In the previous post I looked at the number or 4 or 5 star reviews received on Amazon for books published by the top 6 major online self publishing firms. That chart is below again as a refresher. This time the chart is in order from highest to lowest, which, admittedly, is how the previous chart should have been, too (rather than the order it was in, which was the order in which I conducted the research).
| Publishing Firm | Percentage of 4 or 5 star ratings |
| Outskirts Press | 52% |
| Company U | 37% |
| Company C | 27% |
| Company A | 24% |
| Company X | 19% |
| Company L | 13% |
My conclusion was that Outskirts Press books and authors receive statistically more and statistically higher reviews on Amazon than our 5 competitors. In fact, it’s not even close. 52% compared to the next highest, Publisher U at 37%. Remember, I don’t mention our competitors by name, but it’s probably not too hard to decipher this table…
Reader reviews are all well and good — in fact, we’re proud to come out on top in this analysis — but I was curious if there was a correlation between high book reviews on Amazon and results within a widely recognized and valued book award contest. So I browsed the results of the ForeWord Reviews BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS that were just listed in the July/August issue of ForeWord Reviews trade magazine to compare these same 6 companies:
| Publishing Firm | Book of the Year Awards |
| Outskirts Press | 4 |
| Company U | 4 |
| Company C | 1 |
| Company A | 0 |
| Company X | 0 |
| Company L | 0 |
What do you know? There is almost a direct correlation between the percentage of 4-5 star reviews on Amazon and the number of book awards won by a major book contest.
Not surprisingly, those publishers whose books received less than 25% 4-5 star reviews didn’t win any awards at all. And this in spite of the volume/quantity advantage they have. For instance, Publishers A and X publish approximately 2-4 times as many books as we do in a month, and Publisher L claims to publish about ten times as many. Well, quantity doesn’t translate to quality, as you can see here.
I guess this also proves that Publisher L’s CEO was accurate when, in a 2009 New York Times article, he claimed that his company has “easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind.”
I don’t get the press that he gets (probably thankfully, because I’ve been known to put my foot in my mouth on occasion, too), so for the convenience of NY Times journalists everywhere, they are welcome to my analysis above, and this handy-dandy quote: Outskirts Press easily publishes better books, on average, than our five major competitors.
Actually, we seem to publish better books, on average, than any of our competitors. I searched the 2010 ForeWord Book of the Year Awards for all 20 of the publishers I’ve been posting about in the past and I couldn’t find any that can compete with Outskirts Press.
Just sayin’…
President of Outskirts Press 