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4 Months Of eBook Sales

jstorimer.com

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Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#21

Post by jstorimer »

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 there. I still make more sales on the book website than with Amazon.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#22

Post by jstorimer »

sgdesign wrote: post #20

Congrats! Since the article indirectly mentions me, I wanted to say I also published a similar post about selling my own eBook yesterday: http://sachagreif.com/lessons-learned-from-an-ebook-launch/

Saw that just after I finished writing last night. Thanks for sharing!

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#23

Post by sparknlaunch12 »

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…

Thanks again for sharing.

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?

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#24

Post by jerhewet »

jstorimer wrote: post #8
vijayr wrote: post #3

This is a nice summary. 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…

There are many ways to do pricing and I won't pretend that my method was scientific. Lowering the price of the book may (or may not) have increased revenue. I priced the book this way because I felt it was fair value for the content. 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 .

I can't thank you enough for those links to the "A Smart Bear" blog. Both articles were exceptional (and should be read in the sequence above to get the full impact).

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#25

Post by smackfu »

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…

I was surprised because I probably would choose the Kindle version just for convenience, but that convenience isn't worth giving $15 to Amazon for.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#27

Post by jrussbowman »

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.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#28

Post by jstorimer »

sparknlaunch12 wrote: post #23
jstorimer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks again for sharing. 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?

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: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#29

Post by roel_v »

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 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.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#30

Post by muhfuhkuh »

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…

"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)"

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_...

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