How Do Indies Beat Traditional Authors in Kindle Sales?

Amazon has a chart for books overall, but it also has a separate bestseller chart just for ebooks. Indie authors are actually making more money off of a 499 book than the traditional authors are on a 999 book. It takes a lot of marketing to convince consumers to buy the more expensive thing. The Kindle version of James Patterson's memoir is 1499; the hardback version is 1450. And so how big is that pot of money? Well, in August 2022, which is our most recent numbers, the pot was $45 million.