More Stats...February Amazon 100

I recently analyzed the top 50 Amazon kindle list (mainly because I didn't have the time to do 100) I spent the last few days looking at the whole 100 and here is what I found...

NOTE: An easier to read version of the data can be found here.

As before, let's first back out shorts, magazines, newspapers, and a few non-fiction which reduces the 100 to 75.

I mentioned in my last post (well a comment actually, that no "small press" made the list - when expanding to 100 there was 1 that crept on - the people who are publishing My Sister's Keeper for the sake of this analysis I'm going to still treat this book as an indie so we only have 2 categories - those published by major NY houses and those that are "independent".

• 29/75 - Indie (38.7%)
• 46/75 - Traditional (61.3%)

This is almost identical breakdown as the Top 50 (39.5% to 60.5%). Something to note - It was in December that I saw the FIRST indies breaking into the Top 100 list. Now it is possible that some were doing it before then but it's only been recently that we've seen sustainable inroads by indies.

I'm sorry to say that extending the list did not add any indie in the above $2.99 price point. I'm starting to see a number of indies increases their prices though, so I anticipate by the time I do this again in April I'll see at least one.

• 7/29 of the indies priced at $2.99 (24.1%)
• 22/29 of the indies priced at $1.00 or less (75.9%)

Again this mirrors the bottom 50 (something I did not expect btw - I thought I would see a higher % of $0.99 in the 51 - 100 ranking sneaking in).

I was happy to see Killer (which was #20 a few days ago) jump to #13 which makes it the highest ranked non-$0.99 book.

A few surprises in this bunch of data...

• Two traditionally published authors have moved to self-publishing their books: The Color of Heaven by Julianne MacLean ($0.99) and Second Son of a Duke by Gwen Hayes ($0.99) Since these two authors already have established audiences, my hope is that they will raise their prices and make some real money from their self-published efforts.
  
• A total of 3 traditional publishers are offering books at the basement price of $0.99. #1 - Alone (Bantam), #74 - The Summer Son (AmazonEncore), #81 Spontaneous (Harlequin). I believe Bantam's move was to make Alone hit the NYT digital bestseller list. This is the first time I've seen AmazonEncore take an ebook down that low (but they may have) and the Harlequin doesn't surprise me that much as they offer low priced books fairly frequently as the Romance reading audience is pretty voracious so some "loss leaders" is a great strategy for that market segment.

Of the 75 fiction titles the breakdown by price is as follows:

• 25/75 (33%) Less than $1
• 7/75 (9%) $1 - $3
• 9/75 (13%) $3 - $5
• 18/75 (24%) $5 - $10
• 16/75 (21%) Over $10

Breaking them into Low ($2.99 or less), Medium ($3.99 - $8.52), High ($9.99 and above)

• Low - 32/75 = 43%
• Med - 16/75 = 21%
• High - 27 /75 = $36%