出版与作家生涯2014practicaltypography.com
网络连载书的生意经
The economics of a web-based book
导读
本文是作者对《Practical Typography》在线版第一年收入的复盘：字体授权收入远高于小额捐赠，引发 HN 关于开放内容如何变现的讨论。对写作者而言，它值得读，因为它展示免费公开写作如何转化为读者关系、产品销售和长期影响，以及把流量误当收入的陷阱。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
把免费公开内容当作获客入口，而不是全部收入来源；用邮件列表把一次性读者变成可反复触达的关系。
- 02
让作品本身成为付费产品的销售文案：先建立专业可信度、给读者实用价值，再解释产品为何值得买。
- 03
收费时给读者明确的交易物和购买理由（如字体授权、电子书、可报销的商业用途），比模糊的捐赠更有效。
- 04
免费流量不等于付费意愿；公开传播可扩大影响，但真正支撑收入的是少数核心读者。
HN 评论精选
用免费书换邮箱、养邮件列表再卖产品，比一次性收费更可持续。
如果你想靠小众商业主题出版赚钱，建议学 Nathan Barry、Brennan Dunn 等人的模式：用书或其他激励换读者邮箱。注意力短暂，但经营得当的邮件列表关系持久。先免费送大量有价值内容，再请人买产品并合理定价。按文中数据，65 万人与在线书有过某种互动，可能其中 2 万到 5 万人愿意用邮箱换可下载版本。作者似乎因审美理由拒绝做 PDF/电子书，尽管有人愿意付钱；需要找到能给书增加价值、又值得更靠近部分读者的东西。
patio11查看英文原文
I'd suggest, if you want to run publishing on niche business topics as a business, that you take a page out of the Nathan Barry / Brennan Dunn / et al formula. (There exist many others who do similar things, but they're locally recognizable examples of it.) Trade the book, or some other incentive [+], for the customer's email address. Attention is fleeting, but relationships with one's email list are enduring, if you do them correctly. Send people who give you their email address lots of valuable stuff for free. Then, ask them to buy your products. Charge an appropriate amount for those products. The math is, as has been widely reported by people writing books/etc on HN about a wide range of niche business topics, quite attractive. (Ballpark numbers? 650k people with some level of interaction with an online version of the book implies probably between 20k and 50k folks who would have been happy to swap their email address for a downloadable version. That's basically a nice house which temporarily happens to exist inside of an e.g. Mailchimp account.) [+] I will note the author appears to have aesthetic reasons to reject creating a PDF/e-book/etc version of the book, despite people literally offering him money to do so. http://practicaltypography.com/why-there's-no-e-book-or-pdf.html There must be something which adds incremental value to the book which would justify incremental closeness to a portion of the readers.
免费读者多为消遣，真正付费核心很小；公开内容仍有扩大受众的价值。
我读了部分书但没付钱，因为它只是有趣的消遣，不是我真正感兴趣的东西；若它在付费墙后，也不会对我的生活有实质影响。你的两三百名付费者才是真正读者，其余人只是从一片蓝色链接中路过。不要把这看成负面：排版是小众领域，你至少让 60 多万人接触了排版；哪怕 0.01% 的人后来投入时间金钱，也比内容藏在付费墙后影响更大。
falcolas查看英文原文
Dear Author, I read (parts) of your book, and didn't pay. Why? Because it was an interesting diversion, not something I was actually interested in. If it had been locked behind a paywall, it would not have affected my life in any meaningful way. It was merely, for better or worse, a pleasant diversion, drifting in a sea full of diversions. I don't imagine that I am in any way alone in this. Looking at your numbers, I'd say that your 2-300 paying people are the true readership and audience of your book; the rest of us were there for a diversion; because it was another blue link in a sea of blue links. Don't take this as a negative sign. Typography is necessarily a niche field, and at the least, you've introduced over 600,000 new people to typography. It might not help you now, but if even 0.01% of those 600,000 start investing time and money into typography, well, it's more impact you would have had if the content had been hidden behind a paywall. Cold comfort for sure, but in the age of browsers, typography is a dying art. New blood should always be welcome. Sincerely, Falcolas
字体授权比捐赠好卖，因为全书建立了可信度，并让购买有明确回报和报销理由。
作者惊讶于字体授权（59–299 美元）比捐赠（5–10 美元）更受欢迎，但这并不奇怪。整本书就是字体的绝佳销售文案：建立专家可信度、送读者有用信息、详细解释产品价值，甚至帮读者把自己看成会买的人（如“你不是无动于衷的人”）。捐赠则缺少对等回报，读者决定时书的价值已成过去，心理不同。而且很多人能用公司卡买字体或书，作为业务支出容易报销；给网上陌生作者“捐赠”却难解释。仅凭这一点，把“捐赠”改成电子书销售就更好。
ef4查看英文原文
"What’s most interesting to me, however, is that so many more readers were willing to buy a font license (at $59–299) than to make a donation (at $5–10). Don’t get me wrong—I’m utterly grateful. But it’s counterintuitive: I never expected that the cheaper option would be so much less popular. Economists, I invite your explanations." This is not surprising to me at all. There are multiple reasons why the font sale is easier to make. The whole book is an excellent sales pitch for the fonts. It's hard to believe you didn't design it that way, because you did everything right. You establish credibility as an expert. You give the reader a gift of useful information. You explain at length the value of the product. You even help the reader see herself as someone who's savvy enough to buy the product (copy like: "You are not apathetic" in the Times New Roman page.) So you have a great sales pitch for the fonts. Whereas the donation suffers in comparison. There's no quid pro quo -- I understand you see the book itself as the value they'd be paying for, but that value is already in the past by the time they're deciding to donate. It changes the psychology. Also, plenty of people can plunk down a company card to buy a font (or a book). It's a legitimate business expense that's easy to justify. It can be much harder to justify a "donation" to a random author on the internet. For this reason alone, you'd be better off changing "donation" to an e-book sale, even if the e-book is just the same content as the website.
高质量开放内容的可持续商业模式仍是难题，收入常难覆盖机会成本。
我觉得这值得 HN 讨论，因为作者偶尔在这里发帖，过去也讨论过他的书和排版框架。我很喜欢《Practical Typography》，也乐意付钱（显然远高于中位售价）。读到作者第一年收入不到 1.5 万美元有点失望；他文中看似乐观，但这笔钱很难覆盖高质量书的机会成本。支持高质量开放内容的经济结构仍是持续挑战，没有清楚答案。
_dps查看英文原文
I thought this may be of interest to HN since the author posts here occasionally and there has been past discussion of his book/typesetting framework [0]. I personally found "Butterick's Practical Typography" very compelling, and I happily paid for it (apparently well above the median selling price!). I'm a little disappointed to read that Mr. Butterick has only made something less than $15k over the course of the first year; while he seems cheerful about it in the post, I can't imagine that such a payout comes close to covering his opportunity cost for creating a high quality book. Economic structures that support high-quality open-access content seem to be an ongoing challenge with no clear answers. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822057
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