Quote:
Originally Posted by Psymon
The problem with going with just iBooks, though, is no sales! I think in my first year I made a whopping $7 or $8 in "profits" -- hardly any sales at all, even with my price set to the very lowest (99 cents).
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There's a reason for that. The Apple store system is an archaic system that has a limit to the number of items it can actually show in any category, and the number of books in most categories greatly exceeds that. As a result, they only show the top so many books (IIRC, 65,536, but possibly fewer) even if you're looking at books in alphabetical order.
[Edit: They've changed this since I last looked. Now, they show the first few tens of thousands alphabetically, regardless of sales. So basically, in Science Fiction, if your book's title comes alphabetically after "Atlan 850", it is invisible. I suggested several ways of fixing this in a bug report about two years ago and they basically said that it behaves correctly. Needless to say, I question whether Apple actually cares about the iBooks Store, because they sure don't treat it like they want it to be a quality product.]
What this means is that if your sales don't exceed a particular threshold, people will find your books only if they're looking for them by name. Discoverability in the iTunes store is, therefore, actually zero (as opposed to Amazon, where it is only near-zero).
So IMO, it would be borderline insanity to sell books exclusively on the iBooks store unless either A. you're already a top seller in your category somewhere else, or B. they're giving you a sweetheart deal like an spot on the new releases page. Honestly, the only reason I bother shipping content to them at all is that I want to see Amazon have at least some competition, and nobody else is big enough to do that except Google.