A new report finds that 40-something women are a big force in ebook buying.

According to the Book Industry Study Group,  today’s ebook power buyer is a 44-year-old lover of romance who buys at least one ebook a week and who is spending more on books today than she has in the past. She’s also using an e-reader like a Kindle instead of reading on her computer.

The report identifies “power buyers” as representing about 18 percent of the total people buying ebooks today, but they buy 61 percent of all ebooks purchased.

The Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey also finds that women make up 66 percent of all power ebook  buyers. In 2009, they were only 49 percent of the ebook market.

Also, the majority of ebooks sold are fiction: 20 percent of them are romance. Literary fiction and science fiction each have a 20 percent share of the market as well.

The most  influential factors leading to an ebook purchase come as no surprise to me – free samples and low prices go a long way toward driving sales.

Amazon says it is now selling more ebooks than paperbacks and hardbacks combined.

“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books. We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly – we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years,” Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos says in a press release.
 
According to Amazon, they’ve sold 105 ebooks for every 100 print books. Free Kindle ebooks are not included in that calculation, which would make the number even higher. The online retailer has already sold three times as many ebooks in 2011 as it did during the same period in 2010.

Read the full press release here.

Last year, romance novelist Nyree Belleville was dropped by her publisher. Today, she might tell you it was one of the best things to happen to her writing career.

The author of 12 titles under the pen name Bella Andre, the most Belleville made from her books through her publisher was $21,000.

Depressed, she decided to try self publishing her work. At first, the profits trickled in. Before long, they were gushing in. According to The Washington Post, after the first few weeks, Belleville made $281. The next month it was $474. When she self-published a new ebook in July, she made $3,539.

So she started publishing manuscripts she’d written years earlier. By the end of her first quarter, Belleville had sold 56,008 books, raking in $116,264.

If that doesn’t make every unpublished writer want to run out and self-publish, I don’t know what will.

But wait.

The article by Neely Tucker also includes some more sobering statistics. Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com says in the article, “We have less than 50 people who are making more than $50,000 per year. We have a lot who don’t sell a single book.”

The article also quotes Jeff Belle, Amazon’s vice president of books. “There are a lot of books, even low-priced, on Kindle that are not selling at all.”

Oh.

Well, that’s a downer. Still, given the changing publishing landscape, and the success of self-published authors like Belleville  and Amanda Hocking, all writers – published and unpublished – should probably be exploring all of their options.

Read the full article here.