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While Amazon is rapidly becoming the Microsoft of Books, it’s worth looking at a market that they don’t fully serve yet i.e. authors.

For every book that’ll be written in the new few years, you’ll need -

1. Computers and netbooks and printers and other specialized equipment.
2. Word processing software.
3. Editing, Design, and Formatting.
4. Agents.
5. Publishers.
6. Authors buying a domain or getting a blog.
7. Authors figuring out a way to sell books online.
8. Social Networks and Social Media.
9. Setting up Print Runs, or Print on Demand.
10. ISBNs and other super interesting stuff.
11. Marketing and PR Costs.  

There are probably other significant costs too.

John Oakes and Colin Robinson of OR Books talk about how half a million books are published every year in the US alone.

What might the author’s market be worth?

Let’s work off of 1,370 new books a day (off of half a million books a year).

1. Computers and Equipment. Let’s say changed once every three years and an author writes 2 books a year. That translates to 228 new computer and equipment purchases a day. Assuming an average of $300, that’s $68,400.
2. Word Processing Software also at 228 a day, and at $25 each (balancing out word and free options), that’s $5,700 a day.
3. Editing and Design – Let’s assume $500 per book (which is rather low). That gives us, for 1,370 books a day, $685,000 per day.
4. Agent Services – Assuming Agents take 5-10% of a cut off of book sales. So we’ll leave it at the percentage figure.  
5. Publishers – This is again very vague and lets leave it at 10%-15%.
6. Printing – Cost for 1000 books is $3,000 (courtesy Foner Books). Let’s cut that to $1,000 per book and that gets us $1,370,000 per day in book printing costs.
7. Authors buying a domain/blogging - Averaging it out to $5 per author, and 2 books per author per year, that’s 685*$5 = $3,425 per day.
8. ISBNs – Let’s assume people get the $100 membership at a POD – That’s $137,000 per day.
9. Marketing and PR – Assuming people spend an average of $200 to promote their book – That’s $274,000 per day.
10. Social Media – Leaving it at nothing for the moment.

For publishers published books we have a 15% to 25% cut to agents and publishers that we are disregarding.

However, the other services all add up to – $2,543,525 per day. That’s $928.4 million a year.

Conclusion – Its a pretty big market, probably not as big as books

Even with a very conservative estimate we have a $928 million market.

Would it be possible to provide a service that covers all author needs and takes a 10% to 20% cut? Probably.

If you could get even 10% of the overall market and were to take just a 10% cut, that’s $9.28 million a year. Just from the US.

Perhaps developers and companies should be entering the author market instead of the books market.

Filed under: publishing Tagged: | authors as a market