You may have a desire to become an author and truly feel you have an eBook inside you, but maybe fiction isn’t your forte. If you’ve tried to make your way through characters and story arcs and simply aren’t getting anywhere, maybe you’re destined for the non-fiction world.
Writing non-fiction can be a great way to establish yourself as an indie author, because you can publish eBooks on topics you either already know a lot about or have a deep desire to learn about. In this month’s blog series, we’ll explore some of the major types of non-fiction eBooks whose sales are performing extremely well.
Of the top 20 non-fiction eBooks on The New York Times Best Sellers list (as of the writing of this post), the majority were autobiographies and biographies, but non-fiction eBooks find success in a number of genres, from how-to eBooks to recipe eBooks. In fact, according to BookScan, the top five non-fiction genres are reference, general non-fiction, health/fitness/medicine/sports, religion/bibles, and biography/autobiography/memoir.
Non-fiction is underrepresented in eBooks, comprising less than 20% of sales versus more than 50% in their print counterparts. This doesn’t mean that non-fiction has no place in digital publishing; quite the contrary, we believe it means there is a huge opportunity for the non-fiction indie writer to break into digital publishing.
In the coming weeks we’ll explore different non-fiction eBook genres and how best to approach writing and marketing.
