[Gareth K Pengelly]

I'd be willing to bet a small fraction of Bookbub's subscribers are authors. A small fraction indeed.

Look on Reddit. Look on various review sites where people talk about Bookbub. Almost all of them are readers talking about it from a reader's perspective.

I'd say thoughts like what's occurred to you are more due to your own bias - you're an author, frequenting an author's forum filled with other author's.

When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, etc etc.

 

[Gareth K Pengelly]

Thing is, I get where Mark is coming from - there's bound to be a lot of authors on Bookbub's lists. Nature of the beast. Authors read, probably as much or more than anyone else.

But I'm willing to bet the proportion is small. Larger than other snapshots of society, sure. I'd wager as a percentage there's more authors on a Bookbub list than there would be in any given Asda or Tesco (or Walmart for those of you on the other side of the pond).

But the Crime Fiction list on Bookbub boasts 4 million people. How many of those would be authors? I very much doubt that, out of 4 million, many hundreds of thousands of them are authors.

And if it's only a mere 'few' thousand, say ten thousand, that works out at 0.0025%. Which is hardly padding the figures out, is it?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm drastically underestimating how many authors there are on their lists. Maybe 2 million of those 4 million subscribers are actually authors.

But even if they were... as long as they buy our books, should we really mind, haha?

 

[Gareth K Pengelly]

I've just had a quick check myself, just to do my own research, as you suggested Mark.

It appears that Authors are weighted very highly towards the top of the follower lists. Possibly due to the fact that it reflects well if you're being followed by other successful authors. A nice little touch by Bookbub in their coding.

If you click on Raymond E Feist, for example, who's on the front page with one of his books atm, he only has 4k-odd followers. Scrolling down through his followers, you go through two pages of authors, then about twenty pages of not authors.

Same with a lot of authors that don't have masses of followers.

If you click on authors that have many tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, however, you see a greater proportion of authors for the first however many pages. This, I'd imagine, is due to it having a limit of how many pages it can show you before it stops. Therefore those authors who are shunted to the top of the list (for credibility purposes) are all you can see.

If you could scroll down further and further, I well imagine it'd stop showing authors, then show hundreds upon hundreds of pages of normal readers.

Mystery (hopefully) solved. Huzzah!

 

[Gareth K Pengelly]

Teen and Young Adult 1,480,000+
Literary Fiction 2,710,000+