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).<p>And of the 17k, is it reasonable to say that you pay 30% in processing fees etc?<p>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?<p>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).<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Congrats, very well done!!<p>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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>Looking from this perspective, self-publishing looks quite interesting. Might even try it one day. :))
Congrats! Since the article indirectly mentions me, I wanted to say I also published a similar post about selling my own eBook yesterday: <a href="http://sachagreif.com/lessons-learned-from-an-ebook-launch/" rel="nofollow">http://sachagreif.com/lessons-learned-from-an-ebook-launch/</a>
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 :)
Congrats and thanks for sharing! Fantastic result.<p>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?<p>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?<p>Did you pay for your twitter advertising? Or was it simply related tweets?
This is a nice summary.<p>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.
Congratulations on the success of your ebook. Also, thank you for your words of inspiration, that's quite thoughtful.<p>Could you detail the technical side of writing? I.e. what tools were used in getting this done?
> "The other two big spikes on the chart were the result of discount promotions I ran."<p>How did you advertise these promotions? I noticed you got a huge amount of traffic from running the promotions.