from

$1,000 to $5,000 a month. had 15% of authors earning that amount and then 13% of authors earning over $5,000 a month. So that’s a lot of numbers. So let me simplify it even further, which is to say that just under half of the authors who took the survey are making $100 or less a month. So not significant income from their books yet. And we’ll talk about why that is.

And then we had about close to 30% of authors who are making between $100 and $1,000 a month. So they’re really starting to scale their business. And then we had almost another 30% of authors who are earning kind of significant amounts of money from their business, anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 or $15,000 a month. So a much higher dollar amount.

Ferol Vernon (07:06)

Right. Yeah. And so there’s, you know, somewhere in that sort of high earning category is where we start to see writers go full time, right? They quit their day job and they start to be full time. So those are interesting brackets to look at because the people that are sort of in that have typically, you know, quote unquote, succeeded. You know, only one measure of success is financial, but they have achieved at least that metric. And for a lot of authors in that lower bracket, that’s what they’re trying to achieve, right? They’re trying to make sure that can make a living off their writing. And that’s a goal.

So that’s good set up. So let’s talk a little bit about catalog because that was one of the things that was really like at the beginning of the survey was like, how many books do you have and how does that relate to your income? And this is something that, you know, the industry has been talking about forever. But talk to me about that. Like how many books are authors writing and how do those patterns match up with earning?

Ricci (07:54)

Yes so unsurprisingly the fewer books you have the less you earn and the more books you have the more you earn so you know what does you had one to four books. I have the orders who had less than four bucks eighty percent of those fall into the under one hundred dollar a month back it or another way to say that is. Authors earning under a hundred dollars usually have one two or three books

Ferol Vernon (08:01)

Yeah.

Ricci (08:19)

Once you have five to nine books, the median income then jumps to around $50 a month and more authors enter that $100 to $1000 range. And then at 10 plus books, that’s where you start to see this ramp up in income where authors start earning significantly more. And then when you look at authors who have 25 plus books,

The median income there is about $3,000 a month and more than 40 % of those earn over $5,000.

Ferol Vernon (08:51)

Yeah. And so this is a really interesting trend because this is something, I’m just coming back from Author Nation, which is a large indie author conference in Las Vegas. And that conference used to be called 20 Books to 50K. And that whole concept behind that was, once you had 20 books in your catalog, you could be earning about $50,000. And that would be sort of enough to live on. With inflation, maybe that number has changed a little bit. But the catalog size is a really important thing. And what the data is not saying is that it’s impossible.

to make money when you have only a few books, right? But it is saying that the pattern that we see is that the more books you have in your catalog, the more likely are you to be a high earner. And so often when we talk to authors, one of the things to say is like, you know, what’s the next best thing we should do? And we’ll talk about a lot of those things throughout the pod, but one of them is writing the next book, right? And I think sometimes authors are, you know, writing a book’s hard, right? And once they’re done, it’s like, well, I want to take a break. And so hearing that isn’t always

as inspiring, I think it really shows from the high earning authors that being prolific matters.

Ricci (09:53)

Yeah and i think the other piece here is that writing into series is where when you look at the very high earners not only do they have many books but those books are part of a series and the reason that that is so effective is because when you have a series of you know seven ten fifteen books the amount of money you’re spending on marketing gets amortized across all of those books so you see a much bigger bang for your marketing back so.

If you only have one book and you let’s just say run a promo and you’re spending a hundred dollars you spend a hundred dollars for that promo and all you can sell is one book and when that reader finishes that book they can’t buy anything else from you so the the value of a reader to you is capped and is fairly low because you only have one book once you start having a series if you spend you buy a promo and but now that.

reader finishes book one and they can go on to buy book two and three and four and five, you can actually make a lot more money off of that reader and you’re actually establishing a relationship where you have a fan who’s going to read everything that you put out. And so you see this flywheel start to turn and it’s actually exponential. It’s not incremental in my experience in that, you know, in the beginning it’s like, yes, one book and then two book and it’s kind of slow.

and then you reach some tipping point where you have enough books in the series that all of a sudden the same marketing gives you a much larger boost of royalties that come in through the door. And that’s what you’re seeing with those earners who are making over $5,000 a month. And you’re seeing it in a really big way with those who are making 10, 15, $20,000 a month.

Ferol Vernon (11:31)

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. you think, at least in the industry, always like you think about the product that you’re selling is the book, right? But I think what we’re seeing is really the product that you’re selling is the series, right? And so the series, like let’s say you’ve got 10 books in a series and they’re all 2.99, that’s $30 product, right, that you’re selling, right? Instead of a $3 product that you’re selling. And that’s the way that we encourage authors to think about it, right? Is like that series as a whole product, and you see it sometimes like,

when it’s actually the same thing when authors do box sets, right? Which are really, really popular and really, really work. But your whole series is your product. So when you think about marketing, and that’s what we’re seeing with these successful authors, that’s really where a lot of the bulk of the catalog comes from is additional books in the same series.

Ricci (12:16)

Yeah, and I do want to be careful about how we define success. So some authors deem success as making tens of thousands of dollars a month, but we actually did look at the motivation behind, we did ask a question in the survey as to what is your motivation for publishing books? And for a significant number of authors, the motivation is not to make money.

So your definition of success might not be making a lot of royalties every month. It might be the fact that you are putting a book out into the world. It might be the fact that this is a hobby and a passion project for you that you enjoy spending time on.

for every author, the definition of success is different. What we’re talking about right now is if your definition of success is to make a lot of money, then quote unquote, the successful authors are writing into series.

