Kindle Forum banner
Status
Not open for further replies.

Are you an author? Add yourself to our KB AUTHORS PAGE!

429K views 627 replies 385 participants last post by  Writer Afloat 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)
Edit: Locking this thread, as this feature stopped working long ago. - Becca

Update! Authors can now add themselves to our KB Authors page, regardless of your current sales level.

Go to to see a list of KB authors, sorted by estimated sales.



Near the top, there's a link for you to add your own sales data. Each author can only add/edit his own sales data.



For those of you who use pen names, or who have author names different from your KB names, there is a place for you to list up to five of those.

Please give it a go and let me know your feedback. Thanks!

**
Help!

Over the years, we've had several fascinating threads showing KB authors who have reached sales milestones (e.g. this outdated list of authors selling 50,000 books or more, and Hugh's thread about authors paying the bills through their book sales, to name just a couple.

We would like to create an official KB list of best-selling authors, which lists KB authors based on sales milestones. This would be something we would maintain in this forum, and post periodically in our blog. I expect it could get a fair bit of publicity if it's done right.

I envision this as a listing of authors who have reached the various sales levels of:
10,000
50,000
100,000
500,000
1,000,000

Some questions, though...

1. How would we make this a reliable (i.e. verifiable) source of info? Ask for screenshots of Amazon KDP sales data?

2. How to handle factoring in sales from BN, Kobo, Smashwords, Apple, etc? Or should it be based just on Kindle sales?

3. Indie (self--pub) only? Indie and small-pub? Or any authors of e-books, whether they're indie, small-pub or big-pub?

4. Include freebies or only paid books in the milestone thresholds?

5. Any other thoughts/ideas? Is this an achievable idea?
 
See less See more
2
#108 ·
Martitalbott said:
I got it. I was trying to put a comma in the "approximate number of sales" field.
I've updated the form to allow commas in the numeric fields, and dashes or slashes in the date field. You can enter those and they'll be automatically stripped out.
 
#111 ·
Joe_Nobody said:
Just so I'm clear, I can't count paperback sales - right?

I hate being last on any list...LOL
The consensus was to only count e-book sales, so it's that way right now. I think this can still be a topic we discuss, though... I'm not particularly hard-over on it.
 
#112 ·
Joe_Nobody said:
Just so I'm clear, I can't count paperback sales - right?

I hate being last on any list...LOL
To me this seems like a really minor detail, at least based on personal experience. First, the value of this report seems more like an indie thing and a KB thing than format thing (yes, I know, KB = "KINDLE" boards), and second, again based on personal experience, print sales are so microscopic that debating whether they should be excluded is like debating whether or not we count barnacle weight when we weigh the whale.
 
#113 ·
John Daulton said:
To me this seems like a really minor detail, at least based on personal experience. First, the value of this report seems more like an indie thing and a KB thing than format thing (yes, I know, KB = "KINDLE" boards), and second, again based on personal experience, print sales are so microscopic that debating whether they should be excluded is like debating whether or not we count barnacle weight when we weigh the whale.
My paperback sales are 40% of my total - 80,000 over the last two years. Shrug.
I know this site is "Kindle," but it is also the "Writer's Café."
It really doesn't matter that much one way or the other.
 
#114 ·
I can't see the logic for excluding paperback sales. A sale is a sale, it doesn't matter what the reader's prefs are. Plus excluding them might be unfair to authors in certain genres which haven't really switched to digital as much yet (non-fiction, literary, children's etc.)
 
#115 ·
This is very cool. I love seeing the number of sales across the number of titles.

I hope it's okay that I entered my mom's stats since I am her representative on KB.
 
#116 ·
How cool! I'm glad the lower achievements were added. I'm half-way to my first milestone!  ;D

Another thought, and this is similar to the pricing note, so I have no idea how this could be implemented -- sales milestones are going to mean very different things across genres. To sell 10,000 copies of a romance or thriller novel is different than selling 10,000 copies of a self-published literary fiction novel, or a short story collection, or poetry (God help the poor poets, lol!). Even among the most lauded traditionally published lit fic authors, 10,000 sales is a pretty big deal.

