Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur,

bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, publishing options and marketing ideas for your book.

You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more information at

TheCreativepen.com. And that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show.

Hello creatives. I'm Joanna Penn. And this is episode number 720 of the podcast and it is Saturday the 21st of October

23 as I record this. In today's show I'm talking to Pat McClain about some of the challenges

of a mature career with a big backlist of books. When to keep things updated, when to let things go, when to try new things,

as well as what we think is coming for the indie industry and more. So that's coming up in the

interview section. So in publishing and book marketing things, there was an interesting article

posted on publishers

weekly this week from the CEO of Streetlib, Giacomo de Angelo, and Streetlib is a Italian

self-publishing company that's now expanding in partnerships with Balka and others for global reach.

And the article shared this statistic. According to Bookstat, self-published titles captured 51% of all

online unit sales and 34% of revenue in 2022. I was like, whoa, that is crazy. I mean, I had heard that

collectively we were bigger than many publishers,

but that is a huge amount, and that's not even measuring everything, especially as more authors

move to direct sales. So none of this includes, for example, my Kickstarter or my Shopify sales,

which is becoming more and more of my income. Same with many other authors.

It also doesn't measure KU page reads or serial fiction or in-person sales or any of that.

So, but even then, it's a really big chunk. So 51% of unit sales, 34% of revenue in 2022.

Now, I presume that that is US only, but still, that's pretty significant.

So the article goes on. Several generational trends will chart the course for the industry.

...