I gave away my books and sales increased
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
Sources:
1. Peter Suber's Open Access monograph, chapter 5, p. 107-110 (itself open access, of course). https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_(the_book) argues that OA books facilitate "searching and sampling," and then people want to read the whole thing in the nicer print format.
2. University of Michigan Press says it happens sometimes thanks to increased "awareness and visibility": https://www.press.umich.edu/openaccess
3. A phd thesis reviewing studies, and finding a negative relationship between OA and sales: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/68465
4. A swiss study of matched pairs of books, one OA, one traditional; no statistically significant difference in sales http://www.snf.ch/SiteCollectionDocuments/OAPEN-CH_schlussbe...
it probably does until it doesn't
Also, if people can sample textbooks, you can easily start to see which ones are the best (subjective, in a way) and they can rise to the top.
But yeah I personally have had the experience of the first link - I've purchased many physical books that have free (and legal) PDFs online because I like print books better.
Could be that people are spending more time online and therefore shopping. Could be that people are spending more time with their hobbies (it’s a product for musicians). Could be people spending their stimulus checks. Could be a number of other factors.
My point is that’s it’s probably unwise to draw conclusions from data which was gathered in an unprecedented market, and its best to wait for market stability before running promotional trials.
Even so, well done experimenting with a different model Jeff, you'll have a larger (and more appreciative) fan base because of it.
That's an important point. Writers don't just want sales, they want readers.
https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2008/02/03/pirate-coelho/ https://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-books-...
In short Coelho pirate his own books for free. Sales was 0 in the beginning, then 10k, next year 100k, next year 1m.
Eventually I stuck with it and found it a really eye-opening read, I feel like it's a life guidance book in disguise and I'm usually averse to them but the concept of a Personal Legend really did resonate with me.
Not really surprised by all the negative reviews on Goodreads, I stubbornly felt a similar way for a while.
Paulo Coelho likes to propagate the notion that he posses actual magical powers. When a news crew went to his house, he refused to unsheathe a sword because it might unleash catastrophic events.
That said, I read The Alchemist when I was a teenager and found it pretty fun. As a adult, I would never would never take him seriously.
It's a self-help book disguised as a mystical and easy to read fairytale that most people can somehow relate. It's not the best self-help book I ever read, it's not the best fairytale I ever read, but the result of this mix is brilliant. Most people love it, some people don't understand it and some people don't want to understand it. It definitely worths a read.
To many people 15 euros is an expensive book but looking at my tech books shelf, and seeing an average price of around 50 euros(many of which I would have paid double without a single doubt of hesitation), you quickly see a huge gap between the different audiences.
Good developers and tech people certainly appreciate the complexity of tech books and are well aware that they are often guides to prototypes, as opposed to full, production solutions. Hence the reason why many are more than happy to support open source projects from our own pockets. Take "The Rust Programming Language" book for instance - it's completely free online but I was more than happy to purchase the paper version in order to support the authors, the same way I donate to the Linux foundation, the PSF foundation and so on. And sure enough, I appreciate someone's hard work here and I'd happily buy their books should I see them useful to me.
I can't recall which artist it was (I recall it being Jan Garbarek but don't quote me on this) who gave away an album online where you could get it for free or any amount you like. I recall several sales in the 5-digits which is a clear message. But much like textbooks, such music has a very particular audience and such... Let's call them "stunts" wouldn't be successful for most products and would backfire terribly.
For all my books, I've made it free for a few days and promoted it on HN/reddit/twitter/etc. That period gives me the most sales (as both leanpub and gumroad allow people to pay more than the price of the book).
Before my latest book, due to increasing fear of the pandemic, I made all my books free for the foreseeable future and released the markdown source as well. Then, released the new book early (cutting down exercises and few more things). My post on HN [1] reached front page, in which I also mentioned about my other books. Last month saw the biggest sale ever for me, covers about four months of my living costs. After about two week break, I decided to update all my books (will take about two months). And then back to writing another book.
