[HN Gopher] I gave away my books and sales increased
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I gave away my books and sales increased
Author : geerlingguy
Score : 73 points
Date : 2020-05-04 20:54 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| bArray wrote:
| I think there are a few reasons this works well (a
| simplification):
|
| 1. Ideally, you want everybody who wants to consume your product
| to do so at the highest price they are willing to pay (as long as
| that is above the cost of production and some minimum profit
| margin). People willing to spend a lot of money are willing to
| also spend less, but people who are only willing to spend less
| money are not willing to spend more. Therefore you target the
| high-buyers first and the low-buyers second, until you reach
| zero.
|
| 2. Value loss over time means that there is some non-infinite
| window in which to sell your product in order to maximize
| profits. The trade-off is likely market (people wanting to
| purchase), selling price and exposure (how many people even know
| it exists) - x axis is time and y is profit.
|
| In relation to this story, the exposure was low and the market
| was lower as a result. Reducing price increased exposure and
| therefore allowed the visibility of the product to the market out
| there. Don't under value word-of-mouth!
|
| I think this is why the film and music industry need to calm down
| about piracy. The EU for example withheld a study because it
| showed that piracy didn't provably harm sales [1]. How many
| people have had their internet shut off, been fined or worse
| because of piracy - when there's no proven victim. In fact, if
| anecdotes like this story are anything to go by - it may even
| improve sales.
|
| My anecdote: After pirating the Matrix trilogy (in a time where I
| had no money), I ended up buying the films on DVD twice (each
| film individually and then the box set). I never would have
| purchased these films had I first not pirated them. Similarly, I
| found a PDF for a book on scrum before purchasing it - and then
| recommending my team do the same.
|
| Side note: I remember interviewing for a company that did this
| kind of analysis and automatically adjusted prices for online
| websites. I don't think those guys actually had any clue (it was
| all very young programmers and no mathematicians/machine learning
| people) - but in theory it's entirely possible.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-
| piracy...
| mobilio wrote:
| Nothing new...
|
| https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2008/02/03/pirate-coelho/
| https://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-books-...
|
| In short Coelho pirate his own books for free. Sales was 0 in the
| beginning, then 10k, next year 100k, next year 1m.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I'm not surprised. These books, and Jeff Geerling's contributions
| to Ansible in general, are a very strong resource for new Ansible
| users.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Thank you for this anecdote. I made a post awhile ago about how
| it's almost never small-time authors who get screwed by piracy
| and was promptly downvoted
|
| Yet again, we find that benefits of exposure > costs of some
| free-loading
| geerlingguy wrote:
| To add to that point: I have a few google searches set up to
| get links to my books from warez/free download/random blog
| sites, and I see, on average, 3-5 new sites per day that have
| full PDF copies of my books.
|
| In the beginning I worried about this, but in the end, there
| are two reasons why I stopped caring:
|
| 1. I keep the book updated and relevant, so those versions of
| the book are basically historic artifacts and become more and
| more worthless over time. This value helps people who actually
| care about the knowledge in the book to decide to buy from
| LeanPub or Amazon, eventually.
|
| 2. Most of the people who put up with getting popup ads and
| malware on their computers just to download my book aren't
| likely to pay for it anyways.
|
| I have only filed one or two takedown notices, to people who
| posted YouTube videos infringing on the content of some of my
| talks and past videos, and once to a more popular / non-
| malicious site that was sharing a PDF.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| I just read the 2016 bit about how you published individual
| chapters to gauge interest; that was pretty cool. Could I ask
| you a couple of questions about it?
|
| 1. How does "purchasing" a few chapters look on the user
| side? e.g. Do you price every chapter and they only pay for
| the difference if they want to purchase the full book later?
| Do updates (which you said they're entitled to?) come out for
| individual chapters?
|
| 2. How do you get the word out initially? (I see you
| mentioned going to conferences; it'd be nice if you could
| elaborate or mention if there are other potentially effective
| approaches.)
|
| Thanks, and congrats on your success so far!
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