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Direct e-book sales.
Aug. 18th, 2013 01:58 pmUltimately, one of my goals in putting the whole of MU up on e-books is to grow my audience by reaching people who don't like reading in a browser or who would rather curl up in bed or a corner of the house than sit at a desk for a massive archive trawl. A whole new audience who discovers the series on Amazon would do amazing things for me.
With existing readers, I think I can't expect more than a modest income bump. There are people who won't pay to support a series they could read for free but will buy an e-book, and there are people who will do both, but to a large degree I think more people will be like, I have $3-5 to support this thing I like, and since the books are there I might as well get one.
In other words, I think it's mostly the same bucks I'd be getting if the e-books weren't there.
If I were a major world corporation like Coca-Cola, I'd probably have the good business sense to see this as a catastrophe and release some kind of new formula MU to try to stop the website from losing market share to the e-books. But because I never went to business school, I don't really care how people choose to give me their money. And since direct e-book sales come to me directly with only a small loss in fees that's not much different from the normal ones, I've decided to stop distinguishing between them and site donations. They now all contribute to the bonus story bank.
So if you buy an e-book from me for $4.99, the bonus story bank will go up $5. (I also don't have enough business sense to care about pennies.)
If you want to buy direct from Amazon so you don't have to mess around with transferring to your Kindle or whatever... more power to you. If you prefer to buy directly so you have direct control over transferring your stories among your devices... more actual power to you. I don't use DRM anywhere (I uncheck the option when submitting to Amazon and the Nook store, though I can't vouch for that actually does) and I don't care where people buy their stuff from.
As a sidenote: a few readers in Europe in countries have told me that Amazon gives them an unfavorable price on e-books. As far as I know, the service I use to sell directly (Sellfy) does not have international restriction beyond "places that PayPal or a credit card network services", and the price is the same no matter where you're coming from. So there's that. If anyone who's had this problem before tries this and verifies that it works, please let me know.
And within minutes of updating the website to reflect this policy and tweeting about it, I have $12 of sales... so, good decision.
With existing readers, I think I can't expect more than a modest income bump. There are people who won't pay to support a series they could read for free but will buy an e-book, and there are people who will do both, but to a large degree I think more people will be like, I have $3-5 to support this thing I like, and since the books are there I might as well get one.
In other words, I think it's mostly the same bucks I'd be getting if the e-books weren't there.
If I were a major world corporation like Coca-Cola, I'd probably have the good business sense to see this as a catastrophe and release some kind of new formula MU to try to stop the website from losing market share to the e-books. But because I never went to business school, I don't really care how people choose to give me their money. And since direct e-book sales come to me directly with only a small loss in fees that's not much different from the normal ones, I've decided to stop distinguishing between them and site donations. They now all contribute to the bonus story bank.
So if you buy an e-book from me for $4.99, the bonus story bank will go up $5. (I also don't have enough business sense to care about pennies.)
If you want to buy direct from Amazon so you don't have to mess around with transferring to your Kindle or whatever... more power to you. If you prefer to buy directly so you have direct control over transferring your stories among your devices... more actual power to you. I don't use DRM anywhere (I uncheck the option when submitting to Amazon and the Nook store, though I can't vouch for that actually does) and I don't care where people buy their stuff from.
As a sidenote: a few readers in Europe in countries have told me that Amazon gives them an unfavorable price on e-books. As far as I know, the service I use to sell directly (Sellfy) does not have international restriction beyond "places that PayPal or a credit card network services", and the price is the same no matter where you're coming from. So there's that. If anyone who's had this problem before tries this and verifies that it works, please let me know.
And within minutes of updating the website to reflect this policy and tweeting about it, I have $12 of sales... so, good decision.