I also got an offer for one of my books from a publishing company, which I turned down. A few users wrote me a mail, felt nice to discuss and goes a long way in motivating me to continue writing and improving my content. A big thanks to all the readers :)
Sometimes, yes, it can be a little burdensome if someone dumps 20 different subjective grammar fixes, but even then, it shows someone cares enough about something I produced that they spent the time to give me some feedback about it.
Half the reason I keep updating Ansible for DevOps is because readers keep pushing new ideas or helping fix technical debt incurred by the passage of time in the book's GitHub repo!
Without copyright, someone else could take the author’s books and give them away or sell them without attribution. How would he benefit from that?
I am opposed to copyright that stops people from copying works they have purchased (or obtained elsewhere) and distributing them. And my argument was that, as shown by the post, giving copies away for free can actually increase overall sales rather than decrease them.
In the digital age, it is so easy to copy books, films, TV shows. The arguments against making it legal, is that film studios will make less money. But what percentage of people are currently not pirating content because it's illegal? I'd say a very very small handful.
I would much rather have the option to obtain a copy for free, and donate to the author if I thought it was worth it. Patreon works exactly like this.
but it isn't a "sale" if the content was given away freely. I would call that a donation.
So do you see a patreon-like system work for a majority of content producers?
I also think the bigger issue here is the copyright law that prevents giving copies to friends. Even if a content producer only sells their work - if I buy a copy of it, I should be able to do what I like with it, short of selling it for a profit. Telling me that I can't copy a file is telling me that I can't arrange my hard disk in a particular pattern, because somebody else did it first. Copyright actually infringes on physical property rights when you consider it this way.
I have no issue with preventing people from profiting off another's work. But preventing people from using their own physical property in a certain way, because somebody else used it that way first is absurd.
Imagine being told when you buy a notepad and pen, that you can only write words on there that aren't in the same order that somebody else has already written them in. Even if you don't intend to sell a piece of paper with those words on it, writing them down in that order is illegal if they exist in that order in a copyrighted work. It is a ridiculous notion.
You might view this as a good thing (under the idea that most stuff out there is crap), but I can think of quite a few things that I expect would not exist without copyright, and I'd miss them.
Our current copyright regime is horrendously broken, but abolishing copyright is just going to create other problems.
This reminds me of a semi-relevant experiment that happened in the underground UK bass music community; most labels are privately owned and self-releasing albums are the norm.
So, somewhere in 2009ish Vinyl was coming back within the consumer Market, it was always strong within the DJ and producer community as dubplates were a form of currency to show exclusiveness and clout to get people to come out to the raves to hear a certain 'sound.'
But, it occurred to the label owners and producers that they were losing a lot of money to the downloads, so instead they started to offer free digital DLs with the purchase of any vinyl pressing from these labels/producers. This was a direct response to customers voicing their opinions on forums and radio show chats/comments that made an effective feedback system possible.
I used to have to wait 2-5 weeks for a vinyl to arrive, and the USD-GBP exchange rate was horrible, so I often resorted just getting the digital version, but after having lost my collections due to failed HDDs twice I knew I had to change.
And once they offered this option the community responded and an influx of vinyl purchases started to come in from everywhere creating 2-3rd pressings just to fulfill demand Soon after that low-cost vinyl players were starting to gain traction and it really took off, as it was seen as somewhat of a status symbol.
Now, every bandcamp artist worth it's salt has limited pressings with exclusive deals that offer this as the model proved successful--many of the artists I follow are often sold out within a week.
The Freemium model can be pretty effective, I used it in my startup to some success: but 60x is beyond anyone's expectations, congrats!
Sidenote: the aforementioned music community had its humble beginnings as a Pirate Radio station and being a platform to highlight local talent in an emerging scene. Years later Red Bull Music Academy would come around and invest tons of money in PR and events for those same artists.
1. Ideally, you want everybody who wants to consume your product to do so at the highest price they are willing to pay (as long as that is above the cost of production and some minimum profit margin). People willing to spend a lot of money are willing to also spend less, but people who are only willing to spend less money are not willing to spend more. Therefore you target the high-buyers first and the low-buyers second, until you reach zero.
