I’m pleased to announce that today, in line with my pricing strategy, I’ve reduced The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies to £3.99! The code gimme10 still works, giving you an extra 10% off!
For a specialist, self-published ebook, I’ve been delighted with the number of sales. More than 250 people backed the book as it was being written through the OpenBeta process I devised. Their feedback helped shape the book in a positive direction and around the same number of people have purchased the book post-v1.0.
If you decide to go ahead and buy the book at this price point, be assured I won’t reduce the book further until 2016. 🙂
A quick note on the two other books I planned to write this year. Due to spinning up my full-time consultancy slightly earlier than I’d originally planned, I’ve had to put these on the backburner. I’m still planning to write them – at some point!
Update: The excellent comments on this post have made me realise that I proved exactly nothing in this experiment due to the poor way I set it up. Thanks all! Will try to do better next time.
I mentioned on Friday that I was going to experiment with Twitter ads for my book The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies. I said I’d report back on my findings.
Well, it’s a pretty stark message: either I’m doing something fundamentally wrong, or they’re a complete waste of time and money.
Here’s my results after spending $50 on three promoted tweets:
As you can see, not exactly stellar results.
So how did that translate to sales? Remember, I said that, “After Gumroad’s commission and the 10% discount, I need less than 10 additional people to buy my ebook to break even.”
According to my Gumroad statistics, I didn’t even sell one additional copy:
As the person who bought my book yesterday bought it at the undiscounted rate, I’m chalking that up as an ‘organic’ sale (i.e. they didn’t purchase it as a result of the advertising).
Happily, sales are going reasonably well anyway. They fluctuate each week, but are never zero. I think I’ll just let things continue as they are and not throw good money after bad. 😉
Today I reduced the price of my ebook The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies from £7.99 to £5.99. The code gimme10 still works, giving you an extra 10% off!
I just wanted to take a moment to explain the pricing strategy for this work. As regular readers will be aware, I took a couple of years to write this ebook, starting it shortly after I graduated from my Ed.D. in 2012. My thesis was the academic starting point, with my aim to make my research more accessible and applicable to educators and other interested parties.
The first version of the book, v0.1, was literally the title and an indicative contents page. Those who bought the book at this stage were taking a bit of a punt – but were rewarded by getting every subsequent update for free after a small initial outlay. Each subsequent version (v0.2, v0.3, etc.) increased in price until v1.0 was released for £7.99. Doing it this way meant I got some great feedback from early adopters and meant I could shape the book to be as useful as possible.
The book is already Creative Commons licensed but, eventually, I want it also to be free. I’m going to reduce it in price until, two years after publication (~June 2016), it will be free of charge. I’ll make these price reductions approximately every six months.
I’m itching to write another ebook and so am considering a companion workbook to complement The Essential Elements of Digital Literacies. It would probably take the ‘combination of elements’ approach I started to develop a couple of years ago (see slide 40+ of this presentation). I’d love to know your thoughts on this idea in the comments below. Would it be worthwhile? Is it something in which you’d invest?
