4 Months Of eBook Sales
jstorimer.com
jstorimer.com
And of the 17k, is it reasonable to say that you pay 30% in processing fees etc?
So that would come out to approximately 35 USD / hour, of course not including the time it takes to actually learn the subject the book is about?
Do you think it's feasible to write for a living? Or in your experience, can writing books only be something that people do next to a 'regular' job? (acknowledging that no two books are the same and that the investment/reward can be vastly different from one book to the next).
It seems like this book was written mostly out of love or as a hobby, in which case one doesn't measure success by USD/hour made. But when in this very thread people state that they think ebooks are expensive, it seems that a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation would show that the real question isn't how come they're so expensive, but more how on earth it's possible that still so many books get written, with the financial motive (which can also be phrased as 'the desire the eat', depending on what tone one wants to set) seemingly having vanished completely from the list of reasons to be an author.
So a year from now, that same book will still bring in similar revenues(he just has to keep up with the promos).
Meanwhile he can write 4 more books in that same period, and quadruple his income. The next year he can write 5 more, and a year after that he can write another 4.
And altogether they'll make the same income...especially if he builds a reputation for writing good guides, and will begin marketing to his existing customers("hey, if you liked my book on Unix...you'll love my book on Linux")
And so many books are written, because people are hoping to strike it rich. To be the next Harry Potter writer. Same with startups...the stats show that 90% of them fail...but people are still doing it hoping to make billions.
The Hunger Games trilogy will be getting a lot of sales now, since the movie has been released and it did well on Amazon. The first book is 4 years old though, plenty of books pay off after the initial release.
He's doing VASTLY better than e.g. if he had taken that book as a first time author to a technical publisher. For one, the book is actually published: he'd still have months on the timeline at even the most progressive dead tree publishers. For another, at similar sales levels, his ~$5,000 advance would not be "earned out" yet and he could expect his first royalty check the day after never.
With regards to authoring as a commercially viable profession: traditionally, it isn't for the majority of published authors. There do exist folks who make incomes engineers would find reasonable from selling snooks (including technical ebooks). Well, OK, some of them make incomes engineers would find unreasonable, but not for being too low. (Independent authoring, like independenr software development, is 10% about writing and 90% about successful execution of a sells-writing business.)
I believe that we will look back at right now as the start of a golden age of writing. We just haven't realized it yet as the signal is masked by the noise of all the gnashing of teeth from publishers.
The other perspective here is that this took a lifetime of work. I've been learning about the source material for the past several years. Obviously it wasn't just to write this book, it has many practical applications besides. I've 'practiced' teaching people and writing for years before this, all of that certainly contributed. This quote sums it up nicely: http://www.marketingquoteoftheday.com/pablo-picasso-on-prici....
I don't think it's fair to try to trim down a project like this to an hourly rate because it simply doesn't work like that. I could stop putting time and effort into the project right now and I would still see some money come in, arbitrarily increasing that hourly rate.
Just to drive home this point having a book with my name on it opens up new opportunities. If I were to write another book and spend the exact same amount of time putting it together my 'hourly rate' would probably increase because I now have more people listening to what I have to say and trusting that I will provide something of value. So investing time now into this project is a long-term investment that I may not make back on the sales of this book, if you know what I mean.
I've no idea if it's feasible to write like this for a living. There are lots of people (even in the tech education space) who make a living selling their own products, but typically not just books. Look at people like Marc-Andre Cournoyer or Peter Cooper who have written books but make their living through some combination of teaching mediums (video, webinar, books, training, etc). For many of them their first product was an ebook.
Just to clean things up, this book was written out of love. I felt like I couldn't not write this book once the inspiration came. That being said, there was also a financial motive. I wanted to be compensated for my work, but also wanted other people to place value on the material. Too often free material is considered worthless because there was no exchange made for it. "If you don't give anything you don't get anything", so to speak.
Having this book as a consultant could justify a high rate for Ruby Unix work. He could gather speaking fees for Ruby and Unix conferences. It could also lead to follow on books from standard publishers.
I would say this revenue could be the start to more.
From my own experience writing, it would have been a better investment of my time to do side consulting jobs. But like @jstorimer, once I had the itch, I needed to scratch it (along with writing my own tooling for ebook production).
But the goal is to get a passive income. From the "indie" publishing crowd, (which has a fiction bias), the following are needed to make a living:
1. Luck 2. Good reviews 3. More books
The first two cover the quality of your book, the last is supposedly a multiplier (at least in fiction and I assume in non-fiction as well). I would need to write a bunch more books to write for a living. But there have been other benefits to writing as well.
For someone with a $25+ book, it ends up making very little sense to list it on Amazon at all. You are probably making at least $20 on the downloadable copy, while the Kindle one would net you $8.75 at the 35% rate.
The royalty from the edition on the Kindle store is like 1/4 of the royalty from selling it on the website. I published it to the Kindle store more as an experiment than anything else to see if I could reach a wider audience there. I still make more sales on the book website than with Amazon.
Not necessarily true. There is a genre fiction writer named Michael Sullivan, who writes fantasy in a similar vein as "A Song of Fire and Ice" (Game of Thrones for fans of the TV show).
His sales from April 2010 to August 2011 was over 70,000 and since then, he's sold over 12,000 a month, never pricing below $4.95 on Amazon, which after their cut, he receives over $40,000 a month.
