8 ms·

4 Months Of eBook Sales

122 points by jstorimer 14y ago

efader 14y ago
well done thanks for sharing
leejw00t354 14y 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.
- jstorimer 14y 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 14y 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.
- vaksel 14y 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 14y 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.
- jstorimer 14y 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 http://blog.asmartbear.com/perfect-pricing.html and http://blog.asmartbear.com/higher-pricing.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/higher-pricing.html.
  - ryanaAM 14y 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/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
  - jerhewet 14y 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 14y ago
  Why does college cost so much?
  - mustafa0x 14y 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.
- smackfu 14y 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.
- steveplace 14y 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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mustafa0x 14y 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?
- jstorimer 14y 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 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.
  - Anirak 14y ago
    Could you explain what the "fake sales page" was, and how it helped motivate you? How long did your book end up being, by the way?
  - mustafa0x 14y 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.
flyosity 14y 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 14y 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.
  - jstorimer 14y 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.
  - flyosity 14y ago
    So the site is http://designthencode.com/ 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/ 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.
smackfu 14y 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.
- jstorimer 14y 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.
  - smackfu 14y 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 14y 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_im_a_fulltime_author_who_has/ http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/s6375/hello_reddit_...
  - 14y ago
sparknlaunch12 14y 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?
- jstorimer 14y 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.
  - sparknlaunch12 14y 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?
    - jstorimer 14y ago
      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.
      - sparknlaunch12 14y ago
sgdesign 14y 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/ http://sachagreif.com/lessons-learned-from-an-ebook-launch/
- jstorimer 14y ago
  Saw that just after I finished writing last night. Thanks for sharing!
roel_v 14y 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.
- vaksel 14y 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 14y 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.
rytis 14y 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. :))
- vaksel 14y 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).

122 points by jstorimer 14y ago

well done thanks for sharing

> "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.

jstorimer 14y 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 14y 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.

vaksel 14y 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 14y 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.
jstorimer 14y 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 http://blog.asmartbear.com/perfect-pricing.html and http://blog.asmartbear.com/higher-pricing.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/higher-pricing.html.
- ryanaAM 14y 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/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...
- jerhewet 14y 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 14y ago
Why does college cost so much?
- mustafa0x 14y 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.
smackfu 14y 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.
steveplace 14y 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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mustafa0x 14y 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?

jstorimer 14y 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 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.
- Anirak 14y ago
  Could you explain what the "fake sales page" was, and how it helped motivate you? How long did your book end up being, by the way?
- mustafa0x 14y 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.

flyosity 14y 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 14y 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.
- jstorimer 14y 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.
- flyosity 14y ago
  So the site is http://designthencode.com/ 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/ 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.

smackfu 14y 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.

jstorimer 14y 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.
- smackfu 14y 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 14y 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_im_a_fulltime_author_who_has/ http://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/s6375/hello_reddit_...
- 14y ago

sparknlaunch12 14y 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?

jstorimer 14y 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.
- sparknlaunch12 14y 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?
  - jstorimer 14y ago
    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.
    - sparknlaunch12 14y ago

sgdesign 14y 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/ http://sachagreif.com/lessons-learned-from-an-ebook-launch/

jstorimer 14y ago
Saw that just after I finished writing last night. Thanks for sharing!

roel_v 14y 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.

vaksel 14y 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 14y 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.

rytis 14y 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. :))

vaksel 14y 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).