Digital Book World is a big publishing event in New York, but moreover it’s a great snapshot into the industry – as well as a glimpse into where we are going. Below are some of the biggest pieces that I came away with, but also some pretty surprising statistics. Take a look at the statistics on eBook pricing – as well as how the Amazon sales rank really works.

I hope you enjoy this mix of slides, videos, and tweets and oh, don’t forget to check out the search marketing tips from Rand Fishkin below!

The Biggest Genres on Amazon

What are the biggest genres selling on Amazon? Take a look at this picture – which I realize is a bit fuzzy (the link to the slide deck for this presentation is below) however the color to focus on here are blue, which is self-published. When you look at genres like Romance you see how big this market is – surprisingly Erotica is very small by comparison. Non-fiction is also small however it’s important to keep in mind that these numbers may be missing a big chunk of books and those are the ones that go straight to eBook. Meaning that if an author publishes straight to Amazon without an ISBN, these are harder to track because Amazon uses an ASIN number and how many they’ve issued isn’t shared by Amazon.

Where are most eBooks being sold? No surprise it’s Amazon but what’s surprising here is Apple, which is up higher from last year this time.

Price Points for eBooks:

Publishers continue to struggle with pricing their eBooks, most of them in my opinion are pricing them too high. These numbers are very telling – indie vs. traditional publishing and what gets sold and at what price. The slides may be a bit hard to see, but a link to them is listed below! Check out this short video clip on eBook pricing:

Pricing a Book for a New Author

If you’re a new author the rules are different. It’s harder to price a book at a higher selling point if you’re still trying to build your list, which is why you’ll see the majority of indie author newbies pricing their books at $3.99 and below.

Here are those presentation slides: authorearnings.com

And finally…the Amazon bestseller rank explained, check out this extraordinary formula:

Pre-Orders

Who when do pre-orders get counted? A lot of us believe it’s on the “on sale” date of your book but it’s not – it’s actually on the date of the book order which is again why I always encourage authors to shorten your pre-order time. By doing this you’ll also push your book sales into a tighter window – let’s say two weeks instead of three months.

A couple more Amazon juicy tidbits gathered from Twitter (#dbw16 #dbw)

Did you know that men make up their minds about books faster than women. Click the image below for an interesting piece in the Guardian about this:

Search Engine Secrets, Driving More Traffic, Selling More Books and Great Author Websites

Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz brought a lot to the table as well, including his perspective on great author websites, driving traffic and creating great content. Another interesting thing he mentioned was Medium.com – if you’ve never used it this site is a great way to get your content out there – without getting dinged for the duplicate content issue

Here is the slide deck for Rand’s presentation: