Almost 30 days ago we published a tutorial book that was created for Makerland conference: Makerland Tutorials - Your First Steps with the Internet of Things. The whole thing was a big experiment for us – we didn’t publish any book before and we didn’t sell anything in a “Pay as you want” model before. We didn’t have money to promote it and our goal was to make it reach as many people as possible via Makerland channels (mailing list, twitter followers, facebook fanpage).

I love experiments and this one looked particularly interesting for me, because I literally expected nothing. I usually have my bets and I try to guess what can be the outcome, but this time I just couldn’t bring myself to imagine anything.

At Makerland team, we love transparency. So we thought that first results of this experiment can be interesting also for you. We have no reason to hide them, because Makerland Tutorials is a real community book: created by community, open sourced, licensed under Creative Commons. All proceeds from the book are going into making next Makerland and Make Things more awesome.

So, ready? Let’s crunch some numbers!

Makerland Tutorials was released on 7th May 2014. To promote it during the launch, we did the following:

Posted a blogpost

Sent a newsletter to Makerland list (1,236 recipients, 43% opened email)

Submitted to Hacker News & got to the homepage for 30 minutes

Submitted to a couple of related subreddits (arduino, raspberrypi) without significant success

Tweeted from Makerland account (935 followers) and Makerland fanpage (1,387 fans, total reach of post was 2,844)

Adafruit picked it up and share on their blog

We didn’t do a lot. We could to much much more, but you know, life & day job happens. I hope to focus on promotion more in June.

Anyway, let’s move on into the results:

PDF “Pay as you want” version

Above you can see a graph of downloads and sales during the last 20-something days. Of course, big spike in the beginning followed by a flat line at the end :) Book was downloaded 490 times which converted into 424.49 USD. On average, we sold a book for $0.87.

More interesting stuff happens once you download the transactions, import into excel and have some fun with raw numbers. I managed to get this data:

average book was worth $0.87

89 out of 490 people paid anything (18%)

if we extract only people who paid anything, then we have average of $5 per book. median is also $5.

the highest payment was $20, 4x paid average and 23x average. the lowest one was $0.99.

we’ve got 4 mailinator emails (of course, they also didn’t pay)

I think this results make me happy. I know they might be better if we invest more time into promotion, but I like this two numbers: 18% of people who paid anything and almost 500 people who downloaded the book.

Printed version on Amazon

Book was also published on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk via Createspace (Amazon’s service for self publishers). We priced it as $9, Amazon sold it with 10% discount, but our royalty from each book was ~$2.71 (discount didn’t affect it).

In total, we sold 32 paper copies for a total of $73.74. This brings us to a total of $498.23 for the first month. These results are quite disappointing - we put a lot of effort and work into making digital PDF work in print and I don’t think it was worth it.

This year we first prepared book (formatting, images, etc) for a local printer where we printed books for conference. Then digital PDF for an e-book. Then again different printed PDF for Amazon print (it has different guildelines). It’s a lot of work and pain. Next year we will prepare for Createspace first, order book from Amazon (we can do this for just $2.59 a copy as authors!) for a conference and save time on doing this only 2 times, not 3 :)

Bitcoins

Later on we’ve added a bitcoin donate button. We received one donation for 0.0001 BTC (~0.06 USD). Yeah, that paid off.

How about the traffic?

Our goal wasn’t financial, we just wanted to share the work that costs us and authors a lot of time and we love love love experiments. Let’s see how much traffic / Makerland awareness we got by publishing this book.

Hard to tell how many tweets / twitter mentions it generated, but I guess it maybe around 100-150. A lot of this because of Gumroad feature that encourage people to tweet / share after their downloaded book for free.

Gumroad page was visited 843 times , 93.23% of this traffic came from book.makerland.org.

, 93.23% of this traffic came from book.makerland.org. book.makerland.org was visited 3,174 times and the user acquisition is more distributed as seen on the screenshot below. Note that Hacker News traffic is included in “(direct) / (none)”, they hide it somehow.







and the user acquisition is more distributed as seen on the screenshot below. Note that Hacker News traffic is included in “(direct) / (none)”, they hide it somehow.

35 new stars on Github repo :), 3 forks, 1 issue (saying that books could be prettier), 0 contributions :(

I guess that most of the interesting stuff, I really hope it’ll help you publish your own book. If I missed something that you’re curious about, do let me know!

In June we’re planning to work on increasing “steady downloads”, not “peak downloads”. Basically the plan is to find places where this book could appear that will be drive more more static and long-term traffic than Reddit/HN. I’ll also work on bringing us more Amazon reviews (we have none!), I think that might work somehow to increase sales of paperback version.

You can discuss this post on Hacker News.