In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, publishing and tech pundit Piotr Kowalczyk presents his analysis of the top self-published Kindle books in 2011.

Will self-published books continue to expand? Is $0.99  price tag wearing out? Can we expect new success stories from  independent authors?

2011 was an exciting year for publishing, full of events changing the  landscape of the industry. Self-publishing exploded and became one of  the most important factors to shape digital publishing in the near  future.

I’m excited to share the report with as much facts and figures as  possible to help forecast how the self-publishing phenomenon would  evolve in the years to come. To get the bigger picture, read also 2011 self-publishing timeline.

The report is based on figures from Kindle Store bestsellers archive and consists of five parts. You can jump directly to each one of them from the links below:

1. Highlights – most important facts & figures

2. Tables & charts – based on yearly and monthly lists

3. Description – how the data was collected

4. Overview – analysis of important events and trends

5. Conclusions – predictions for the future

1. Highlights

– Average price of a self-published book in 2011 was $1.40, vs. $8.26 for all books in Top 100

– There is a downward trend in both the number of books and the average price

– John Locke is the author with the highest number of books in a single monthly list (8 titles)

– Five authors stayed in Top 100 for at least 6 months (Barbara Freethy, Darcie Chan, John Locke, J.R. Rain and Michael Prescott)

– There are 18 self-published titles in a yearly Top 100 for 2011 (not a single self-published book in Top 100 for 2010)

Read the rest of the report, which includes many tables and charts displayed more clearly than we can present them here, as well as detailed analysis, on Ebook Friendly.