I think most cultural goods compete in hit-driven markets. That is a given. But as far as I understood the article claims the downfall of books in general. And that is not true, in my opinion at least. Books are bought as web novel or viewed on Kindle Unlimited or in general as self-published endeavors. And as the link in my post states, KU pays good, Patreon works as well. There also emerge more and more paid and sponsored newsletters etc. All completely independent to classical publishing channels.
> Books are bought as web novel or viewed on Kindle Unlimited or in general as self-published endeavors.
I've seen no data to suggest this is true at least in the sense it's some sort of major revenue shift. "Traditional" - so non-web novel - type e-books make up about 20% of sales of traditional books, and this has been very slow to change in recent years.
As far as I can tell - and this might well be way off, so I'm happy to see better numbers, the web novel market might maybe be somewhere between 3%-5% of the size of the traditional book market. Both likely can make up substantially more of indie authors earnings - it's certainly far easier for me to sell to Kindle users than getting my books into bookstores, and so paper sales largely come from Amazon too.
The webnovel market is really hard to justify spending time on unless you write in a very specific set of genres, and is prepared to death-march until you get traction. That's fine - some people want to do that.
But KU etc. does not pay well either for most. They pay well for a similarly minuscule fraction of writers, and next to nothing for most. For my part, I'm considering pulling my stuff from there, as it prevents you from putting up your ebooks elsewhere.
This isn't really surprising, sure - it's a market where it's now trivial to enter but still hard to get both good and find a product market fit. So you have a flood of people churning out vast volumes, most of which isn't very good, some of which is good but just up against a deluge of amazing work.
I don't know about the US, but I know there was a survey in the UK a couple of years back that showed that in the UK the average full-time writer, irrespective of platform, earns well below minimum wage, and the vast majority of writers are not full-time. Most full-time writers in the UK at least depend on the income of a partner to be able to afford to write full-time. And that average is pulled significantly up by the top end of the market.
Some people do better on KU or serialized venues than traditional books, sure.
With respect to the click-bait headline, it's not so much that all that much has changed, but that this is the most we've seen the publishing industry numbers laid bare.
And "no one" really do buy books in the sense that reading "books" be they traditional, or webnovel.com or other serial formats, is something most people just don't do very often.
I think web novel and similar channel revenue is hard to estimate, since Patreon revenue and so on flies below the radar.
It is of course still a niche, but I don't think it will stay that way. And I assume publishers see the effects already in consumer behavior. Just look at the Chinese web novel market.
You can not assume you can guess read-throughs based on reviews, is my first problem.
It's against their terms to buy reviews, but you still trivially can (and risk getting banned if Amazon suddenly decides to enforce their rules - it's not worth the risk), and plenty of "grey hat" review services exist that costs money and where the provider will "gift" the readers copies bought off Amazon, but where the readers aren't paid, and are at least in theory given instructions that somewhat tries to comply (or pretend to comply) with Amazon's rules. Wouldn't use that either.
If the reviews aren't verified, then ARC (advance reader copies) are also common and accepted by Amazon w/caveats (you need to be very careful about wording, and for KU it's against the terms for you to send the book out while it's exclusive to KU, but you can do it before, or pause KU), and a fairly large percentage who receive ARCs will leave reviews. ARCs is the norm in the publishing industry, and so anyone remotely decently prepared will line up reviewers that have no direct link to sales, and someone with a following somewhere can sometime line up fairly chunky numbers of reviews right off the bat.
But this means the ratio can be far lower. It's likely a lot of the early reviews will have come from free giveaways and early efforts that did not earn the author a single cent and might even have had a net cost.
Without knowing how the author in question promoted their book, it's a guess that could easily be off by a factor of ten. But it could also be better.
$200k is certainly possible. Just rare.
To do well on KU, people also usually focus on maximising page count. That means writing series, and pushing out "box sets" to encourage. It's a very different game from writing standalone novels, and one probably better suited to people already used to the webnovel/serials on Patreon game.
With respect to the Chinese web novel market, my son spends a fortune on it, but it's still a tiny sliver of overall publishing. I suspect it's likely to outpace the growth in the rest of the e-book market though.