2. Value loss over time means that there is some non-infinite window in which to sell your product in order to maximize profits. The trade-off is likely market (people wanting to purchase), selling price and exposure (how many people even know it exists) - x axis is time and y is profit.
In relation to this story, the exposure was low and the market was lower as a result. Reducing price increased exposure and therefore allowed the visibility of the product to the market out there. Don't under value word-of-mouth!
I think this is why the film and music industry need to calm down about piracy. The EU for example withheld a study because it showed that piracy didn't provably harm sales [1]. How many people have had their internet shut off, been fined or worse because of piracy - when there's no proven victim. In fact, if anecdotes like this story are anything to go by - it may even improve sales.
My anecdote: After pirating the Matrix trilogy (in a time where I had no money), I ended up buying the films on DVD twice (each film individually and then the box set). I never would have purchased these films had I first not pirated them. Similarly, I found a PDF for a book on scrum before purchasing it - and then recommending my team do the same.
Side note: I remember interviewing for a company that did this kind of analysis and automatically adjusted prices for online websites. I don't think those guys actually had any clue (it was all very young programmers and no mathematicians/machine learning people) - but in theory it's entirely possible.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...
If every book publisher (say, in the tech industry) announced free books at the same time, would this person's sales have increased by the same amount? Almost certainly not. Would they have increased at all? .. probably?
But your comment adds a new twist, which is the timing/price discrimination side, where, to run an experiment, we'd also have to control for works that were already out vs not, by running this experiment on new releases as well as works already available for sale for some amount of time.
My edtech startup has been giving away our most popular tool for a couple months, and paid sales are probably up 30% during that time. It certainly wasn't why we did it (we've had philanthropic programs from the beginning [1]), but it doesn't hurt.
1: https://www.amazingeducationalresources.com/
2: https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/why-every-edtech-company-s...
One hypothesis can be that many people (like me) ended up paying for both the books (ansible and kubernetes) even if it was free. Someone puts their soul into creating good books that we benefit from, so why not pay if we can.
This might be mostly true, however when you've got something for free (because of a giveaway or through piracy) and you love it, you may want to buy it afterwards to show you support and maximize the chances of having more stuff you like in the future.
I actually quite often pay for stuff I already have and my level of satisfaction is on average much higher than when I pay for stuff I don't have (should I say obviously?).
It's what got me going in using Ansible. I didn't even finish the book (due to lack of time) or know all the features in the book but I appreciate knowing Ansible whenever I use it.
And his book is the reason I started writing my own ebook. It will never be as good as his but it's been a great experience.
What also influenced my decision was that another of Jeff's projects had been quite helpful to me (DrupalVM).
Yet again, we find that benefits of exposure > costs of some free-loading
In the beginning I worried about this, but in the end, there are two reasons why I stopped caring:
1. I keep the book updated and relevant, so those versions of the book are basically historic artifacts and become more and more worthless over time. This value helps people who actually care about the knowledge in the book to decide to buy from LeanPub or Amazon, eventually.
2. Most of the people who put up with getting popup ads and malware on their computers just to download my book aren't likely to pay for it anyways.
I have only filed one or two takedown notices, to people who posted YouTube videos infringing on the content of some of my talks and past videos, and once to a more popular / non-malicious site that was sharing a PDF.
1. How does "purchasing" a few chapters look on the user side? e.g. Do you price every chapter and they only pay for the difference if they want to purchase the full book later? Do updates (which you said they're entitled to?) come out for individual chapters?
2. How do you get the word out initially? (I see you mentioned going to conferences; it'd be nice if you could elaborate or mention if there are other potentially effective approaches.)
Thanks, and congrats on your success so far!
1. I choose a point in time to start 'publishing' (in my case with A4D it was after 3 chapters were written, first draft). 2. Users can start buying at this point, at a minimum price I determine (starting at 'free', or 4.99 and up). 3. Any user who buys the book gets DRM-free downloads in any format from LeanPub, and the book is on their permanent shelf on LeanPub, so they can download any newer version forever, free.
