出版与作家生涯2011keirthomas.com
想自出版一本IT书？先看看这些
So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?
导读
这篇帖子围绕自出版一本 I.T. 书展开，作者用具体销售数据讨论“免费送电子书、靠纸质书赚钱”是否划算。对写作者的价值在于：它把内容免费策略、电子书定价和推广方式当成可实验的经营问题，而不是只谈写作本身。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
免费赠品最好只给部分内容或替代格式，不要免费送出完整电子书再指望纸质书盈利。
- 02
电子书读者对价格敏感，可以用不同定价和限时促销做实验，找到可接受的区间。
- 03
把书拆成系列博客发布，或轮换公开部分章节，既能带来搜索流量，又能保留购买完整版的理由。
- 04
自出版前要算清电子书与纸质书的利润结构，PDF/HTML 往往比纸质书更接近全额利润。
HN 评论精选
免费送完整 PDF 再卖纸质书不划算，应只送部分内容或卖电子版。
我在 Leanpub 的联合创始人写过出版《Flexible Rails》的经历：Peter 靠这本书赚了 4.8 万美元，其中 3.4 万来自 PDF 销售。把接近 100% 利润的 PDF 免费送掉，再去卖利润低得多的纸质书，在我看来很疯狂；文章里 40% 的利润率已是我见过最高的。Keir 既有读者又有好书，却免费送出 50 万份电子书，只在纸质书上赚了 9 千美元。他本可以每份卖 2 美元，哪怕只有 1% 的下载者购买，也能赚得更多。Keir 说得对：必须免费给点东西，但应该只给全书约三分之一作为 PDF，再卖完整版；或者像 Eric Ries、Venture Hacks 那样免费提供 HTML 全书、卖 PDF。这个帖子数据有趣，也说明“送电子书、卖纸质书”未必是好路子。
spatten查看英文原文
My cofounder at Leanpub wrote up his experience publishing "Flexible Rails" here: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=266 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.
电子书需要低价和促销实验；读者尚未普遍认可其付费价值。
我在 hlrb.org 上有类似经历：免费提供 PDF/HTML 之前销量一直疲软，之后虽然不算爆卖，但明显好多了。我一直说：人们（还）不喜欢为电子书付费。写《Rails Upgrade Handbook》时，我先用 20 美元试市场，多数人说太贵，后来很随意地定在 12 美元，卖得不错；销量下滑后我做了 6 美元促销，销量又猛涨了一阵。我打算等 Rails 3.1 发布后试试类似的定价结构。我写“如何写电子书”的那本电子书按主流标准卖得不好，我几乎可以肯定 49 美元的定价是部分原因；但一本讲写电子书的书又很难出纸质版，只能想更好的营销办法。也许以后人们会更愿意为电子书多付钱，但现在不能怪他们：电子书不是有具体价值的实物，而且按现行版权机制，误删文件可能就永久没了，这个媒介整体还没被解决。
jeremymcanally查看英文原文
I've had a similar experience with http://hlrb.org. Sales flagged until I gave away the PDF/HTML; not that they're smashing now, but they are way better than they were. I keep saying this: People don't like to pay for eBooks (yet). When I wrote the Rails Upgrade Handbook, I initially put out market feelers at $20, but most people said that was too expensive. I settled pretty arbitrarily at $12. It sold well, but as sales began to slope off, I ran a $6 sale for some time (stated as a celebration of Rails 3 stable I think and then just continued on just because), and wouldn't you know, sales soared for a while. I plan on implementing a pricing structure similar to what he's done here once Rails 3.1 hits next month; we'll see what that experiment yields. My eBook on writing eBooks (http://authoringebooks.com) hasn't sold well by most mainstream standards, and I can almost guarantee the $49 price tag is partially to blame. Unfortunately, it'd be really problematic to have a print edition of a book on writing eBooks, so I'm just going to have to figure out a better way to market it. :) Maybe one day soon people will be willing to pay more for eBooks, but at this point I can't blame them. You don't get a tangible good that you can give specific value to. With current rights scehemes, if you delete the file on accident or something, it's possible that you're hosed for good. The medium in general still isn't a solved problem, but maybe one day soon it will be...
用连载博客或轮换公开章节引流，保留完整版的购买理由。
我认为免费送 PDF 是个错误。我会把 PDF 卖得和纸质书同价或略低，同时试两种宣传引流方式：一是把书连载成博客，每个自包含的部分间隔发布，文末链接到完整 PDF 的购买页；二是把全书以 HTML 发布，但任意时刻只公开一部分，并自动每周更换公开的部分。这两种做法都是为了带来搜索流量，只送出部分价值而不是全部，让读者有理由购买完整 PDF 或纸质版。
kjksf查看英文原文
I think that giving the PDF for free was a mistake. I would sell the PDF for the same price as print (or slightly cheaper) and try 2 other ways for generating publicity/traffic. 1. Serialize the book as blog post i.e. post each self-contained part as spaced blog posts, with a link to buy the whole PDF at the end of each post. 2. Publish the whole book as html, but at any given time only part of the book would be available. I would (automagically) change which part e.g. every week. Both those tactics are meant to drive search traffic, give away some of the value of the book but not all of it, so that people have a reason to buy the whole thing, either as PDF or as paper version.
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