Would it be very hard to make the genres into clickable tags, so you could filter the list by genre and see who the bestselling authors in each genre are?

Just an idea. If that's impossible, then please ignore me.  :p
 
#118 ·
No idea how feasible this is Harvey, but is there any way to add to the form an option that lets authors type in a non-standardized milestone as well, such as 'print only deal' or 'film rights optioned'?  Just asking because those are always very cool to see as well, but no idea how well something like that would work.
 
#119 ·
Joe_Nobody said:
My paperback sales are 40% of my total - 80,000 over the last two years. Shrug.
I know this site is "Kindle," but it is also the "Writer's Café."
It really doesn't matter that much one way or the other.
dgaughran said:
I can't see the logic for excluding paperback sales. A sale is a sale, it doesn't matter what the reader's prefs are. Plus excluding them might be unfair to authors in certain genres which haven't really switched to digital as much yet (non-fiction, literary, children's etc.)
I think part of the reasoning is that we're in the middle of a publishing revolution, and in keeping with our Kindle niche, it's appropriate (and interesting and impressive) for this site to showcase the number of e-books that are being sold by our authors.

But I do think we're not far away from the notion of high e-book sales becoming conventional wisdom, and it may make sense at some point to switch this list to include all editions (paper, e-book, audio).
 
#120 ·
Kalen ODonnell said:
No idea how feasible this is Harvey, but is there any way to add to the form an option that lets authors type in a non-standardized milestone as well, such as 'print only deal' or 'film rights optioned'? Just asking because those are always very cool to see as well, but no idea how well something like that would work.
Interesting idea. I'd like to see that info, too - although I think it would apply to so few authors that it's better listed in the Notes section than in additional fields. For now, anyway! Thanks for the thought.
 
#121 ·
Laura Rae Amos said:
How cool! I'm glad the lower achievements were added. I'm half-way to my first milestone! ;D

Another thought, and this is similar to the pricing note, so I have no idea how this could be implemented -- sales milestones are going to mean very different things across genres. To sell 10,000 copies of a romance or thriller novel is different than selling 10,000 copies of a self-published literary fiction novel, or a short story collection, or poetry (God help the poor poets, lol!). Even among the most lauded traditionally published lit fic authors, 10,000 sales is a pretty big deal.

Would it be very hard to make the genres into clickable tags, so you could filter the list by genre and see who the bestselling authors in each genre are?

Just an idea. If that's impossible, then please ignore me. :p
That is a good idea. It would take some work to put that into place, and I'd have to figure out how to deal with authors whose works span genres. But I've noted this for a possible enhancement in release 2.0. :)
 
#123 ·
I'm too ashamed to post my pathetic sales, but great job to everyone in KB land making sales. And a word of thanks to Harvey for creating this list.

Looking at the layout, it seems the field labeled "KB Info" is too crowded. Given that the "Author" column is somewhat spacious, it may be more aesthetically pleasing to move each authors KB info directly under his/her name.

Also, you may want to limit the amount of KB info that's presented. Beyond the date they joined this forum, all other KB data seems irrelevant (in my opinion).
 
#124 ·
Thank you, Kevin! And Mr. RAD!

I intend to shorten the time stamp format for the KB info.

The info in that column is of high interest to me. I've heard (in other forums) that KB is a place that authors come to and then leave after achieving success. I don't think that's true but am interested in how that 'last login' might give evidence about that over time.
 
#126 ·
Andrew Ashling said:
Harvey, would it be possible to add a link to the list at the top of the page, right under the masthead?
Yes, I'm going to give another day or so for authors to add their sales info, and then publicize it. At that point, we'll add a link to it at the top of our page, and post about it in our blog, Facebook, Twitter, and email newsletter.

So this will get some visibility pretty soon!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
You have insufficient privileges to reply here.
Top