Hi Chicken, Perhaps youshould go to the source: http://authorearnings.com/report/may-2015-author-earnings-report/ Cheers, Greg.
There's been a lot of criticism of the methods used in that report. I honestly haven't cared enough to dive into it all, but if anyone's going to use the numbers to plan their careers, they should probably read the critiques before accepting the conclusions.
Hmm. Their terms are unclear, and their charts don't clearly identify self-publishers. What is included in "indie"?
Hi, You can read their raw data which will tell you what's counted and what's not. However, there is no survey of author earnings that can't and shouldn't be criticised. In Hugh's case the biggest concern is that the data is self reported even if anon. Cheers, Greg.
I think these reports are based on data scraped from Amazon, not self-reporting. The criticisms I've seen are more along the lines of "the data doesn't support the conclusions". And as someone who's tried to figure out actual sales based on Amazon ranks, I'd have to say the data is probably pretty sketchy, as well. There's a good list of links at SL Huang's blog, http://www.slhuang.com/blog/2014/02/16/links-to-analysis-regarding-authorearnings-com/. And for the paranoid among us - in addition to being a mathematician, SL Huang is a self-publisher. Many of the links go to sites with analysis from other self-publishers. Wanting to challenge misinformation doesn't make someone anti-self-publishing, it makes someone anti-misinformation.
OK, I'm relieved to see that others are finding flaws. Because I was reading the page and kept saying, "What the... how does... what's the basis for... where did that conclusion.... what?" I didn't know if my usual ability to understand statistics had fallen down, or if he needed to read a copy of Tufts' The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, or what.
