READER SURVEY 2015 – PART 5

This is the fourth part of a series looking at the results from a mail-out to 10,000 people on my mailing list where I asked them to answer a series of very simple questions.

 

At the time of writing, I have 1,650 people answering the questions. This is a decent sample size from which other authors could profitably can draw their own conclusions.

 

The tenth question that I asked my readers was a simple one:

 

How do you read your books?

 

Platform

It wasn’t too surprising to find out that 82% of them read on a Kindle. Amazon dominates the market and, more pertinently, I only have a fleeting presence on other platforms bar Kobo, where I reliably sell a good number of my Soho Noir titles each month. Print comes in at 2%, and I have noticed a reliably growing metric for sales over at CreateSpace. Not enough to pay the mortgage off, but enough each month for a very nice meal for me and Mrs D. Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Computer round out the answers, save a large chunk of 12% who report “other” (and, when they specify, it often means PDF, Android, iPad, etc – there was even a Sony eReader in there, too…).

 

My takeaway from this is a positive one. The other platforms, which offer very significant audiences, haven’t even been touched yet. That’s a goal for the second half of 2015.

 

Subscription

The eleventh question was a yes or no: are you in Kindle Unlimited?

 

Of the 1650 respondents, 82% said no… but a very healthy 18% reported that they were.

 

Why healthy?

 

KU has only been in existence for six months or so, and it already accounts for a very significant chunk of my income. I’ve been one of the top 100 most downloaded authors on KU for four out of the six months in the US, and twice in the UK. Some authors are reporting that numbers are going down since KU launched.

 

On the contrary, I have found that numbers are going up.

 

And that has meant that even though I would like to build my platform on other retailers, Amazon has a pretty good hand to play that has, so far, kept me exclusive with them.

 

Things can always change, and I do have an idea to take my Rose books more widely before I republish them with Thomas & Mercer, but, for now, I’m not messing with the status quo.

 

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More good stuff to come in the final part of this write-up: audiobook penetration and reviews.

 

 

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