4 Months Of eBook Sales

http://jstorimer.com/2012/04/20/4-months-of-ebook-sales.html

by jstorimer • 14 years ago

122 52 14 years ago

jstorimer.com

leejw00t354• 14 years ago

> "The other two big spikes on the chart were the result of discount promotions I ran."

How did you advertise these promotions? I noticed you got a huge amount of traffic from running the promotions.

jstorimer12• 14 years ago

The first promotion was advertised on Twitter and RubyFlow. The second was advertised on Twitter and RubyWeekly. Twitter has always been the best way to spread news about the book.

vijayr• 14 years ago

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 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.

vaksel4• 14 years ago

noone picks numbers out of thin air.

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

lee• 14 years ago

You're making a few assumptions though:

* 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.

jstorimer12• 14 years ago

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.

ryanaAM• 14 years ago

Those are really great articles. The classic Camels and Rubber Duckies is still relevant as well though with less practical advice: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

jerhewet• 14 years ago

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).

seanmalarkey• 14 years ago

Why does college cost so much?

mustafa0x3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if this whether you're being serious or not. If you aren't, than could you please explain the relation between ebooks and college? I see the knowledge-is-pricey relation, but I find it weak. Writing a book and building a school, hiring staff, etc. is not a strong comparison.

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.

smackfu3• 14 years ago

There are a few "indie" authors now selling Kindle books for a buck or two and selling hundreds of thousands of copies. For instance, Hugh Howey and Amanda Hocking.

steveplace2• 14 years ago

Sometimes you don't want higher volume, because that requires more customer management-- and you get a lot more tire kickers and refunds at lower price points.

mustafa0x3• 14 years ago

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?

jstorimer12• 14 years ago

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.

mustafa0x3• 14 years ago

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.

flyosity2• 14 years ago

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 about :)

jrussbowman• 14 years ago

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.

jstorimer12• 14 years ago

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.

flyosity2• 14 years ago

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.

smackfu3• 14 years ago

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 35% rate.

jstorimer12• 14 years ago

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.

smackfu3• 14 years ago

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.

muhfuhkuh• 14 years ago

"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_...

__mharrison__3• 14 years ago

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?

obtu• 14 years ago

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

Turing_Machine• 14 years ago

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.

vaksel4• 14 years ago

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

parfe• 14 years ago

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

sparknlaunch123• 14 years ago

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?

jstorimer12• 14 years ago

Thanks for reading.

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.

sparknlaunch123• 14 years ago

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?

steveplace2• 14 years ago

Why not consider capturing emails with those landing pages initially? That way you have a list of qualified leads who are ready to buy the product.

marcuschristie• 14 years ago

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?

sgdesign• 14 years ago

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/

jstorimer12• 14 years ago

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

efader• 14 years ago

well done thanks for sharing

roel_v• 14 years ago

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.

vaksel4• 14 years ago

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...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.

grogs• 14 years ago

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.

patio11• 14 years ago

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 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.)

jstorimer12• 14 years ago

Totally agree about the 10-90 split. I like to think it's more like 25-75 but you drove the point home ;)

spatten• 14 years ago

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.

jstorimer12• 14 years ago

346 hours is both an underestimation and an overestimation. I can say that I definitely did not sit down at the keyboard for 346 hours to put this together. But how do you account for time spent thinking about the content, planning, visualizing, etc? What about the fact that most of that time was 'overtime'? ie. over and above my full-time job.

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.

hiccup• 14 years ago

Don't stop at the revenue from the book. There is also the value of credibility from a published technical book.

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.

__mharrison__3• 14 years ago

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.

__mharrison__3• 14 years ago

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

rytis• 14 years ago

Congrats, very well done!!

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. :))

vaksel4• 14 years ago

could you write up a blog post for the author's experience with the publisher(i.e. reports/promos they did, your earnings per book etc).

4 Months Of eBook Sales

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