Ferol Vernon (13:08)

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. like, everybody’s got different motivations. And I think the other thing is that everybody has different motivations at different points in time, right? And some of these early career authors, I think you said something important earlier in the pod about, you know, they haven’t achieved some of that success yet, right? And people might start with an idea for a book because they wanted to get it out there. And then they might realize, hey, this is something that I can actually make money on. then, then the goal changes from sort of something more passion driven to something more financially driven. And that’s okay. Both are okay.

But we have authors who filled out the survey that are kind of in both camps. I think that’s an important point to make. I’m glad you brought that up.

Ricci (13:43)

Yeah, I’m just looking at the data now and of the respondents, only 41 % said, I want to make money from my book as the primary motivation, right? And unsurprisingly, there was a very strong correlation between people who said, I want to make money from my book, who are making money from their book. So if your goal is, want to make money from my book, then if you follow through with a strategy that you are publishing multiple books and you’re investing in the business, you will end up.

Your odds will increase of actually making money. But when we look at the other motivations, 20 % of people said, I want my story to be told. So part of that is just, you you just want to get your story out in the world. You have a story inside of you that you feel like you need to share. Almost 17 % said, I want to be a well-known author. And then another 16 % said, writing is a hobby that I enjoy. So the vast majority of authors, not the vast

Ferol Vernon (14:21)

Mm-mm.

Ricci (14:39)

but 60 % of authors who answered the survey did not say making money from their book was a primary motivation. So when we are looking at this in terms of income brackets, for some authors, how much income they’re making is not actually the marker of success for them.

Ferol Vernon (14:55)

Yeah, I think that’s important. like, you know, a thing for authors to know is that if your goals are financially driven, that’s okay, right? And then you need to treat your author business like what it actually is, which is a small business and you invest in small business, invest in marketing and accounting and all these things. And then there’s a lot of people where there’s different motivation, I think, you know, it’s different for everybody. So, you know, we’re here to support all those kinds of authors.

Ricci moving on from income, one of the other…

sort of really striking trends that we saw was the role of email, right? And so email is something that we obviously believe in very strongly. We run an email-based business. We know it works. But I think what was interesting was how different certain authors agree with that or potentially need to learn a little bit about email as they’re trying to get into more marketing.

set that up differently.

Ricci (15:45)

No, I’m just trying to find the data.

Ferol Vernon (15:47)

It’s section three.

Ricci (15:49)

Yeah, so the data was pretty clear that having an email list is very important if you want to make money from your books or if you want to sell more books. So when we looked at published authors, those with an email list earned a medium of $300 a month, whereas those without earned $15 a month. This is just on the aggregate. So that’s a 20 times different. That just shows you the difference between having an email list and not having an email list.

And then when we look at how effective authors think email is, the gap grows wider. So when we looked at what we’ll call the high earners, authors making over $10,000 a month, they ranked newsletters as having the highest effectiveness, their own personal newsletter as a 4.3 out of five, which we’ll get to some of these other things in a minute. So they think it’s the most powerful email. They think it’s the most powerful marketing tool. And so they spend a lot of time investing in and building that.

list. And also when you look at the list size of authors who are making over $10,000 per month, it’s significantly larger than any other authors in the groupings. When you looked at authors who are still in those early stages of maybe making a hundred bucks or under a month, they only thought newsletters effectiveness was about a 2.7. So almost half as effective. because they don’t believe email

Newsletters are important. They’re not investing in email newsletters. And I think they don’t realize how important it is. And we have a whole podcast series on this. It was one of the first ones that we recorded because we are huge advocates of email marketing. It just works and it’s the most cost efficient. And we think every author, no matter how early in their career should be investing in their list. It’s never too early to start. You can start building your list before you even publish your book.

Ferol Vernon (17:25)

Yeah.

Ricci (17:43)

⁓ And I would say you should. And so to learn more about how to do that and how to do that effectively, please go back and listen to some of the pods that we’ve recorded on that topic.

Ferol Vernon (17:53)

Yeah, and I think it bears mentioning this because I think that the discrepancy that you mentioned between high earners and low earners is really striking, right? Because it’s really, I think, potentially a perception problem that you were addressing where people aren’t sure that like, is managing email is really worth it? And I think we’ll talk a little bit more about some of these other techniques. But when you’re weighing investment of your time in an email list or like, say, your metadata or say something else,

Like it really is bang for buck one of the better places. And we have authors write in all the time who say like, you know, Hey, well, you know, the best thing I do is send is send to my own email list. And that’s cause those people are already fans right there, like prime to like your stuff. So I think it’s really, really important. So that was really striking. what are like, like moving on to more general marketing topics, because email was sort of, sort of popped out, but there’s a lot of other stuff that the authors are using for marketing, obviously.

We’re marketing company, so this is an area of very big interest for us. So let’s talk a bit, what were some of the things that authors are using and what’s working and what’s not.

Ricci (18:57)

Yeah, and so how we framed this out is we gave authors a list of a bunch of different marketing tactics, everything from promo sites like ours to TikTok, to social media, to Kickstarter campaigns, and asked them to rank it on how effective they were finding those marketing tactics. And so what we found is that having your own email list

obviously is the most effective for authors. And then after that, promo sites like ours and like some of the others that are out there, which tracks because promo sites are just email lists that you don’t own. You’re basically, you know, renting out our audience. After that, we had Facebook ads. So let’s see, we have email.

in first place, followed by Facebook ads in second place. Bookbub deals, we broke out separately, even though Bookbub is technically a promo site, it’s kind of in its own category due to how exclusive it is and the high price point. So Bookbub deals came in third. We then have lead magnets. So I thought that was an interesting one and also makes sense because using lead magnets both helps you build your email list.

but also helps you build a fandom, right? People actually go in, use the lead magnet, read your book, and then are interested in reading more of your work. So those were the marketing tactics that were ranked pretty highly. Some of the ones that were ranked more low that were surprising,

Amazon ads were actually not ranked very highly. That was surprising to me. Those were more skewed or perceived to be less effective. The same goes for Bookbub ads. Bookbub has its own ad platform where you can advertise. So that was really interesting because Bookbub promos were ranked high whereas Bookbub ads were ranked lower.

