eBook Case Study And Experience Selling eBooks

First, I should point out some major differences between my own eBook sales and selling eBooks for Kindle or iPhone. I am selling PDF files using eJunkie as the download service and PayPal as the credit card processor. This is a very different than selling to registered customers who are buying yet another eBook for their sunk-cost device with a single-click through from a trusted big name vendor. It also means that my eBook sales have zero dependence on the cataloging or ranking of a retailer site. This case study is a follow up to an earlier post in which I tried to establish if eBook sales were hurting print sales.

I chose the awkward time period of this case study, May 9th to Dec 31st of four successive years, because the eBook edition of my business title went on sale May 9th of 2008 and I wanted to compare apples-to-apples as much as possible. The reason I give paper book sales data for two years prior to the release of the eBook is to show that a downward trend was already in place for this eight year old title. In addition to actual eBook sales, I show Ingram sales (which represent the majority of paper book sales for this title), Amazon Associate sales (direct buyers from the FonerBooks website) and the number of hits on the order pages for the book. Now, on to the sales data:

Period May 9 to Dec 31st, Paper $14.95 (Amazon $13.45), eBook $11.95:

Year (May to Dec) Ingram Sales eBook Sales

2006 807 0

2007 694 0

2008 498 159

2009 569 165

Now the combined unit sales and a look at the website marketing, including Amazon Associates sales and hits on the order page(s) for the book:

Year (May to Dec) Ingram + eBook Unit Sales Associates Sales Order Page Hits eBook License Page Hits

2006 807 183 5,348

2007 694 160 4,648

2008 657 83 4,691 777

2009 734 97 5,115 805

Perhaps the economic events of 2008 had a direct impact on the sales for this title about starting a business. It's also important to note that two directly competing titles appeared on Amazon in late 2007. The sell through for the eBook, once customers click through to the eOrder page and are confronted by the license agreement and the PayPal symbol, is higher than 20% for both years. The Amazon Associates sales for the paper book dropped by almost 50% when I started selling eBooks direct, yet the eBook sales nearly doubled the lost Associate sales. International eBook buyers who suddenly have a low cost way to get the book account for part of that difference.

The main sales drivers for this title are the extensive excerpts available for free on the FonerBooks website and its visibility on Amazon (paper book only), which was built over the years. The book seems to be widely available through piracy sites, and likely was before I even began selling an unprotected PDF version. I haven't gone through the exercise of trying to download pirated copies because I don't put that much trust in my antivirus software and I don't find it beneficial to my mental health. Going by Google's auto complete results, there are plenty of people looking for a freebie on file sharing sites (my more popular titles also show similar queries, including the word "free"):

The experience of selling eBooks using the simple combination of eJunkie and PayPal is working very well. Of the 1207 eBooks sold (four different titles) in 2009, there were a total of eight PayPal disputes initiated, less than one tenth of one percent. Six of the eight disputes resulted in somebody getting a free eBook, whether or not it was the intended customer isn't clear. PayPal labeled two as "bank returns", two as "temporary holds" that apparently became permanent, one as "non receipt" (I assume they couldn't find the file on their hard drive) and one as a credit card company "charge back" which resulted in a $10 loss. Two of the disputes were resolved in my favor. I also issued six refunds unilaterally after noticing customers never downloaded the eBook they had paid for, and I don't believe I ever heard from any of them. The only other overhead has been regular requests, perhaps one a month, to replace lost eBooks. Overall, I may spend fifteen or twenty minutes a week managing the eBook sales. The graph shows a strong seasonality to my eBook sales, I wonder if other publishers have seen anything similar?

I also started selling my most recent print title as an eBook for the first time this month, and overall eBook sales are up around 40% over the previous January. This should give me some data to contrast with the book published earlier that year, when I started selling the eBook a couple months before releasing the print book. Now that I'm selling three eBooks on a related subject, I've started seeing triple orders, one a week so far. When somebody purchases an eBook, comes back a half hour later and purchases the next one, and then returns an hour after that and purchases the last one, I take it as a vote of confidence in the quality. Only one of the three eBooks makes any mention of one of the others, and that's at the very back, so it's not a question of push marketing.

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