How Much Can Self-Published Authors Earn

Author Brenda Hiatt is showing us the money again.

On her blog, Hiatt lays out her initial findings as to how much "indie" or self-published authors are earning.

So, far, she says she's collected data from 82 books, 33 of them are backlist titles. The rest are original self-published works.

The titles have been available as ebooks an average of seven months.The average price of the titles is about $3. About one-third have been discounted or offered for free for anywhere from a few days to months.

The earnings per title ranged from a few dollars to a current maximum of nearly $140,000.

For backlist titles, the average total amount earned over a book’s "e-lifetime" (as Hiatt refers to it) is $7,915. The median earned is $4,134.

The "average" usually refers to adding up all the numbers and dividing that sum by the number of numbers. The "median" is the middle number or the average of the two middle numbers.

When it comes to original titles, which have been available an average of 6 months, the total earnings to date averaged $12,548. The median was $5,150.

Hiatt reports the single highest-earning title in her survey was an indie original by a previously unpublished writer.

For the complete results of Hiatt's survey, click here to visit her blog.

UPDATE: I''ve taken the plunge and developed an author website that I actually have to pay for! I hope you'll start visiting me there; that's where I'll be blogging from now on! Come along and have a look! Click here.