{"id":5183,"date":"2011-03-18T15:30:16","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T09:30:16","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-03-21T14:52:17","modified_gmt":"2011-03-21T08:52:17","slug":"500-free-to-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/500-free-to-one\/","title":{"rendered":"500 Free to One Paid"},"content":{"rendered":"

That’s the ratio one self-publisher found was needed to extract paid sales from free books.<\/p>\n

Technical writer Keir Thomas reports on his experiments in screen publishing<\/a>. He wrote a book (a resource guide for the programming language Ubuntu) and then made a PDF. He posted the PDF online available for free. The hosting site and the PDF itself contained advertisments for paper versions of the book (printed on demand by Amazon’s CreateSpace) priced at $12.99. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the free book, which Thomas treated as “free” marketing. Some downloaders bought the book. Here are the results of his sales:<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ve lost count how many people have downloaded the eBook but the last time I audited the figures, which was around six months after the book\u2019s release, it\u2019d seen around 500,000 downloads. I suspect that number has doubled since then.<\/p>\n

Since going on sale at the start of 2009, the book has made me $9,000. Bearing in mind the book took three months to produce, that\u2019s a salary of $3,000 per month, although costs such as hosting have to be deducted, and I also spent quite a few days marketing the book once published.<\/p>\n

I estimate I have to give away 446 copies of the eBook for every sale of the print edition. Without Amazon S3, I simply couldn\u2019t have done it.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s been a success in terms of providing a free educational resource for the Ubuntu community, and I\u2019m very proud of this achievement. But as a commercial endeavour, I wouldn\u2019t recommend anybody take a self-publishing route.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thomas is now trying a new experiment, selling Kindle versions of two new books at 99 cents.<\/p>\n

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\"Keir\"<\/p>\n

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That’s the ratio one self-publisher found was needed to extract paid sales from free books. Technical writer Keir Thomas reports on his experiments in screen publishing. He wrote a book (a resource guide for the programming language Ubuntu) and then … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[870],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/screenpublishing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}