We realized going into this that the gain was not profit. We thought we’d learn something and that, to us, was something we couldn’t quite put a value on. Nevertheless, we didn’t go into it without wanting to make money. We just didn’t know where to set our expectations. After all, publishing a book first as a wiki, licensing it for free distribution and making it available as an eBook to download is not a business model widely known.
In just two months, we’ve sold over 1,000 copies of The Complete Guide to Google Wave.
When Gina first approached us to help her, we put together some preliminary numbers anyway. In true scientific method, we formed a hypothesis (sell X number of books) and tested it (go out and sell them). For the preview edition, we anticipated selling between 100 and 1000 copies but really figured we’d sell around 500-700 copies. We hit our high mark of 1,000 and we did it in exactly two months. Net revenues for the book have been $5300 (we lose about 50 cents per copy to google checkout and 10 cents to docmonk). Our peak day was November 20 (Day 3) when the book was announced; we sold 85 copies that day.
Sales pattern for the (now 9) weeks since it went on sale:
Complete Guide to Google Wave sales by week
On the horizon, we will have the First Edition (not a preview edition) for sale by March 12 (when SXSW begins). It will be a higher price. With it we will also have a Print-on-Demand version that we can drop-ship as well (for a slightly higher price). We got our first preview copy of that last week. Here’s a peek at me showing it off excitedly.
Our print preview
