The first page of the PDF (still available on gumroad)
Back in March I did a little publishing experiment which I mostly forgot about until right now. Typically I would think that means it failed, although I’m not sure it’s the case. I took two months of blogs posts and formatted them into a PDF with a bunch of additional photos from each of the featured shoots. I sold it via Gumroad for a minimum of $1. I only sold six copies for a grand total of $17.62.
Since it took me a few hours to layout it and offer it for sale, it’s a pretty significant loss, especially if I add in expenses for writing and the photo shoots (although we had already done them both). But one try isn’t necessarily enough to decide if something works. Did I publicize it enough? Was the content good enough?
I think the only way to work that out is to try it two or three more times and see what happens. I didn’t make much money publishing one e-book either, but once I had ten it was a whole different story.
Any way, if you’re interested, here’s my original blog post about the PDF, including a few samples.
And the PDF is still online here if you’d like to buy it.
It’s so hard to figure out what format/seller will sell. Anything other than Amazon has been a total dud for me, even something backed by a publisher. I tried fictional short pieces on Amazon, and those tanked, while the books I made directly from my blog posts have done the best by a huge margin.
Oh readers, you are so tricky to please!
Hi Daisy!
My bestselling book by far was Brorotica and it sold on Amazon, presumably based on searches and nothing to do with my outreach. Confusing at best.
For everything it’s hard to tell. I have sold almost no books on B&N. Maybe we should try door to door. 😀
Haha, we should try that. We would need a camera crew to document it. “No, really, we aren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses, we just want to sell you some smut!”