Here's the tl;dr:
* Peter made $48k from Flexible Rails.
* $34k of that was from sales of the PDF.
I'm biased, but it seems to me that giving away the PDF (where you make close to 100% profit) to sell a paper book (where you make much less -- The 40% profit from the article is by far the highest I've ever seen) is crazy.
If you have an audience and a good book, you should be able to do well on an e-book. Keir Thomas in the article has both, but he gave away 500 000 copies of his ebook and only made $9k on the paper book. Yikes! He could've sold the book for 2$ a pop and got 1% of the downloads and still made the more.
Keir is right that you have to give away something for free. So, give away a good chunk of the book (say, 1/3 or so) as a PDF and sell the full thing.
Really, I don't meant to be too hard on Keir. It was a good post, with interesting data. I think he has shown that giving away the e-book and selling the print book is not necessarily the way to go.
I'd love to see a lot more experiments and write-ups about this. I truly believe that authors can and will soon be able to make good money self publishing technical e-books.
Here's the tl;dr: * Peter made $48k from Flexible Rails. * $34k of that was from sales of the PDF.
I'm biased, but it seems to me that giving away the PDF (where you make close to 100% profit) to sell a paper book (where you make much less -- The 40% profit from the article is by far the highest I've ever seen) is crazy.
If you have an audience and a good book, you should be able to do well on an e-book. Keir Thomas in the article has both, but he gave away 500 000 copies of his ebook and only made $9k on the paper book. Yikes! He could've sold the book for 2$ a pop and got 1% of the downloads and still made the more.
Keir is right that you have to give away something for free. So, give away a good chunk of the book (say, 1/3 or so) as a PDF and sell the full thing.
Or, give away the whole book for free as HTML and sell the PDF. That's what Eric Ries http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned and Nivi and Naval from Venture Hacks are doing (http://leanpub.com/venturehacks) and they're doing quite well.
Really, I don't meant to be too hard on Keir. It was a good post, with interesting data. I think he has shown that giving away the e-book and selling the print book is not necessarily the way to go.
I'd love to see a lot more experiments and write-ups about this. I truly believe that authors can and will soon be able to make good money self publishing technical e-books.