Interesting to see that the annual earnings from Amazon of new authors are higher for those publishing independently  compared to those who have been taken up by the Big 5 publishing houses.  If you are an established author, the Big 5 are great. However, if you are new, it seems you sell more and earn more if you have the energy, time and knowledge to do it by yourself. Problem is, you have to do it properly and that means more than just writing the book. You need to get a proper editor (I’ve learnt that the hard way), get a professional cover design, fiddle with formatting so you can publish on Amazon and CreateSpace. Then you have to do the marketing …

The graph below depicts the stats for those earning over $50K pa from Amazon sales. See the full report at http://authorearnings.com/report/may-2016-report/