The AuthorAZ Indie Author Survey 2027
There is a great deal of advice about indie publishing and remarkably little data. This is an attempt at some: an anonymous annual survey of what authors actually earn, spend, use and worry about — asked the same way each year, so the answers can be compared.
Respondents can enter a draw for one of 20 lifetime unlocks of the app
Not open yet
The 2027 survey opens on 1 December 2026 and closes on 31 January 2027. The questions below are published in advance so you can see exactly what is being asked before deciding whether to take part.
For taking part
20 lifetime unlocks of the AuthorAZ app, drawn among respondents
Leave an email address at the end of the survey and you can enter a draw for one of twenty lifetime unlocks of the mobile app — the full vault, one time, no subscription.
The draw runs on the entry list alone. Your answers carry no identifier and your email is stored in a separate table with no link to them, so we cannot tell which responses are yours — not even to award a prize. The draw does not weaken that guarantee, because it never needs to know.
Draw termsTold the day it opens
What it asks about
- Your publishing5
- Money3
- Distribution2
- Marketing2
- Technology and AI4
- Challenges2
What it does not ask
Your name, your pen name, your book titles, your email address, your country, or anything else that would identify you. Revenue and spending are ranges, never exact figures, and location is a broad region with a “prefer not to say” option.
If you choose to give an email address to receive the report, it is stored in a separate table with no link back to your answers. That is a deliberate design decision, not a policy promise: there is no key joining the two, so the answers cannot be attributed to you even by us.
Full methodology and privacy designWhy annual
A single year’s snapshot of indie publishing is mildly interesting. The same questions asked identically over several years is the useful thing, because it shows what is changing. The core questions are therefore fixed: their wording will not be quietly improved between editions, because that would silently break the comparison they exist to support.