Ferol Vernon (20:26)

Hmm, interesting.

Yeah.

Ricci (20:45)

newsletter swaps with other authors. ⁓ That was ranked a little lower than lead magnets. ⁓ do know a lot of authors do this and I do think they are quite effective, but they were ranked more on the lower end. And then running a Kickstarter campaign was ranked the lowest. ⁓ And that’s not that surprising because I think a Kickstarter campaign, it’s binary.

Ferol Vernon (20:48)

Hmm, that was ranked low.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Ricci (21:11)

It either works great or it doesn’t work at all. There’s no middle ground. Whereas with some of these others, know, people ranked it on one to five. Some of these others, kind of see what you would deem as a normal distribution. When it comes to Kickstarter, was like a lot of people ranked it as one, like terrible. And then you had a subset of people who ranked it really high, but there’s not as much kind of, it did okay. There’s no average results on Kickstarter. You either kill it or you don’t.

Ferol Vernon (21:11)

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and Kickstarter is one of those platforms where you really kind of have to know the nuances of it to make it work for you. And I think a lot of authors have tried it or thought about it. And it’s really not one of those things that you can do where like, I’ll just kind of try it see how it goes. You kind of have to like read about it, make sure you understand how it works and really kind of get behind it to make it work. Or some of these other things are a little more plug and play.

Ricci (21:56)

Yeah, for sure. I also think, know, Kickstarter, like anything else is you have to drive traffic to a Kickstarter campaign. So when you start looking at, you know, your return on investment, should you be sending a ton of traffic to Kickstarter to try and get that to work? Or should you invest in driving all of that traffic to your books and just selling more books? I think sometimes it makes more sense to just drive the traffic to your books on your own website or on retailers. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (22:02)

Yeah.

retailers. yeah,

got it.

Next, let’s move on to something that’s always like really interesting to talk about and that is packaging, right? And this is the judge a book by its cover section of the pod that we’re getting into. you know, without giving it away, what did we see when we sort of asked authors about the packaging, sort of the overall product that they’re selling?

Ricci (22:34)

You

Yes we had a few questions around this one of the questions was what do you think is the most important factor in actually selling a book and book cover was the number one factor and it was ranked that way across every type of author so. Yay i’m very excited to see this i’m very happy to see this because it is true right people do judge a book by its cover if your cover. know isn’t isn’t great or doesn’t grab attention.

Ferol Vernon (22:57)

Yeah, we love seeing this.

Ricci (23:07)

If your cover isn’t on genre, like it doesn’t actually tell a reader what kind of book it is, it’s gonna be really, really difficult to convert that reader into a buyer and someone who’s gonna read your book. So cover design was the number one factor. It was ranked that way. We then also asked questions about how much are authors investing in cover design? So if it is such an important factor, is there a difference? Yeah. And so…

Ferol Vernon (23:10)

Yeah, so important.

Yeah, this was fascinating, I thought.

Ricci (23:32)

What we found, and again, this wasn’t super surprising, is that among the high earners, most spend between 250 and $500. Some spend between 500 and $1,000. But among the high earners, they are investing at least $250 in a book cover. There were almost none or very few who spend $0 on a book cover. But when you look at the lower earners,

more than half of those authors spend nothing, like zero dollars or under a hundred dollars on a cover. And we’ll get to edit it in a second, but a lot of low earners don’t spend money on editing either. although everyone recognizes that the cover is important, not everyone is investing in their book cover when they publish a book.

Ferol Vernon (24:06)

I

Ricci (24:24)

And I think this is, makes sense because you’re an author, you’re starting out, maybe you don’t want to invest that much, but because the book cover is going to be the single most important factor in the success of your book, I would say that these findings tell us loud and clear that it’s worth making that investment in the book cover. It’s worth making sure that it’s high quality and on genre. And we see this every day. You know, we’re very inclusive.

Ferol Vernon (24:30)

Yeah.

Ricci (24:50)

When it comes to promos, really believe that every author deserves a shot to get in front of our audience. And so we do not do a lot of gatekeeping. But when authors come to us and they’re disappointed with their results, the first thing we do is look at the book cover and then we look at the price. And the vast majority of times, the book cover is either just not professional enough or the book cover is confusing. So if you’re…

Ferol Vernon (25:03)

Look at that cover, man.

Yeah.

Ricci (25:16)

You publishing a science fiction book there is a way that that book cover should look so that the reader identifies it as science fiction and sometimes what we see is although it is a science fiction book the cover may read something else and so this is in book cover design is an area where you actually don’t want to be. creative or out of the box you want to make sure that when you’re looking at those top. Ten you know best sellers on amazon.

Ferol Vernon (25:35)

You

Ricci (25:42)

that if you put your book in there, it would fit. You don’t want it to stand out in a way that, because usually when it stands out in the, so it’s in a way that’s confusing to the reader.

Ferol Vernon (25:45)

Yeah, not stand up. You don’t want to stand out.

