Over the last couple months, I’ve been thinking about doing something to try to give indie authors a chance to see how they’re doing relative to others. It’s always interesting to me that indies are exponential. By that, I mean I look around the indie space and see plenty of folks who are a tenth as successful as I am (and some who are 100th as successful, which is the same place I was in 2019 when I started), while at the same time, I see a fair number of folks who are 10x as successful as I am, some who are 100x, and a few who are 1000x. That’s a complicated place to think about, and it’s a little difficult to figure out how you’re doing with such a wide range of situations and careers.
I’ve thought about this some before. I came up with a rough set of developmental stages for indie authors. That was fun (and completely made-up), but my categories were fuzzy, and not everybody progresses through the stages I laid out the same way. But it would be fun to do this kind of thing from a data-driven perspective rather than being speculative.
One answer to exponential data is showing them with logarithms, but those are tricky for some folks, and it’s a little harder to figure out what they mean. A better option is percentiles. They’re relatively easy to understand and easy to calculate. But they take a lot of data to be meaningful.
I think it might be fun, and maybe even useful, for indie authors to be able to answer a short survey and then see how they ranked, percentile-wise, versus other respondents. Like most internet research, the sampling wouldn’t be unbiased – I’d just invite people to submit on various places where indies congregate, and we’d almost definitely oversample and undersample various subpopulations. But I think if we could get a couple hundred responses, the percentiles would probably at least mean something. There’s the potential that a lot more folks than that would respond, too.
With the data, for each person who submitted, I’d send them a link to their profile, maybe with a login, maybe based on their email or something. They could sign in and get graphs like this for various variables (data are fake, these are just examples).
The parameters that occur to me off the top of my head are as follows:
- Productivity
- Books written
- Books released
- Stories written
- Stories released
- Audience
- Total paid book sales (lifetime and last year)
- Total free books downloaded (lifetime and last year)
- Total KU page reads (lifetime and last year)
- Total in-person sales (lifetime and last year)
- Number of ratings for your most popular book on Amazon
- Number of ratings for your most popular book on GoodReads
- Business
- Total revenues (lifetime and last year)
- Total expenses (lifetime and last year)
- (Profit/loss calculable from first two)
- Other funding
- Total Kickstarter revenues (lifetime and last year)
- Total Patreon or other sponsorship revenues (lifetime and last year)
- Demographics
- Years since first publication
- Genres + Subgenres
- Others? Age, gender, full-time status?
Obviously, not everybody would need to answer all the questions – just the ones they wanted. There are probably other kinds of data that would be interesting, too, but I wouldn’t want to make the questionnaire too long.
I would pledge not to publish or sell the data except on whatever site I was using, and I would keep user data completely confidential to the best of my ability.
So, what do you think? Would this be interesting and useful? Would you respond to the questions? Please leave any suggestions in comments or email me at dave@davedobsonbooks.com.
