How to Protect Your Book Sales When the Market Slows

To protect your book sales when the market slows, spread your books across several stores, offer every format, and keep publishing while others quit. A slow market hits a self-publishing business like any other business, so you can’t stop the dip, but you can make sure no single store or format holds all your income. Below is what the numbers say now and the three things I do.

I made the video below during an earlier downturn. Some gurus still tell people to put books on the market and make millions, and that is not true when the market slows.

Is the book market slowing down?

For print, yes. US print book sales fell 3.1% in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same quarter of 2025, according to Circana BookScan (Jane Friedman, 8-Apr-26). That followed a rise of just 0.3% in print units for 2025 as a whole (Jane Friedman, 14-Jan-26), so this is a dip and not a collapse, but it is a reminder that sales do not only go up.

Amazon announced about 16,000 corporate job cuts on 28-Jan-26, after about 14,000 in October 2025, as it restructured around AI (The Star, 29-Jan-26). I can’t say what a company under pressure will do next. Platforms can change royalties, rules and costs for authors, and they have done so before.

You cannot control what the platforms do. You can control how much of your income depends on any one of them.

Why should I sell in more than one store?

So that one store changing its rules cannot take all your income. Do not have your book only on Amazon. If Amazon changes the rules for how much you earn on each sale, you want your books on other sites too, so you keep earning royalties on them.

Of the other sites, IngramSpark is the place to be, second only to Amazon. After that, get your ebooks into Draft2Digital. That way your books are spread out if one company decides to cut your royalty percentage.

For the details of each, see my posts on IngramSpark and publishing on IngramSpark and Amazon KDP.

Which formats should my book be in?

All of them: ebook, paperback, hardback and audiobook. When a reader comes to Amazon, another store or your own website, they want to read the book in their own way. Have it as an ebook, a paperback, a hardback and an audiobook.

The reason is simple. On any given day, any given format on any given store has some probability of making a sale. When the market goes down and fewer sales happen, each of those probabilities goes down too. Having your book in more places and more formats keeps more chances alive.

Think of it as fishing. The number of fish is decreasing, so you put out as many lines as you can, in as many waters as you can, with different bait on the hooks. Even if the fish are cut in half, you can still catch some. I live in Norway, where wild salmon numbers fell so low that the authorities closed fishing on 33 rivers in June 2024 (Salmon Business, 24-Jun-24). Where you can still fish, you want to get the most from every trip.

Should I keep publishing in a slow market?

Yes. Quitting is the common temptation. You see other people doing well, especially if you bought into what the fake gurus say, that your books will sell millions of copies. Often it is hybrid publishers and others who point to testimonials and tell you of course it will work.

Most people who start with that mindset give up within six months to a year. In a slow market, it can even tempt authors who have been at it a while to give up because the money is not stable.

If you stay in the game, you keep producing books in different formats on different platforms, running ads, doing content marketing and optimizing your pages to drive traffic. Your competition quits publishing in your genre while you keep going. When the market picks up, you are the one with the books out there. New people come in, but they start from scratch.

Never underestimate that. It is also the habit of sharpening the saw, from Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people, which I heard about as a cadet at the Air Force Academy. You get better at your skills, but it does not happen overnight. Do not jump ship to something else, because then you start from scratch, and every market gets hit in a downturn, with the economy down, inflation up and things getting more expensive.

What should I check this week?

Open your list of books and look at where each one is for sale and in which formats. Where is a book only on one store? Where is an ebook missing its paperback? Make a short list and start with the book that sells best, since more formats and more stores will help it the most.

How does getting better help in a downturn?

Better books and better marketing win a bigger share of the sales that are still happening. That is a big reason I coach authors. If you improve the quality of what you do, your sales go up with the right strategy. In a slow period you may still see a decline, but with new strategies you can even see an uptick in your total, because what you are doing is doubling or tripling the results you would otherwise have had. Some authors do see a bump, especially as the Christmas season comes.

Not sure which of these to do first? Book a free 25-minute discovery call and we will look at where your books are now.

If you are wondering whether it is still worth it at all, read is self-publishing on Kindle profitable?, and before you pay anyone who promises big sales, read why hybrid publishing is wrong for most authors.

How are you getting ready for a slow market? Tell me in the comments.

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