Yeah, so I think that’s exactly right. like, you know, like your cover, like when you’re designing your cover, it shouldn’t be about the plot of the book. It should be about the genre of the book, right? I think that’s the most important distinction for authors to know is like cover should indicate genre. And that’s the deal you’re making with the reader. Hey, I’m looking at this. It’s dark. It’s got white letters. There’s a spaceship on it. Sci-fi like I’m in, right? And that’s what you need to communicate to the reader. And I think, you know, the really striking thing was how many people spent zero.

on their covers. I thought that was really surprising. And I think, you know, I did a little back of the napkin math. like, if you’re if you’re an author who’s you’re thinking about spending, you know, either $100 on a cover, which is kind of in that low earner category, you’re thinking about spending $400 on a cover, which is closer to the higher in the category. That’s, know, like, you know, $300 that you’re trying to make up. So like, how many books do you actually have to sell?

To make up that difference. And so if you think about it’s on the book for $2.99, you’re making about $2 profit on that sale, right? So that’s about 150 extra books. So you got to like kind of think about is spending that 300 extra dollars Like worth is that actually going to increase my sales by 150 copies? I think the answer is usually yes, right for spending an extra few hundred dollars is usually worth the extra sales Obviously, we can’t make any guarantees, but I think it’s just it’s like the thing that sells your book

Right? It is both the cover of your book and it’s the ad for your book. And you have to think about it that way.

Ricci (27:18)

Yeah and what i would say is it you know for authors that are. Don’t have the budget or they’re like i really don’t want to spend money and i know how to use canva or no i know how to use photoshop and i really want to do it myself. If you are going to do it yourself or you’re to have a family member do it for you then take that cover. And show it to somebody objective and ask them what they think right take some feedback and then go back and iterate on that cover do that exercise of comparing your cover to the best selling books in your category.

Ferol Vernon (27:37)

Yeah.

Ricci (27:46)

I think there are some covers that could be designed for zero dollars if you have the skill or if you have, know, a bestie who can do it for you. But the challenge is I think when you have a family member yourself doing it, it now becomes an emotional issue and you’re not willing to change the cover or you’re not willing to improve the cover and you land up getting into this place that is a little stuck.

Ferol Vernon (28:01)

Yes.

Yeah, I remember talking to an author once and this is a very sick. I want to name names was very successful. And the one thing he said, I was asking about his covers and I was like, do you have a cover designer? He yeah, have a cover designer. And I was like, tell me about your process because you’ve sold a lot of things. And he’s like, I just tell him to design the cover and that’s it. And I was like, well, what’s the feedback process? He’s like, no, no, no. He’s like, I don’t get emotionally involved. The person does the cover and I write the book. And that’s sort of the division of labor. And while that is extreme, I thought that was interesting.

⁓ Anecdote, right? Because you have to sort of trust that like the designer is designing something to sell and being, I think your point you made about being emotionally attached can really inhibit you from having a cover that’s actually successful.

Ricci (28:51)

Yeah, yeah, that’s a great story and great advice.

Ferol Vernon (28:53)

Cool.

So you mentioned, editing so briefly. And I thought this was ⁓ similar to cover design in that this is part of the sort of packaging of the book. But what did we find about editing when we surveyed authors?

Ricci (29:09)

Yeah, think similarly, you know, higher earning authors spend money on editing. They do have someone who edits their work. Among low earners, almost half spent nothing on editing. And so same, same idea. You know, the packaging of your book, your book cover, the editing, those are really important. The editing becomes secondary. You need the book cover to sell the book. But then if you sell the book and then a reader starts reading it,

Ferol Vernon (29:20)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Ricci (29:33)

and there are a of typos or it doesn’t flow or there are issues, then you’re gonna lose that reader. They’re gonna stop reading halfway. They’re not gonna go on to buy more of your series. They’re not gonna sign up for your email list. So once you have converted the reader, the editing piece becomes more important.

Ferol Vernon (29:52)

Yeah, and I think the other thing with editing is it can really show up in your reviews. So like I read a lot of indie fiction and I see typos and stuff and I don’t care. Like I like reading interesting, like weird stuff and things that we on our site and that’s fun for me. And so when I see a missed word or something, I don’t really care. But when you look at the reviews for some of those books, there are a lot of people that do care and are vocal about caring, right? And so, know, this book’s full of typos.

And for an author that’s just getting started, that can be super discouraging. And I think it doesn’t mean that the story’s not good or it’s not a good writer, but this is a polished thing. And so I think while there are some readers that will tolerate a certain amount of typos and incorrect language, you really are better off spending a little bit of money and spending a little bit of time upfront to get that done. And one of the other techniques that we’ve heard that’s worked really well for authors that don’t have much of a budget is sharing. So you don’t really want to edit your own work.

But you might have a friend who’s also a writer, and you could edit their work, and they can edit your work. And we’ve seen that work for folks that are really on a budget. But doing your own editing often, it’s really hard to catch problems.

Ricci (30:58)

Okay, so I was trying to find how much authors are actually spending on editing, because it doesn’t have to be a huge investment. as we said, there’s a very large contingent of authors who are spending nothing on editing. But when you look at the distribution of authors who are spending on editing, it’s anywhere from $100 to $1,000 is where the bulk of the spend is.

So, you know, for 100 or 200 bucks, you can probably find somebody who can do a quick read of your book and help you, as Ferol called it, polish it up so that once you do have that reader who’s reading it, you can get them on your side and have them become a fan.

Ferol Vernon (31:37)

Yeah, and I think one of the things that was interesting is only 6 % of authors are spending more than $2,000. And there are a lot of very professional editors out there that charge that neighborhood $2,000, $3,000. And it’s not that these people aren’t worth it. Most of those people are exceptional at what they do. But very few authors actually spend that much money. And I thought that was interesting. Even among high earners, you don’t necessarily have to break the bank. There’s a lot of affordable options out there that you can get to get a really good edit.

