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4 Months Of eBook Sales

jstorimer.com

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Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#41

Post by jstorimer »

jrussbowman wrote: post #27
flyosity wrote: post #12

Great article, and I'm glad other people are doing well writing and selling articles/ebooks/books on their own. I sell iPhone interface design/development tutorials and they've done really well, coming close to making a livable full-time income last year for myself even though I have a full-time job and sell them on the side. Writing and selling technical ebooks is like the secret money-making sauce that few know abo…

How do you sell? I'm working on my first book now covering Tornado. At the moment I've been considering launching the book as a website then selling ebook copies of it as well. I'm curious to know how others market their material.

There are a million ways to do it :)

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.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#42

Post by jstorimer »

sparknlaunch12 wrote: post #35
jstorimer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: the "niche" factor, what do you mean? The fact that the target audience was a subset of programmers? 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.

Re niche. Yes, do you think the whole sales/marketing process was easier because your target market are quite narrow (ruby, UNIX, programming)? Would you have priced differently knowing what you now know about discounting effect?

It's always easier to target an audience that you are familiar with and are a part of. Since I would have bought this book myself if someone else had wrote it I knew what people would want to know and how to reach them.

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.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#43

Post by grogs »

vaksel wrote: post #33
roel_v wrote: post #29

Would you say that (2.5 months * 30 days per month * 2 hours per day) + 100 (hours of overhead, editing, etc) + (4 months 4 weeks per month * 3 nights per week * 2 hours per night) = 346 hours is a reasonable approximation of the amount of hours you spend on this? (If anything, it's probably grossly underestimating). And of the 17k, is it reasonable to say that you pay 30% in processing fees etc? So that would come o…

well his revenue isn't over...most of that is fixed cost...his variable cost is very little. 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...espe…

Indeed. Writing a book creates a passive income stream. Much like a blog with ads. It's arguable it's not completely passive, you can/should do promo - but equally you may want to do SEO on a blog.

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.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#44

Post by __mharrison__ »

jstorimer wrote: post #21
smackfu wrote: post #15

Wow, Amazon really wants Kindle books priced at under $10. If you self-publish, you either choose a 35% royalty rate and have few restrictsions, or you choose a 70% royalty rate and have to keep it under $10 price. 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…

Yeah, pricing on the Kindle store is a bit of a nightmare. From what I've read the only folks making money on there are selling books for $0.99 and selling tens of thousands of copies (or more). 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…

Thanks for being open with your numbers. Amazon incentivizes you to price between 2.99 and 9.99 (for 70% royalty). As a self-pubbed author (currently on Amazon KDP right now), my Amazon numbers are a lot better than yours. But your web sales dwarf me.

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?

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#45

Post by marcuschristie »

jstorimer wrote: post #19
sparknlaunch12 wrote: post #18

Congrats and thanks for sharing! Fantastic result. 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?

Thanks for reading. I had 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 ad…

I'm really interested in the 'fake' sales page idea, thanks for sharing the details. From these numbers, did you have a formula in mind that would determine if you could make money from the book? In other words, if you sell for $27, those 15 buys generate $405, which is obviously more than the $100 spent on Adwords. But how many of the 15 people who clicked Buy would actually buy? Also, did you list a price on your 'fake' sales page next to the Buy button?

Also, given your fake sales page experience, have you considered advertising with Adwords?

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#46

Post by obtu »

jstorimer wrote: post #21
smackfu wrote: post #15

Wow, Amazon really wants Kindle books priced at under $10. If you self-publish, you either choose a 35% royalty rate and have few restrictsions, or you choose a 70% royalty rate and have to keep it under $10 price. 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…

Yeah, pricing on the Kindle store is a bit of a nightmare. From what I've read the only folks making money on there are selling books for $0.99 and selling tens of thousands of copies (or more). 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…

Or maybe people just break it up; Amazon's strange response curve would encourage that.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#47

Post by mustafa0x »

jstorimer wrote: post #14
mustafa0x wrote: post #10

Congratulations on the success of your ebook. Also, thank you for your words of inspiration, that's quite thoughtful. Could you detail the technical side of writing? I.e. what tools were used in getting this done?

I'll publish another post detailing my toolchain, but here's the overview. 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.

Thanks.

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.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#48

Post by __mharrison__ »

roel_v wrote: post #29

Would you say that (2.5 months * 30 days per month * 2 hours per day) + 100 (hours of overhead, editing, etc) + (4 months 4 weeks per month * 3 nights per week * 2 hours per night) = 346 hours is a reasonable approximation of the amount of hours you spend on this? (If anything, it's probably grossly underestimating). And of the 17k, is it reasonable to say that you pay 30% in processing fees etc? So that would come o…

When you publish with Amazon, 30-65% is in "processing" fees. Similar with Apple, BN, Kobo, etc. Self distribution can be a lot cheaper if you already have the marketing platform built it, which apparently @jstorimer has.

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.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#49

Post by __mharrison__ »

roel_v wrote: post #29

Would you say that (2.5 months * 30 days per month * 2 hours per day) + 100 (hours of overhead, editing, etc) + (4 months 4 weeks per month * 3 nights per week * 2 hours per night) = 346 hours is a reasonable approximation of the amount of hours you spend on this? (If anything, it's probably grossly underestimating). And of the 17k, is it reasonable to say that you pay 30% in processing fees etc? So that would come o…

BTW, most technical books do very poorly. (Sell less that a handful a month) This is a successful book!

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#50

Post by Turing_Machine »

smackfu wrote: post #15

Wow, Amazon really wants Kindle books priced at under $10. If you self-publish, you either choose a 35% royalty rate and have few restrictsions, or you choose a 70% royalty rate and have to keep it under $10 price. 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…

One option would be to split the material across multiple books. That wouldn't be very hard for a lot of technical topics, and isn't usually that hard to do for fiction (the cliffhanger ending has a long, long history).

A side benefit is that it might reduce "book bloat" - the tendency in recent years for programming books to weigh about 20 kg.

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