ebook sales 2018

As I wrap up my record-keeping for 2018, I broke down which platforms sold the best for me in the last year:

Amazon: 63.92%
Google Play: 14.58%
Kobo: 8.55%
Apple: 7.27%
Barnes & Noble: 5.1%
Audiobooks: 0.0043%

I gotta say, this makes me very glad I spent a weekend towards the end of 2014 figuring out how to use Google Play!

This is also why I only have a few books in Kindle Unlimited. If Amazon was closer to, say, 85% of my total sales, it would make more sense, but not at 64%. (And that’s lower than it has been in past years.)

People have been saying that Barnes & Noble is going to go under for years, but my sales on it have been pretty consistent since 2016 or so.

I get good results using Kobo’s internal promotions system.

Audiobooks might have been only 0.0043%, but that’s still 16 times more than I made from audiobooks in 2017. Audio takes a while to scale up, and I had just gotten started with them towards the end of 2018. I made more from my self-published audiobooks in January 2019 than I did in the entirety of 2018. Hope to see more growth there in 2019!

Thanks for reading, everyone! In a few days I’ll post which series of mine sold the best in 2018.

-JM