Ricci (32:04)

Yeah and when we actually looked at that 2000 plus back it there was no correlation between spending that much and being in. Hi and all alone in a bucket so it’s not a case of more spend equals more success and it’s just a case of you want to probably do some editing but you definitely don’t need to be spending that much if you don’t want to.

Ferol Vernon (32:23)

so we’ve talked about sort of marketing, we’ve talked about packaging, editing, cover design. Let’s go to sort of the publishing step and the great KDP Select debate or discussion. We ask every year, know, who’s in KDP Select, who’s wide, you know, where, like which retailers are actually providing earnings for authors. So let’s get into that section, Ricci. What are some of the high level takeaways?

Ricci (32:48)

Yeah, so let’s just start with where authors are making most of their income and it is still Amazon. So when we asked authors which retailer or channel generates the most revenue for you, Amazon was still the leader by a lot. ⁓ It wasn’t even close. And we’ll talk about author sentiment and how a lot of authors are trying to move away from Amazon. And I think over the long term,

Ferol Vernon (33:05)

Yeah, it wasn’t close.

Ricci (33:16)

that is a trend and something that authors should be investing in. But when we actually look at 2025 this year and we look at 2024 last year, Amazon is the number one sales channel for authors. It still is. And we didn’t see a marked change in the percentage of authors who are saying that Amazon was the number one channel for them.

Ferol Vernon (33:40)

just to like put a fine on that when we ask, you know, which retailer generates the most revenue for you, it’s like 85 % had Amazon as their number one channel. So like really a high percentage.

Ricci (33:53)

Yeah. And then when we look at, know, when we asked about which channel generates the second most revenue for you, it was a mix. There wasn’t really like a breakout leader. For some authors, Amazon was second. So the authors who didn’t put Amazon first, lands up putting Amazon second, followed by in-person sales, which is, you know, exciting. And I think that’s really cool.

Ferol Vernon (34:14)

Yeah.

Ricci (34:19)

And then Apple, direct sales, Kobo actually beat out Nook and Google as the secondary channels that authors were generating revenue from.

Ferol Vernon (34:25)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I thought that the in-person sales data point was really interesting and that was surprising to me. Like seeing Amazon as the number one channel, like that’s not that surprising to me. And while it may be disappointing to some of our listeners, it’s probably not surprising to them either. But seeing in-person sales be essentially like the third highest channel, like in that second ranking, I thought was really interesting. And even in what generated the most revenue for you, that question that we asked.

In-person sales was ⁓ the second most highly chosen option. And so I think what that points to is more authors. We’ve talked about direct sales, and we often think about that as digital, like sending a book through the mail directly to the reader. But seeing this in-person sales be so high, I thought, was really interesting. we can talk about it in a minute. But I think one of the reasons is the rise of the really awesome special edition.

right? And those are these really cool, you know, foil covered, ⁓ you know, sprayed edges kind of things. And those additions are often sold at shows and in person sales for higher price points.

Ricci (35:36)

Yeah, I also think, and I want to dig more into this data, which we’ll do when we put out the, we will have a blog post, probably multiple blog posts, but we’ll have one blog post where we share all of this data. And so you can actually look at it and see the numbers in print. But I’m very curious to also slice and dice that by genre. Because we also know that nonfiction authors who are speakers tend to use, that’s how they, if you’re a nonfiction writer who’s also a speaker,

Ferol Vernon (35:53)

Hmm?

Ricci (36:02)

you tend to sell a lot of your books when you go to speaking engagement, because that’s part of the gig. So you go and you speak and then you bring your books and then you get to sell a high volume of those books. So I’m curious to see what the genre breakdown is when we slice and dice it on.

Ferol Vernon (36:16)

Yeah, as a fan of fantasy, I’m hopeful that you find that it’s that because some of these fantasy special editions look amazing. They’re just they’re beautiful, like coveted option like objects. So hopefully we find that. So I thought that was an interesting trend. What else did we see when we’re kind of breaking down the retailers?

Ricci (36:24)

They do. I love the special editions.

Yeah, so that’s what we saw in terms of retailers generating income for authors. We then asked a question around KDP select, given that Amazon is, you know, the primary channel still. Um, and what we found was that, um, it was like pretty even split. across all the respondents, 38 % had all their books in KDP select. Um, 30 % had none of their books in KDP select.

Ferol Vernon (36:50)

Yeah.

Ricci (37:01)

And then the rest were a mix where they had some books in and some books out. So not quite a third, a third, a third, but pretty close. When we looked at the income brackets on the kind of like authors who are getting started in the under a hundred dollar a month bracket, 40 % had none of their books in select. So slightly over-indexed versus the average. But 35 % were all in. Among the mid on

of mid earners, 41 % were all in and 22 % were still wide, were fully wide. And then when you looked at the authors earning over $5,000 a month, 43 % had all their books in select and only 15 % had none. So, this doesn’t mean that select causes higher income, but authors who earn significantly more.

Ferol Vernon (37:52)

Mm-hmm.

Ricci (37:55)

Are more likely to be in KU or more likely to have some of their books in KU. This is another one where causation does not mean causation. So I want to be very clear here. There are, you know, what’s that 43 plus 15, they’re 40 % or 15 % of authors who have none of their books in KDP select and are earning $5,000 a month.

Ferol Vernon (37:57)

That’s right.

Ricci (38:24)

So what I don’t want people to take from this is that in order to make a lot of money, I have to be in KDP Select. It’s possible that by having some of your books in KDP Select, you might edge up the probability, but it’s not a silver bullet solution at all, as is neither is direct sales. We see kind of similar data when it comes to direct sales. And I was listening to Joanna Penn’s podcast. She was doing a recap on authentication, which is fantastic. I’d recommend everyone listen to it.

