The growing impact of the audiobook market is illustrated this week with the entry of a self-published science fiction title into the Amazon Charts Top 20 on the strength of its audiobook sales.
Not Alone by Craig A Falconer is a new entrant into the Most Sold fiction chart at No 17 and more readers listened to the audiobook on Audible than read the Kindle ebook.
The ebook is available at $0.99 and is also likely to have been boosted by being available under Amazon’s Prime Reading scheme, which is a rotating selection of around 1,000 titles which Prime members can read for free.
Not Alone is also available on the Kindle Unlimited ebook subscription scheme. Books read through Prime Reading and Kindle Unlimited would count towards the chart totals as the Most Sold chart ranks books according to the number of copies sold and pre-ordered through Amazon.com, Audible.com, Amazon Books stores and books read through digital subscription programs (once a customer has read a certain percentage — roughly the length of a free reading sample).
Not Alone does not appear on the corresponding Amazon Most Read Top 20 chart (week of August 6, 2017), which ranks titles by the average number of daily Kindle readers and Audible listeners each week.
The Most Read Top 20 is again dominated by seven Harry Potter ebooks, which are available through Kindle Unlimited from JK Rowling’s Pottermore imprint while there is only one Potter book in the Most Sold Top 20 (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at No 13).
Craig A Falconer has written six science fiction novels, including four titles in the Sycamore series. Not Alone is not a new book as it was published in December 2015 and Falconer’s most recent book is Terradox, which was published in March 2017.
You can check out the Amazon Charts at Amazon.com/charts.
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