He recently did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything)[1], where he disparages the 99-cent price and feels writers should have more dignity and respect for their work than that.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/s6375/hello_reddit_...
KDP has been an experiment for me. I get ok money from it. But I'm not sure it is the correct model for niche technical books. The idea of giving away my book during promotions (I've given it away probably 100x more than sales), makes me wonder if for technical niche books you aren't shooting yourself in the foot by flooding the market with freebies.
But I'm also wondering if I need to change my price. It seems a lot of technical self-pubs seem to be in the $20-$30 range when they sell them themselves. Care you elaborate on that decision?
A side benefit is that it might reduce "book bloat" - the tendency in recent years for programming books to weigh about 20 kg.
and by them I mean Amazon...not the author.
A <$10 kindle purchase for Amazon...means that the person will spend extra to bring the cart up to $25 to get free shipping
Unfortunately I went down the standard route - publisher, Amazon, the lot... I had really great experience in dealing with the publisher, and I learned a whole lot of new stuff about publishing, etc, etc. But this is where good experience stops:
Absolutely no exposure into sales figures. I've no idea what's going on - only getting quarterly reports, but they, well... bit dry and lacking information.
Hard to influence the sales. Everyone's saying that the book publishing adventure doesn't stop when the book is out, but given the share from the sales, I really don't have any incentive to spend a lot of time promoting it.
Looking from this perspective, self-publishing looks quite interesting. Might even try it one day. :))
I've seen success from releasing the content for free with a paid version for ereaders, or doing it like I did and just offering the paid version.
In terms if your starting point, how many followers/readers/subscribers did you have? How much of a reputation did you have in your field of knowledge?
Your test sales page is a great method of testing your concept. What was on this page? Where was it hosted? How many people fed back?
Did you pay for your twitter advertising? Or was it simply related tweets?
I had < 250 twitter followers when I started, < 50 blog subscribers. I had some reputation as a Ruby developer from open source work and participating in different things but I would say I had a very small network to start from.
I kept the 'fake' sales page as simple as possible. It was static HTML (written with slim-lang) and pushed to heroku (free hosting). I spent $100 on Adwords to get traffic. That bought ~300 visits which led to ~15 people clicking my 'Buy' button. The page wasn't all that different from what I have now, list the benefits of the product, what buyers can expect, etc.
I didn't pay for Twitter ads. In the beginning people retweeted my announcement. Later on readers of the book would share the link to their followers.
Would you say the "niche factor" made it easier to attract traffic, buyers and followers?
Roughly how many paid full price versus discount? How powerful was discounting in bringing in more sales?
I don't know exact sales volume for the discounted days but as you can see those days brought in the most revenue, so it was certainly powerful.
Would you have priced differently knowing what you now know about discounting effect?
If I were targeting the book at sysadmins, for instance, I would have had no idea how to get in front of them or talk to them at their level.
re: pricing, nope. I think the discounting works because it's intermittent and gets people sharing. If I were to lower the price permanently I wouldn't expect sales to remain that high.
Also, given your fake sales page experience, have you considered advertising with Adwords?
In my mind it wasn't scientific. If I could put a sales page for a product that doesn't exist and even one person attempts to give me money, imagine what I could do if I had a real product and could even show a sample, testimonials, etc.
The fake sales page, for me, was just to test that I wasn't off my rocker with the idea and to get a little motivation to push forward.
I have spent a bit of money on advertising (<$200) and saw almost no returns from it.
Just out of curiosity - why do ebooks cost so much? (I am talking in general, not with respect to this particular book). Of course, the value of the content is high etc etc - but wouldn't pricing ebooks less make more people buy them? A $30 ebook is much more expensive, especially if you are not in US/Europe (if you are in Asia, Africa etc), than a $9 ebook, wouldn't the volume make up for the lost dollars? Again, I am not talking about big name publishers, they have their own reasons. I am only talking about independent authors, who have full control over their books/course materials.
they do a/b testing to see what gets the most revenue.
Usually at $9...you only sell twice as much as you do at $30...so you actually lose money.
That's because to most people $30 or $9 makes very little difference
* Those in Asia,Africa, etc... would actually purchase ebooks if the price were lowered. Look at China, everything is pirated there regardless of price. For this reason, most content producers tend to target North America/Europe.
* That the price of an ebook is highly elastic. You're hoping that dropping the price from $30 to $10 would yield sales greater than 3x. But what if it only gave you 2x? And at a lowered price, the margins per sale are slimmer since you have to factor in marketing costs and conversion rates.
Personally, as a North American programmers I wouldn't think twice to drop $30 on a good book that I'd find valuable. My time is more important than a $20 price difference.
These two articles on pricing nicely highlight some reasoning behind low vs. high: http://blog.asmartbear.com/perfect-pricing.html and http://blog.asmartbear.com/higher-pricing.html.
If you were being serious, than the reason college is costly is because everything that goes into me being able to attend a college costs money.
Could you detail the technical side of writing? I.e. what tools were used in getting this done?
I wrote the book using Markdown and styled the PDF with CSS using PrinceXML. The kitabu framework (http://github.com/jstorimer/kitabu) held it all together and automated the translation to different formats.
In the beginning I had to dive into the different formats to get them all working as I wanted but now I've got that automated.
Did you use a code editor for the markdown? I'm working on a book, and would use vim, but I'd like to see the TOC at all times. Something like Word's navigation pane.
How did you advertise these promotions? I noticed you got a huge amount of traffic from running the promotions.