4 Months Of eBook Sales • Hacker News Board

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#51

Post by vaksel » Fri, Apr 20, 2012, 5:37 PM UTC

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…

my guess is that their research shows that at those prices they make the most money

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

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#52

Post by parfe » Fri, Apr 20, 2012, 5:49 PM UTC

vaksel wrote: post #51

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…

my guess is that their research shows that at those prices they make the most money 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

Why would you need free shipping for a digital purchase? (Which is why kindle purchases don't count towards the $25 super savers shipping).

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#53

Post by flyosity » Fri, Apr 20, 2012, 6:22 PM UTC

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.

So the site is http://designthencode.com/, I collected email addresses before the site launched and now have about 6k on the list of people I'll email when a new tutorial is live. I cross-promote it on my blog http://flyosity.com/ and on the Twitters but other than that I don't do any marketing for it. Sales are slower recently since I haven't put out a new tutorial in awhile but I have a few in the hopper coming out over the summer, it'll probably boost sales back up again. For payments I use Quixly which has a PayPal backend, but the new version is supposedly going to support Stripe so I'm looking forward to that.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#54

Post by spatten » Fri, Apr 20, 2012, 7:47 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #37

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…

n.b. When you unbundle it from an app store, processing $30 transactions costs about $1.50 to $3 at the high end (getting screwed by a legacy processor) not $9. 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 si…

One of our goals at Leanpub is to create a world where authors can make a living. This seems like a crazy vision to some, but why should it be?

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.

Re: 4 Months Of eBook Sales

#55

Post by jstorimer » Fri, Apr 20, 2012, 8:15 PM UTC

marcuschristie wrote: post #45

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…

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 '…

I didn't have a formula in mind with the fake sales page, but my conversion rate was 3-4%. Not bad.

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.