Quote:
Originally Posted by DD1509
I self-published a technical eBook in 2003 and I sold it myself one-at-a-time on the web to a very small niche market. To date it has sold about 4k copies with about $88k in revenue. Of course in this model I kept almost all of that revenue with a small amount of marketing/selling costs. No returns, no inventory, no printing, no agent, no publisher and did it without an editor. I did a lot of personal selling using various methods over the years but it is an indicator that self-publishing definately has its place in the growth of the eBook.
I easily netted $20 per sale. Of course, the fiction market is a different animal but eBooks and self-pub will change the entire industry as we know it today.
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Did you keep track of the time you spent writing, editing, marketing, fulfilling orders, designing, typesetting, and all the other facets of publishing a book? I ask because the numbers you give are impressive but without knowing how much time you spent and how much out-of-pocket you spent it is not possible to determine if you are getting a decent rate of return.
My wife is a
painter and I keep telling her that it isn't good enough to record a sale; you need to know whether the return is worthwhile. If you spend 500 hours on a painting and marketing it and $1,000 on supplies including a frame, selling it for $10,000 (net $9,000) gets you $18 an hour in wages. That may be acceptable, but that is what you need to know, not that you sold it for $10,000.