How well do middle grade eBooks sell?

My understanding is middle grade doesn't sell as well in e as in print. However, the reader/tablet manufacturers are working hard at making sturdy, kid friendly tablets(Kurio Kid's tablet). I suspect one day one of those tablets will be the kid equivalent of the kindle.

High schools and middle schools are already going from laptops to ipads, wouldn't be at all surprised if we don't see tablets in the grade schools in the next few years.

How did you do?

One of the biggest trade book fiction categories is YA, can you make it YA? You can give away and sell thousands of copies in that category. Check out this popular thread. To sum it up, YA books are a hot commodity.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=227945

MG is a younger and less monied category. I think the parents are still making the book buying choices at that age. Is there any way to mature your MC and their problems?

Otherwise, what many people don't realize is when most books are published in print today as many as 50% (on average) of the total copies sold are ebook versions.

As for self publishing, the best selling print and ebooks are epic fantasy (Eragon), alternative family issues, and alternative lifestyles. Rather than being popular genres the popularity of those genres in ebooks describes the dedication of the the readers in those categories rather than the book reading population as a whole.

Waldo said:

One of the biggest trade book fiction categories is YA, can you make it YA? You can give away and sell thousands of copies in that category. Check out this popular thread. To sum it up, YA books are a hot commodity.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=227945

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YA book blogger here -- please don't try and sell an MG book as YA. All it leads to is disappointed YA readers who can tell the book is written for a different audience.

YA, generally, has a strong focus of coming-of-age themes and romance. Middle grade doesn't, and it has a quite noticeably 'younger' voice, so if you wanted to follow Waldo's suggested plan you'd have to heavily rewrite. You'd also have to redesign your cover. It would be a lot of work.

On a more practical note, YA is currently a very overcrowded genre and the days of it being an easy money-maker are gone. New Adult is the current money-making genre, and you don't want to try converting an MG to that.

Waldo said:

As for self publishing, the best selling print and ebooks are epic fantasy (Eragon), alternative family issues, and alternative lifestyles.

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Eragon was never a self-published e-book. It had a self-published print run but was picked up by a major publisher quite quickly, and has been trade published ever since.

Grimball4 said:

Also what is New Adult?
Ironically most of the people that I know who have read my book are adults and they are the ones who really like to story. So I could put it out as an adult horror story like Stephen King’s It. It just wouldn’t have any extreme violence, bad language, or adult situations.

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New Adult is an emerging genre, so there's not a strict definition for it yet, but it's usually stories involving college-age or twenty-something characters and higher sexual content than YA.

It's a huge money-making genre in self-publishing right now, and a particularly noteable success story from our forum can be found in LeahZero's publishing diary. She's a damn good writer and it shows in her results: she's been an Amazon bestseller multiple times and was nominated for the Goodread's choice award.

Comparatively terrible, in my experience.

My current MG series moves somewhere in the neighborhood of 1% of sales as ebook, and I'm fairly convinced that a statistically significant chunk of those sales are my adult fans picking up the more portable version.

I firmly believe the market WILL get there, but at the moment it's just not there. Until they invent an e-reader you can hand to a ten year old boy without a qualm--and they will! Eventually!--I expect e-books of MG will be pretty weak.

Well, I don't have much to add for sales statistics, but I do have a nine year old. He loves to read books. I buy him lots of books. I do not buy him e-books for the reasons mentioned.

He is a boy and he tends to break things.

That being said, the minute that an affordable and durable e-reader comes on the market I will be all over it for my kids. I think the market for MG e-books will be much larger at that point.

Hope that adds some insight to your question.

Grimball4 said:

Only 1%? Looks like if I don't have a publisher by next fall I'll need to put out a physical book of my story myself..

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I've seen some of your threads discussing the book you released and discussing looking for an agent - are you planning on looking for an agent for the book you self-published?

That can be a very hard road. It's not completely impossible, but generally, unless something is a big seller already (in the tens of thousands at least), publishers tend to lack interest in publishing it. Thus agents tend to lack interest in authors wanting deals for those books.

If you're talking about looking for an agent for other, unpubbed books, sorry, ignore me.

Just a note: Don't start duplicate threads in different forums. If you start a thread in one forum and think it would be better in a different forum, ask a mod to move it.

cornflake said:

I've seen some of your threads discussing the book you released and discussing looking for an agent - are you planning on looking for an agent for the book you self-published?

That can be a very hard road. It's not completely impossible, but generally, unless something is a big seller already (in the tens of thousands at least), publishers tend to lack interest in publishing it. Thus agents tend to lack interest in authors wanting deals for those books.

If you're talking about looking for an agent for other, unpubbed books, sorry, ignore me.

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This is what I have heard as well regarding trying to find an agent or publisher for an already self-published book. Unless it has sold in significant numbers, self-publishing can be a deterrent for publishers.

Good luck to you. I hope that MG is an emerging market for ebooks. It seems more and more kids are getting iPads, etc., so perhaps that will lead to higher ebook sales in the future.

Grimball4 said:

I recently published one and was wondering if this was one of the tougher categories to sell in eBook only format.

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Really poorly. Sorry.

On a positive note, my seven year old next door neighbor has an e-reader. Many kids this age have ipads. They can read on those, but they don't seem to.

When Scholastic sells e-books at the book fairs, e-books will take off.

Scholastic....

Debbie V said:

On a positive note, my seven year old next door neighbor has an e-reader. Many kids this age have ipads. They can read on those, but they don't seem to.
When Scholastic sells e-books at the book fairs, e-books will take off.

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Agree with that....

My house has several iphones, laptops, ipads, and kindles. But my younger daughter never reads digital books, she gets almost all her books from the Scholastic book fairs at school.

On the opposite end of the spectrum - My teenage daughter buys at least 2 paid eBooks per week on her kindle. And for a handful of books she LOVES - she will also ask for a paperback/hardback and read it again.

Slight derail for my own curiosity: I know I own an iPad and a dedicated e-reader because, well, I'm a spoiled adult and I got the nook before iPads came out, but do you think a lot of parents buy multiple devices for kids?

Yes, they do buy multiple devices for kids. They buy one--the child breaks it--then, they buy another, and another, and another.

Electronics Circle of Life

wampuscat said:

Slight derail for my own curiosity: I know I own an iPad and a dedicated e-reader because, well, I'm a spoiled adult and I got the nook before iPads came out, but do you think a lot of parents buy multiple devices for kids?

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When I upgrade devices, rather than sell or trade-in the used device, I pass it down to other family members. So everybody may not have the latest gadgets, but they do have access to multiple gadgets.

I do see other families doing the same thing. The kids getting off-cycle devices from the parent (previous-gen smartphone/reader/tablets)

Ex: and old smartphones don't even need a phone-plan. An old iPhone without a phone-plan is like an iPod Touch with better cameras.

I think middle grade ebooks tend not to sell as well as their adult counterparts.
The reason is due to kids not having the money to buy books on their own, and therefore rely on their parents to purchase the ebooks for them. And parents tend to stick to conventional publisher when purchasing books for their children.