Ferol Vernon (38:39)

Yeah.

Ricci (38:51)

I mean, what she was saying, something similar. She was saying, just because there are authors who are being successful in KDP Select doesn’t mean it’s the only path to success. And just because some authors are being successful in direct doesn’t mean that’s the only path to success. You basically have a bunch of authors doing a lot of different things. And what happens is you can have a bias towards the authors who are really successful in telling their story, thinking, oh my gosh, this is the recipe and this is what I have to do to be successful.

Ferol Vernon (39:00)

Yeah.

Ricci (39:20)

That’s not exactly right. You can take some learnings from that, but it comes more down to what your strategy is and then following through and executing on the tactics to make you successful, given the strategy that you’ve chosen.

Ferol Vernon (39:27)

Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that’s really important. And it’s also, you know, a lot of times we hear this debate about being wide or being in KDP select is fairly dogmatic. And I honestly, I’ve talked to so many successful author authors that like are a mix, like they have some books that are in select and they have some that aren’t. they’re like, I’m like, well, what’s the best strategy? And they’re like both. Right. And so I think there’s, there’s definitely the camp of like all in on KDP and there’s the, the campus all in on wide. And sometimes there’s some tension there, but there’s also a lot of authors that have seen success by

sort of not forcing themselves to make that choice for their entire catalog, right? Using some of the benefits of KDP Select is that, you know, when you’re in KU, discoverability is a little easier, right? Some of the downsides, you have a lot less flexibility, right? And so trying to sort of essentially play both sides, I think can also work really well for authors. And I thought that’s what we kind of saw in the survey data. Like you said, a third, a third, a third, it’s like, it’s like pretty evenly split. wasn’t like we said, some other trends in the survey, things were sharp.

Right. And here it wasn’t quite as sharp.

Ricci (40:32)

Yeah, so I don’t think there’s any one recipe to success here and we’re really big fans of experimentation. So I love this idea of experimenting, putting some of your books in, putting some of them out. If you only have a couple books, it’s only a 90 day period that you’re committing to. So go in for 90 days, come out for 90 days. See what happens, look at the data, figure out what works for you. I know some authors philosophically don’t wanna be in select and that’s okay. As you said, Ferol, this doesn’t have to be like a dogmatic.

issue where people have to be on opposite sides of the aisle. think it’s okay for each author to choose their own path, choose their own adventure.

Ferol Vernon (41:09)

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so let’s, mentioned this a few times and this has been a trend that we’ve been seeing for, I don’t know, maybe two years, maybe a little longer. And that is direct sales, right? And this is authors wanting to get higher margins by selling their books directly to the readers and not going through a retailer like Amazon or Apple or one of those.

And so we asked about this in the survey. I can’t remember when we started asking about a few years ago, but I thought this data was was interesting Especially sort of the second part. So Ricci how many authors are selling direct and How many are not what did the survey say?

Ricci (41:47)

Yeah, so survey says that about 30 % of the authors who responded currently do sell direct. So it was about 330 authors currently sell direct, the rest do not. But then we also asked a follow-up question, which was, if the author said, do not sell direct, we then said, do you plan to start selling direct in the coming year? So of the 70 % who said they do not.

currently sell direct 30 % of those said they plan to start selling direct in the next 12 months. So there is a large pipeline of authors preparing to diversify their revenue channels by selling direct in the next 12 months.

Ferol Vernon (42:34)

Yeah, and I think this is a trend that we’ll see emerge. As the tools get better, you can use, there’s a ton of really cool POD, print on demand providers out there now. the tools for selling things like WooCommerce and Shopify are good enough, they’re easy enough to use, there’s more tutorials. So I think we’re seeing more authors start to take control and sell direct. It is still not.

the majority. thought that was interesting. It’s still like, you know, 70 % of authors are still not the selling direct. Right. But I do think it’s a trend that are obviously we’re watching and I think is a really interesting one for authors who are trying to reclaim a little bit of margin.

Ricci (43:11)

Yeah. And when you, when you start looking at the income breakdown, authors who are making over $10,000 a month of those, half of them are selling direct. So the general population, 30 % are selling direct authors at, you know, at 10,000 plus half of them, 5,000 plus almost half of them. And this makes sense because, selling direct, it’s a big investment and it is a fair amount of work. Not only is it just, you know, setting up the store, but

We’re selling direct comes customer service and fulfillment and a lot of great services out there but it’s you’re not just putting your book up on a retailer and getting the retailer. Take care of everything for you and you’re making more margin but you’re also doing more work and. So the authors who making more money have more resources i would imagine to help with some of that. I will have to have more.

Ferol Vernon (43:42)

Yeah, returns.

Ricci (44:06)

sophistication on dealing with their reader customers and figuring out exactly what they need. There’s also dovetails back to the email list. If you have a large, as we said, authors who are earning, you know, five, $10,000 a month, plus they have a large email list. So when they email their readers directly, having them come directly to them and getting that margin versus sending them off to, you know, a third party site like Amazon and giving them 30 % makes a ton of sense. So this is definitely a tactic.

that as authors become more successful, they employ.

Ferol Vernon (44:38)

Yeah. And I think what we’re seeing is a lot of, like you said, the more successful authors doing this successfully. And then I think some of the other trends that we’re seeing that are maybe not as positive are authors who are maybe trying direct sales a little too early before they built their brand, before they built their email list. And those are the authors that end up with of boxes of books in the garage that they can’t ship. Right. And I think that’s an important thing to note is that there is a sort of a time and a place for pursuing direct sales. And it’s usually not right away.

It’s usually after you’ve got a little bit of attraction, you’ve got a little bit a brand going.

Ricci (45:10)

Yeah, or an audience. So if you have an existing audience and then you’re publishing a book, even if it’s your first book, but you have an audience, can email and send them to your direct sale site. Like by all means do it. But if you don’t have an audience, you have the same issue that you do when you put your book up on a retailer, which is you still have to drive traffic to that book. And when we asked all those this year, what is the most challenging part of being an author? Like hands down, everybody said marketing.

Ferol Vernon (45:21)

Go for it.

Ricci (45:37)

Not everybody, but I think it was 80 or 90 % plus of authors responded that marketing is really hard. Sometimes think authors think that somehow direct sales doesn’t require the same marketing effort that everything else does, but it’s almost the opposite. You have to drive traffic to your books regardless of where they are. You’re either driving traffic to Amazon or another retailer or your direct sales store.

Ferol Vernon (45:37)

Yeah, that was

Yeah.

Ricci (46:05)

but you still have to figure out how to drive traffic. And when people say marketing is hard, that’s what we’re talking about. Marketing is driving traffic, driving attention to your books to then get people to purchase them.

Ferol Vernon (46:16)

Yeah. And I mean, it’s so important, right? Like, you know, the publish and pray, like that model doesn’t work, right? Like you’ve got to market, you’ve got to work at it. And we see that across, it was super sharp in the survey. And you mentioned something a little bit about sort of author sentiment. And I want to kind of move on to that because I thought that was one of the things that was really interesting. And, you know, we kind of asked authors like, how do you, how do you feel about things? Right. And this is a little bit more qualitative because a lot of the other things are pretty hard data. How much did you earn?

What tools are you using, those kinds of things. But this was sort of like, how are you feeling? And I thought this was really telling. And I thought I both enjoyed and shed a tear as I was reading some of the actual responses. But what did authors have to say here in this section?

Ricci (46:59)

Yeah, so I think I like scroll down what the like emotional tone of the indie author community is and what I came up with based on all the answers are, you know, authors are hopeful, but tired. ⁓ They’re motivated, but also overwhelmed. And they’re committed, but face a lot of uncertainty.

Ferol Vernon (47:05)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ricci (47:24)

So it’s definitely this mix max of positive emotions like authors are really committed to their businesses, they’re motivated, they wanna sell books, they’re very passionate about what they wanna do. There is a fair amount of optimism. However, there are also headwinds that are making authors feel fatigue and overwhelm. And I think this theme of uncertainty is probably more macro.

Ferol Vernon (47:41)

Yeah, for tea.

Ricci (47:47)

then just applying to authors. think that’s a macro trend we’re seeing just among, you know, I would say the global population, but I’ll speak only for the US population because that’s what I know. So, you know, was a mixed bag.

Ferol Vernon (48:01)

Yeah, and I think one of the most common words in some of the open-ended responses was hard, right? And I think that’s one of the things that’s picked up in a lot of what you said, which I loved, is it’s hard to get visibility. Marketing is hard. Figuring out who to trust is hard. There’s too much information. It’s hard to figure out where to go for it. And I think that’s one of the things that makes me feel good about what we do is that we’re trying to sort of help on some of that. But what that also means is that authors are like

you know, they’re out there on their own. We’ve talked about this a ton. It can be a little bit of a, a little bit of a solo mission, right? You and your keyboard by yourself, writing your book. and I think sometimes that is difficult. and it’s really, I think the survey, while it was full of optimism and we are really excited about a lot of the trends that we’re seeing and authors are figuring stuff out, which is awesome. there is also sort of a fatigue that they felt, right? And I think, you know, trying to help them with things and make things easier is

one of the things I think we can do to help.

Ricci (48:57)

Yeah, you know, some of the responses reminded me of 2020 of like the COVID year, right? It had that ring to it. Like remembering COVID, everyone just was like, by the end of the year, I was just so tired. And then I felt like there was almost like an upswing because although COVID was so hard, it actually was really good for books 2020 and 2021 and even into 2022. So I think we saw a lot more like energy and less fatigue.

Ferol Vernon (49:01)

Yes.

Ricci (49:25)

Like, you know, people kind of came back and then I think this year in 2025, it has echoes of that. Like people are just feeling tired again and things do feel harder. And, you know, we get it. We’re a small business as well. if your motivation is to make money and you are running an author of business by publishing your books, it’s hard out there for small business.

Right? Like inflation is a thing. Consumer demand and sentiment is a thing. Loneliness is a thing. And so, you know, we, we get it. We feel you. It’s not just among authors, you know, among our subset of, of what I’d call small business owners and entrepreneurs. There’s a very similar sentiment.

Ferol Vernon (50:06)

Yeah, and the other thing I would just say on this that’s maybe a little more uplifting is you’re not alone. And so we had well over 1,000 authors and these themes were common among all of them. So if you’re feeling like, things are hard, I’m a little overwhelmed, it’s not you, it’s everybody.

Ricci (50:20)

Yeah, I do think one of the questions we asked is like, who’s serving authors well? so what I will say, there is such a supportive, amazing community out there for indie authors. And so when it came to this answer, ⁓ a lot of people said, I said, thank you very much. Like that honestly means the world. And we’re really trying to be the easy button for authors. So, you know, we’re trying to be the counterfactual to the hard.

Ferol Vernon (50:36)

Yeah, it makes the world.

Ricci (50:44)

⁓ But then there was like a long list of other people and I want to call out a few that like rose to the top. Joanna Penn, you know, a lot of people said, you know, her podcast and her education materials. She’s really helping authors feel less alone. Becca Syme ⁓ is, you know, a lot of people said serving authors well, Ally, Author Nation. So there are these communities out there and there are people who are trying to help. And so if you are feeling like things are hard or if you are feeling a little alone.