As an author, when I push a new update, I have the ability to also send a notification email to all subscribed readers so they know a new version is available—otherwise I can just silently update it (e.g. for smaller bugfixes in the text or slight corrections).
See here: https://imgur.com/a/UxSyr28
I sometimes wonder if those who give away their book for an email would get more emails if they would first give away their book and only then ask your email.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(social_psychology...
I purchased the dead-tree version probably three or four years ago and, unfortunately, it was basically already outdated by that time. I learned a bit from it but so Ansible moves pretty fast -- or did back then, at least -- so it wasn't nearly as useful as it could have been. (I don't remember any specifics, sorry.)
That experience led me to stop buying books on new and/or fast-moving technologies.
I know two book agents and both agree that the #1 killer of new author sales is the fact that nobody else has read one of their books. There was an excellent article from book agents that found the "piracy" rate of new books foreshadowed their sales success.
It is one of the more interesting things about information economics that information can become valuable as a reward for production.
Free: Book
Premium: Book + nice feeling of helping out a nice guy
I'm surprised Jeff is offering his videos for free too though...that seems like a perfect candidate for a paywall to capture some of the value created from the books he's giving away. Of course I don't know the whole story and realize it's a personal choice -- but, in any case, this is exactly why giving a book away for free can be so powerful.
I'm planning to launch a book marketplace that offers books for free if downloaded via P2P while charging a small fee for direct HTTP downloads.
I figured it would also offer people a distraction / way to learn something during the workday (or night, I guess, outside of US and most of Europe). I've considered doing a full-fledged course a few times (and have had offers to do it for a couple different platforms), but live streaming it kind of forces the issue, and has helped me get a little more structure on my YouTube channel, which has kind of been festering since 2006 :D
Now I'm considering moving on to a similar 'Kubernetes 101' at some point, maybe. It's _relatively_ fun for me, and if it opens up possibilities of another group like Device42 sponsoring portions of it, that would be a net benefit IMO—most of the free content I see is absolute-ground-level and doesn't really get far enough to make someone productive.
I know for myself, having really good intro-course-level content free would've helped my growth earlier in my career (before I was able to get my workplace to pay for decent training material and conference travel).
There's a saying "Those who can't do, teach."
I think, on the contrary, a good teacher has to not only be an expert on a topic, but has to poke and prod it further, then distill everything about it down to the essentials to turn it into teachable lessons.
Anyways, I figure that I have a certain amount of knowledge in my head. It would be nice if I could spread that knowledge as far and wide as possible, since that could ignite a bit more passion for good software and solid automation in others.
> Those who can't do, teach
I'm with you. I'd change that phrase to "Those who have done, should teach".
Reminds me of an idea I think I read in one of Nassim Taleb's books...that growth of education tends to follow the growth of industry, since industry is where a great portion of tinkering and experimentation is happening.
OTOH, I worked at a .edu for several years (networking) and was asked to teach a course when the contracted instructor suddenly had to back out at the last minute. That led to me teaching a course or two per semester for a few years and, to be honest, I'm fairly certain that I learned way more when I was teaching than my students did. As you said, you have to be much more than just an expert on the topic.
(My 2016 non-TB MacBook Pro's battery had started ballooning and it was getting difficult to click the trackpad. The bottom case was touching the table in the middle and the front feet were about .5mm in the air. Didn't want to let it get worse!)
Seriously, with the downvoting? This was meant to be a philosophical comment on the self-referential effect of posting about the experience.
And I admit, it's not just "make something free and sales go up"—I've probably spent more time during this lockdown working on tying together social media + YouTube videos + book marketing, once I noticed the uptake on the free offer.
The strangest thing to me? The 'ignition point' for going from a few hundred to multiple thousand copies of the book being given away in just a few hours was a LinkedIn post that was shared pretty heavily.
LinkedIn... seriously!
I do something similar on leanpub [1] by setting the minimum price very low, free reading online, and a Creative Common share license and encouraging people to share my books with their friends.
As you mentioned, leanpub makes it really easy to update books and I am probably going to pull my books from Kindle Marketplace because of the overhead of updating them.
I like your approach - I am tempted to copy your process.