I analysed Reddit’s self-publishing subreddits

Some of the results surprised me

Most advice you see online starts with somebody’s hunch. I wanted facts. So I asked ChatGPT to dig through three years of r/selfpublish and r/selfpublishing, count the hot topics and flag the posts that earned the highest vote totals.

The prompt I used
“Scan back for up to the last three years of the subreddits r/selfpublishing and r/selfpublish, analyse the questions and comments, as well as upvotes and downvotes, and pull out data that I can use to help self-publishing authors. For example, what are the top pain points being expressed in the subreddit? Quantify data where possible, but lists of useful information are also helpful.”

ChatGPT sampled six hundred high-visibility threads. Every post was sorted into a theme, then we calculated the share of discussion. The numbers confirm what many of us feel instinctively, but a few findings were unexpected.

More detail on the results is available on our Author Growth newsletter on Substack.