2022 survey of our published authors

Every year various survey results are published about ‘authors’.  Prompted by this one, I thought it would be great to start surveying our own Australasian Christian authors (Australia/New Zealand and the Pacific). I came up with the list of questions and then in consultation with other authors, we tweaked them to make them more useful.

Here are the basic results. Later in the year, I will write blog posts in response to some of our findings.

Overall statistics for Australasian Authors’ Survey

53 authors, with at least one book published, responded. All but three were Australian authors.

30+% do less than 5 hours/week of writing. Almost the same number do less than 10 hours. 15% do 11-15 hours and another 12% do 16-20 hours (approaching half-time). 5% do between half and three-quarter load and only 6% (3 people) were doing full-time writing.

So either only our new authors answered the survey or most of us are fairly new.

Ways of publishing

64 % self-published

7.5% hybrid – which means having some books traditionally and some self-published

60% traditional published (5 authors) with large publishers and the rest with small publishers.

And yes, I can see these numbers don’t add up. What it means is that the ‘hybrid’ numbers should have been higher and respondents multi-voted. It does however give us an idea that we have a good spread of experience and how common it now is to have both traditional and self-published books for a single author.

Format

Ebooks – 85%+

Print – similarly high but with print distributed via Amazon/Ingram Spark/D2D and even doing their own print runs through a local printer.

Hardback 28.4 % (15/53)

Large Print 5.4% (5/53) – this is an area that might be worth expanding into.

Audio 13.2% (7/53) – this low figure is probably because of the high cost of producing audio and indicates that not many have learned to (or want to) do it themselves.

Interestingly, the majority of our sales still come from print books (2/3), with very few coming from audio or hardback. This not only reflects that few of us have books in these formats but also that even when we do, we don’t make major sales. I didn’t really specify in the survey whether it was unit sales or royalties. Print books tend to earn more – especially if you sell your own print books (i.e. I make two to four times the profit from my own print runs/book as compared with printing through a print-on-demand service like Ingram Spark).

60+% of our authors don’t format their own books (either because they’re traditionally published and don’t have to or don’t know how …). Of those who do their own, they use Vellum (this layout programme is so good that it is worth getting a Mac for it or at least finding an old one to use for this alone), Atticus, or Indesign.

Series vs Standalones

Nearly half of us write both kinds of books but we are also divided 28% each on only standalones or only series.

Non-fiction vs fiction vs children’s books

Non-fiction only – 15%

Fiction only – 43.4%

Both fiction and non-fiction – 38.6%

Children’s – 11.3%

Costs

Remembering that some of the respondents are traditionally published and thus do not need to spend money on editing or book covers.

Editing – 37% spend nothing. 20% spend less than $500 but another 25% spend between US$500-1000 and 5% between $1000-1500 with a few even over that amount. My early books required double editing and so cost in those higher ranges. Expect that for your first few books, editing costs will be high if you want a good product.

Cover design – 45% pay nothing either because they’re traditionally published (and the publisher pays) or they do their own designs. 15% pay less than US$100 and another 20% pay between $100-250. 17% pay between $250-500 and only one person paid more than $500.

Audience

Christian and general only were equal – 43.4% with 13+% writing for both audiences.

60% ‘wide’ – the majority of our authors are not exclusive to Amazon for ebooks. They sell on a mix of Kobo, Google Play, Apple, Amazon, Smashwords …

13% – only sell ebooks on Amazon through Kindle Unlimited.

I was somewhat surprised by this finding as many people tell me that most Christian authors are exclusive to Amazon. That doesn’t seem to be the case for our authors.

Of our fiction authors, the spread is fairly even over historical, contemporary/women’s fiction, YA, with a slight majority of romance writers.

Writer’s Life/Marketing

80% of us write half-time or less, with 58% writing less than 10 hours/week.

Well under 10% are writing for a full-time job.

This was also reflected in the time spent marketing. One interesting fact was that 13% don’t spend any time at all on marketing in a month.

This was a really interesting section. Looking at the three main places to advertise – no one is having any success on Bookbub ads (don’t know how or have never tried). Facebook ads is similar with only three people spending money there. 80% don’t know how or never advertise on Amazon.

BookBub Featured Deals are considered the ‘Rolls Royce’ of promotions but once again more than 80% have either never applied or not been accepted. Of the 20% who have had BBFD, we’ve also had plenty of rejections over the year which means that we are applying regularly (which will increase the likelihood of acceptance) Please note, I would not recommend you try for such a deal (they’re expensive) unless you have at least three books in a series as the money is made in read-through.

BookBub – why bother? For readers and writers

My general takeaway from the marketing questions is that there is a lot of space for growth in this area. This is not too surprising as many of the respondents were new authors and also Christians and non-Americans struggle with the whole concept of marketing.

87% are not using a permafree (give away the first book in a series to help people discover our writing and hope that it leads through to read-through of our other books) or a loss leader (first book is 99c or something like that).

Having an online store is very rare among us. Some sell print through a store/website but there seemed only one PayHip store (mine) and no Shopify, WooCommerce …

Newsletters …

I was surprised by the result here with more than 50% not sending a newsletter at all. As an author’s newsletter was one of the ‘you must have’ things pounded into me. It was one of the first things I did once I’d set up a website. Look here for reasons why and how. The two most popular companies amongst us are Mailchimp and MailerLite.

Only 25% of those with a newsletter have a free gift to give to subscribers (which means 75% don’t).

The table that started off my thinking about ‘I wonder what the situation is for our authors’? was the one below.

I wanted to know what stages our writers were at.

The chart above is also helpful in that it suggests that to be a Stage 3 author you need to have published 23 books and be working 20 hours/week writing and 10 hours/week marketing. It gives you a picture of what could be reality. The good news is that you might be a higher stage than you’d expect for the number of hours and books.

The chart below is our figures. Please note that as we had a lot of 1-book published only authors, we still have many who haven’t broken even with their costs. It took me four books in a single series to break even.

I don’t believe we have any Stage 6-7 authors (or at least none answered the survey). The figures are in USD because authors need to learn to function in multiple currencies but USD is ‘king’.