Self-Publishing Vs Traditional Publishing II

I return with a post about self-publishing vs trad publishing. I write this in the light of strange data concerning my sales. I notice that mu sales in the UK are going up, but my sales in the US are going down. I have been thinking a lot about this, and the difference in the readerships and other factors. Because the US population is five times bigger than the UK population is stood to (my) reasoning that the sales should be approximately five times greater as well, if all things were equal.

But apparently they are not equal. So this got me thinking. The first thing my meandering stumbled upon was that the US has more people, but it also has more writers uploading more material. This is what some in the academic environs might call the quantitative analysis. As far as qualitative analysis, well... this is harder, but I  think that perhaps the American reader prefers faster fiction, and more violent fiction, and neither of these things is my forté. 

Now......... what has any of this got to do with self-publishing Vs traditional publishing I hear you ask. In the world of self-publishing, writers have more control over their output. By this, I mean they can publish more often than with pro houses, but also they are the final judge of the material and what most (if not all) trad houses would reject as too violent, etc., the self-published writer can just go ahead and give to the world. 

In the brave sorties I make for you, my Blog Reader, into the world of self-published writing, I have started to notice a common theme among those writers claiming to make a lot of money, and that is that they write quite graphically violent material, or pornographic material as well, particularly those who call themselves "paranormal erotica" but what you or I would call vampire porn. 

My thinking on this is that the sales are high for these authors because they are writing and publishing stuff that just cannot be bought anywhere else because traditional publishing houses just will not touch stuff that graphic. For this reason, people who are looking for this kind of stuff go to Amazon and pick it up from a self-published writer. The more violent or pornographic it is, the quicker word spreads about the content and the higher the sales go. Then this process starts to snowball because the higher the sales the higher the book goes in the sales rank, and then more people notice that writer and round it goes again. 

The problem is that other writers, whose stuff isn't incredibly violent or stuffed with people giving vampires blow-jobs, find that their stuff just gets lost in the white noise. People can read what these writers are writing simply by going into a book shop and buying it there, after all, but what they cannot do is go into a book shop and buy stories with incredibly violent depictions of murder, or stories of what happens when a werewolf tries to have sex with a leprechaun, or whatever the hell is in those "paranormal erotica" books. 

It is no accident that the biggest sellers of self-published books are in the fields of porn and violence, and this is because if people want to read that stuff, the only place they can get it is on Amazon. So, the moral of the story is if you want to make big sales on Amazon then it looks like you might have to start writing "paranormal erotica" or very violent crime or horror stories, because that is where cash is for the reasons I have written about here.