Tony Wang9 min readA Fifth of Goodreads Books Dated 2025 Are Amazon Self-Published. A Rename Hid It.
Merge CreateSpace and 'Independently published' and Amazon self-publishing grows from 1.3% of Goodreads books dated 2010 to 21% of 2025.
Goodreads' publication-year counts have two odd peaks, 2018 and 2025. In August we traced 2018 to public-domain reprint imprints. 2025 stayed open. Going back to it, we found the bigger story is a publisher name that changed.
One imprint, two names
Count the Goodreads records published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, by year. They climb to 44,604 dated 2016, then fall to 1,139 dated 2019. "Independently published" goes the other way: 1,734 dated 2016 and 66,259 dated 2019.
Nothing shut down and nothing new launched. Kirkus Reviews reports that on 28 August 2018 KDP told customers CreateSpace was being absorbed into KDP, and Author Imprints notes that KDP Print's free ISBN shows the publisher as "Independently published", where the old free CreateSpace one showed "CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform". Both are secondary sources, not an Amazon page, but they match the shape of the data.
Add the two names together (both spellings of each) and the share of each year's records looks like this:
Show the counts behind the chart
| Publication year | CreateSpace | Independently published | All records dated that year | Combined share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 5,958 | 152 | 466,332 | 1.3% |
| 2012 | 17,361 | 334 | 615,153 | 2.9% |
| 2014 | 32,236 | 477 | 641,895 | 5.1% |
| 2016 | 44,604 | 1,734 | 762,074 | 6.1% |
| 2017 | 40,824 | 11,191 | 661,000 | 7.9% |
| 2018 | 31,912 | 23,136 | 1,037,841 | 5.3% |
| 2019 | 1,139 | 66,259 | 787,475 | 8.6% |
| 2020 | 477 | 104,781 | 727,864 | 14.5% |
| 2021 | 220 | 164,406 | 789,966 | 20.8% |
| 2022 | 152 | 167,588 | 947,245 | 17.7% |
| 2023 | 121 | 149,214 | 858,292 | 17.4% |
| 2024 | 83 | 134,310 | 868,290 | 15.5% |
| 2025 | 76 | 225,338 | 1,069,998 | 21.1% |
| 2026 (partial) | 41 | 197,521 | 910,244 | 21.7% |
The dip in 2018 and 2019 is the changeover. The records were relabeled, not lost.
It does not explain 2025 on its own
The tempting conclusion is that self-publishing explains the 2025 peak. The share says otherwise: 20.8% in 2021, when the year had 789,966 records and nothing looked odd, against 21.1% in 2025.
What 2025 has is more of everything: 1,069,998 records, 201,708 more than 2024. "Independently published" accounts for 91,028 of that (225,338 against 134,310), about 45%. The other 55% comes from other imprints.
Look only at books people have rated and the peak disappears:
| Records dated | 2024 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| With at least one rating | 315,217 | 336,100 | +20,883 |
| With no rating | 553,073 | 733,898 | +180,825 |
| All records | 868,290 | 1,069,998 | +201,708 |
2018 works the same way: 660,316 unrated records against 410,445 in 2019, a gap that is largely the reprint imprints from the first post. Both peaks are real counts of records. The extra records are the ones nobody has rated.
Where the extra 2025 records sit
Formats overlap, so these don't add up, but they show the direction. Against 2024, 2025 has 103,000 more Kindle Edition records (435,000 against 332,000), 60,000 more Audible Audio (84,000 against 24,000, more than triple) and 43,000 more paperbacks. Two large imprints went the other way: Forgotten Books and Rare Biblio had about 75,000 records dated 2024 between them, and neither is among 2025's 50 largest. The growth is broad across languages: English is up 120,000, Spanish 23,000, German 20,000.
We also can't tell whether 2025 has more records because more books were published or because the crawl found more of the recent ones. The counts look the same either way. 2026, with two months to go, already has 910,244 records.
The same book in 26 languages
The rating counts above belong to the work, and every edition and translation repeats them, which makes a top-books list easy to get wrong. We took the 300 records with the most reviews and grouped them by author and near-identical rating and review counts:
| Work | Author | Records in the top 300 |
|---|---|---|
| Fourth Wing | Rebecca Yarros | 34 (26 languages) |
| The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo | Taylor Jenkins Reid | 36 |
| A Court of Thorns and Roses | Sarah J. Maas | 42 |
| A Court of Mist and Fury | Sarah J. Maas | 9 |
| Verity and It Ends with Us | Colleen Hoover | 80 (two works) |
| The Housemaid | Freida McFadden | 39 |
| The Silent Patient | Alex Michaelides | 45 |
| The Hunger Games | Suzanne Collins | 15 |
Ranks 1 to 34 are all Fourth Wing, in 26 languages; its English, German and Thai editions each report about 4 million ratings. Across the crawl, 838 records in the Harry Potter series show more than 100,000 ratings. The 124,322 records with that many ratings are not 124,322 books: Shakespeare, Austen, King and Dickens alone account for 8.3% of them. Totals also drift with crawl date, from 3.86 million Fourth Wing ratings on a July crawl to 4.05 million on a November one.
What to do with it
- Merge publisher name variants before comparing publishers over time. A relabel looks like a collapse.
- Filter to rated books before trusting a per-year count. Unrated records carry both spikes.
- Dedupe editions to works before ranking, or summing ratings or reviews.
- Put an upper bound on year filters. The crawl has records dated 2027 and beyond, some as far out as 9999.
Publisher, format, language and the full ratings breakdown are queryable at /datasets/goodreads over one REST API, and the tables from both posts are on that page.
Caveats
- This is a crawl of 24.4M records, not Goodreads' catalog, and every count is per edition record.
- "Self-publishing imprint" here means the two publisher names above. It misses self-published books listed under an author's own imprint or another platform.
- Reprint imprints are classified by publisher name, not record by record.
- Shares are rounded to one decimal. 2026 is a partial year.
- The CreateSpace and KDP details come from secondary reporting.
Sources
Related reading
Frequently asked questions
How much of Goodreads is Amazon self-published?
In a 24.4M-record Goodreads crawl, Amazon's self-publishing imprints (CreateSpace until 2018, then 'Independently published') are 1.3% of the records dated 2010, 14.5% of 2020, and between 15% and 22% of every year from 2021 on, including 21.1% of the records dated 2025. The figure counts books listed under those two publisher names, so it misses self-published books listed under other imprints.
Why does CreateSpace seem to disappear from Goodreads in 2018?
It was relabeled, not shut down. Kirkus Reviews reports KDP told customers on 28 August 2018 that CreateSpace was being absorbed into KDP, and Author Imprints notes KDP Print's free ISBN shows the publisher as 'Independently published' where the old CreateSpace one showed 'CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform'. In the crawl, CreateSpace falls from 44,604 records dated 2016 to 1,139 dated 2019 while 'Independently published' rises from 1,734 to 66,259.
Does self-publishing explain Goodreads' 2025 publication-year peak?
Only partly. 'Independently published' adds 91,028 records over 2024, about 45% of the year's 201,708 increase, but its share of the year was 20.8% in 2021, which had no peak. About 90% of the increase is records with no rating at all, while the number of rated books per year is flat at roughly 315,000 to 378,000 from 2016 to 2025.
Can you count Goodreads editions as books?
No. Ratings and reviews belong to the work and repeat on every edition and translation. The 300 most-reviewed records in the crawl are about 9 works, and the top 34 are all Fourth Wing in 26 languages. Dedupe editions to works before ranking books or summing ratings.