Monday, February 15, 2016

Harry Potter And The Cursed Child Available for Pre-order

The 8th installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, is a two-part play scheduled to open at the Palace Theatre, in London, England, on July 30, 2016.  J.K. Rowling didn't write the play, but Jack Thorne did.  But don't go thinking that J.K. Rowling didn't influence it.  The play is based upon a story by author J.K. Rowling, Thorne, and director John Tiffany, so Jo did have a hand in it.

Since most Harry Potter fans won't have a chance to see the play in London, Pottermore and Arthur A. Levine (an imprint of Scholastic) are publishing an early version of the script on July 31, 2016, the day after the play opens.  Coincidentally (not really!) that's J.K. Rowling's and Harry Potter's birthday.  While the script isn't published yet, you can pre-order it now in hardcover for $17.99 or Kindle eBook for $14.99.

J.K. Rowling has said in the past that she wouldn't write another Harry Potter tale.  (Immediately followed by "Never say 'Never!'")  She also said in September 2007 that she was working on a Harry Potter encyclopedia that could take up to 10 years.  We haven't heard of this encyclopedia in years, but she has written articles for the Harry Potter universe and character histories, including more than 19,000 new words added to Pottermore.com.  I think it's likely that the published encyclopedia itself will never come about, but Harry Potter fans worldwide can enjoy the free encyclopedic articles online at Pottermore.com.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Feb. 2016 Author Earnings Report Is Posted

Each quarter, Hugh Howey and David the Data Guy crawl the Amazon.com website to gather data on Amazon Kindle eBook sales to determine how much money authors, publishers, and Amazon earn from daily eBook sales.  This quarter, they've also managed to gather data for print and audio book sales.

In one day in January 2016, Amazon.com customers purchased about 909,000 Kindle eBooks and downloaded the equivalent of 155,000 Kindle eBooks as Kindle Unlimited borrows, spending about $5,755,000 a day, which earns authors about $1,756,000 a day.  In one year at this rate, consumers will spend $2.1 billion, and authors will earn about $641 million.

Of particular note, Hugh and Data Guy have taken nearly a million data points to calibrate the sales rank to daily unit sales.  By looking at the chart below, you can see how many sales it takes to reach a rank and to maintain that rank.


For example, if your Kindle eBook were sitting at the 600,000 rank because it hadn't sold any copies in a few days and you ran a 99 cent promotion and sold 24 eBook copies, you can expect to reach the rank of about 10,000.  If your eBook then sold 12 copies each day for the next several days, it would maintain a rank of about 10,000.

Thank you, Hugh and Data Guy, for doing all the hard work to bring us all this info!