Amazon UK have announced that 15 of the Top 100 books sold on Kindle in 2012 were self-published. This is great news. It’s great news for those authors that have churned out their novel and implemented all of the things that I bang on about every day, but it’s also good news for me because it means it’s possible to achieve a bestseller off my own back.
Nick Spalding has two in the Top 10, numbers 1 and 3, and although he has now signed with Hodder and Stoughton he achieved this success on his own. Apparently there are ten other authors that earned more than £100,000 last year from the UK site alone, and given that the US site is a monster in comparison, I can only assume that these authors had a very healthy New Year’s party.
As with any success story, it concentrates on those that are at the very top of the ladder but what this implies is that there are even more self-published authors that are making at least a liveable wage on the lower rungs. Good news for me.
I write romantic comedy fiction and I am interested in this genre obviously more than any other. Nick Spalding is in this genre, as are two other authors that I came to know in 2012. Andrew Lucas is the author of the best-selling ‘Cross Dressed to Kill‘ and Jon Rance is the author of the best-selling ‘This Thirty Something Life‘. The coincidence is that all of these are either from Southampton or live nearby now. I don’t even know if they all know of each other but there are three people who live within a ten mile radius of me that have achieved what I want, in the last year.
I have been inspired by their success and the success of self-publishing overall in 2012. It not only seems possible but also realistic to dream of achieving some level of success. Underpinning all of this is the undeniable fact that all three of these authors are great writers, and their stories are captivating and well-written, but that part is in my hands.
I’m delighted by their success and hope to one day emulate it for myself, but I’m interested to hear what your opinions are of self-publishing as we start 2013.