Ferol Vernon (50:57)

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Ricci (51:11)

⁓ I would definitely recommend trying to plug into some of these communities, listen to some of these pods, because there are people out there who can help.

Ferol Vernon (51:19)

Yeah, I think that’s great. One of the other names, two other names to shout out there that are really great, great people and great resources is Dale Roberts. Dale’s mostly on YouTube, he does pod too. And James Blatch, who’s ⁓ a friend and a partner of ours. But those are some other common names that were mentioned. think there’s a lot of good people in the industry trying to help and reach out and read their stuff. It’s really good.

Ricci (51:41)

Yeah, the other question we asked is like where authors go or log in at least once a week. And Facebook groups and Facebook communities were still by far the number one place that authors go. And I know there are a lot of Facebook communities out there that are either genre specific or specific to where you are in your author journey that you can join. And then there’s a lot of conversations and support happening in those places as well. that’s another great resource.

Ferol Vernon (52:07)

Cool. All right, so we’re just about time here, Ricci. Let’s close. What are some of the big takeaways from the survey? We’ve talked about a lot of them in somewhat of detail, but let’s kind of recap and go through some of the big ones.

Ricci (52:20)

Yeah, well, we covered a lot of data and we probably only covered like half of the data that’s in the survey. So there’s a lot more coming. So what I would recommend is, you know, when this part drops, there will also be a blog post with all of the data we discussed here and then a whole bunch more. And there’ll also be some more slicing and dicing by genre, because I know authors really do care about that. So please go and check that out. Also, if you’re asking the questions.

Ferol Vernon (52:25)

I know.

Ricci (52:46)

on that blog post, hey, I’d love to know this, that, and the other, we’ll go and pull that data for you. We did that last year as well. But in terms of what we talked about today, let’s see, how could we summarize this? think, you know, email being kind of like the most important part of your marketing stack and your author business, email is your engine, right? So if you’re driving this car, make sure that you’re really investing in that piece of it.

Ferol Vernon (53:03)

Yeah, for sure.

Ricci (53:11)

⁓ email popped up both in terms of creating your own email lists, so that you can drive your author brand and not be dependent on anybody else by having a direct, list to a direct email list to your readers. and then also, you know, promo sites, which are all based on email marketing. Ours, the other ones out there, Bookbob, you know, we’re really big ones. covers editing. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (53:27)

Exactly.

Yeah, covers, editing, blurbs, spend money on packaging. Not

too much, but some, right?

Ricci (53:38)

Yeah, spend some money on packaging. And if you can’t make sure that you have an objective eye looking at those things, or if you’re getting a ton of bad reviews on typos, you know that it’s time to go back in. The beauty of eBooks is that even if you have typos on version one, you can go in and change it anytime. So, we didn’t touch on this like specifically, but one of the learnings that did come out, you know, when you piece all of this together is that the higher earners,

Ferol Vernon (53:52)

Yeah, you can fix them. Yeah.

Ricci (54:05)

stack their tactics. So when you look at the higher earners, you know, they’ve got their own email lists, they’re doing promo sites, they’re doing Facebook ads, and they’re doing direct sales. So they’re kind of like doing it all. ⁓ So that’s where you want to get to eventually. I don’t think you have to do it all today. You know, start with the things that are accessible and easy. And by the same token, you know, the bigger your catalog.

Ferol Vernon (54:15)

They got everything.

Ricci (54:28)

the more likely you are to actually be able to make this a sustainable, profitable business. you your catalog size definitely creates opportunity.

Ferol Vernon (54:37)

see we

talked about catalog size and growing that through series, right? That was a big one.

Ricci (54:41)

Yep. the two controversial topics, you know, direct sales and KDP select, like they both work. ⁓ there’s no right or wrong path here. Like choose your own adventure. Don’t judge somebody else’s adventure. Like let’s be supportive. ⁓ your path can be the right path and somebody else’s can be on a different path and that can be right for them too. and then I just think, you know, this idea of, of community like.

Ferol Vernon (54:47)

Yeah.

Ricci (55:07)

Hang in there, stick with it. Everything goes in cycles, right? So maybe it’s feeling a little hard now, but it will feel easy again. There are people out there that can help. And if it’s feeling easy now, like soak it up and enjoy it and celebrate your successes. And yeah.

Ferol Vernon (55:24)

think, yeah, and the other thing I would say is, we send, you know, millions of emails out and we get some replies, you know, reader replies back and those replies are often very nice, right? So even if it feels hard, there are a lot of readers out there that want to read your books and they’ll reply as things like, I love this book or I love that, you know, and those are really one-off interactions, but they are out there and they are positive. And so I think your comment of like, stick with it, like you’re putting creativity out into the world and that’s a beautiful thing is really important.

And I think that’s a good place to close the pod.

Ricci (55:56)

Yeah, the last thing I would say is, you know, what the survey showed is that there are hundreds, if not thousands of authors when you extrapolate out who are making a living from writing their books. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of authors who are living what is their dream, right? Their motivation might be that this is a hobby or that they wanna get their work out there and they’re actually doing it. And so the written word books, we think,

Ferol Vernon (56:05)

Yeah.

Ricci (56:23)

are super, super important for this world. And all of you are out there championing that mission. And that’s a really incredible thing.

Ferol Vernon (56:32)

Amazing. All right. Well, thank you all for listening. The detailed author survey data will be out in the blog in the coming weeks. But thank you all. ⁓ Keep writing.