Book People Archive

Re: Success with POd's and ebooks?

In a message dated 7/9/2001 8:33:16 AM Central Daylight Time, 
grant@[redacted] writes:

> What is your personal experience?  Anyone pay the rent with POD sales or
> ebook orders?  

No can do. I think your opinion must be well-founded, it matches mine so 
closely. <grin>

Ebooks: I've been doing ebooks on line for eight years. As long as I was 
paying all the online bills out of my own pocket, the visitors came in 
droves. Around a million, all told. As soon as I put a price tag on 
everything to help cover expenses the traffic died to a trickle. I'd be happy 
if I could get my faucets to shut off that completely. A total of five people 
were willing to pay the buck or two I asked. I'm cool with that, though a 
smidgeon disappointed.

POD: I devised a print on demand system a couple years back and started 
offering physical books. My POD system doesn't require a large outlay like, 
say, a Docutech-based system so I have no equipment payments to make. Even 
so, it's not bringing in enough income even to pay the electric bill.

Unlike the ebooks, which proved unviable free because of the expense and 
unviable paid because of zero income, I have not given up on POD books. I 
believe the path to profitability there is to find niche markets who want or 
need just 20 to 100 copies of a book to saturate their niche, then sell 
yourself aggressively to those markets. The trick is to find enthusiastic 
buyers. People madly interested in the subject matter. Then to find books 
that feed their rabid lust. So far I have found only one such group (fans 
Harry S. Keeler, an obscure mystery writer) and am busily engaged in printing 
short-run editions of all the appropriate material I can typeset. An upcoming 
article in the Wall Street Journal will touch on this particular little POD 
success story.

I've had a little success in another area -- family histories. Every family 
with a history has an extended family. So these books have a mid-sized but 
very finite buyer pool. Once a family history book sells its 30 to 50 copies, 
it's the end of the line for that title. The first difficulty of this niche 
is that it's hard to get in touch with the individual family historians. The 
next difficulty is getting them to stop using photocopiers and start using a 
keyboard to record their histories. I'm conducting a small-scale test direct 
mailing to genealogy groups in the hope that I'll get enough responses to 
hint that a massive promotional effort may be worthwhile. 

Some things sell. Some things don't. And I seem to pick more of the latter 
than the former, so I sure can't speak with much authority in that area. But 
nothing sells if you don't get the word out.

Jim Weiler, The Naked Word
Editor-in-Chief, Short Order Press