This may not have been the dumbest thing I’ve ever done after all! The numbers were suggesting that it may have even been a smart thing to do. More people were getting the content I wanted to share, and I wasn’t going broke over it. I suspect the total number of downloads would have been far less (resulting in a higher percentage of paid downloads) with extra hoops to jump through.Įven with the small percentage of people choosing to pay, my earnings on the book were on track to at least match, and likely exceed, the royalties I had been receiving through my publisher in the first few weeks. If I had gone with either of those safety nets, I might have seen quite different results, like this author, and had the majority of people pay. That may have been a poor business decision, but I don’t regret it for a second. Neither of those things felt right to me.
#DOWNLOAD MYPUBLISHER FREE#
I didn’t set a minimum price and I didn’t require an email address to get to the free download. Reading up on it after the fact, it seems that didn’t really follow the same rules most “pay what you want” offers do. Essentially most people who did pay, choose a price near my $5 suggestion even though it was 100% optional. Just about the price of the ebook originally. The average price that people have chosen to pay is $4.75. An entire 12% of people opted to pay even though they didn’t have to. Around 12% of downloads were accompanied by a payment which I was very impressed with. The majority of downloads took the book for free, which was totally fine and exactly what I expected. Tweets about the book were retweeted over 500 times, and there were over 1000 downloads of the book in just the first few hours.
The initial attention this got was beyond anything I had expected. My publisher closed, so I’m giving my CSS Animations pocket guide away for any price you choose. I wrote up a quick post, Tweeted about it, and hoped that it wouldn’t turn out to be the the dumbest idea I ever had. My book was available again - this time at any price people wanted to pay - just 24 hours after my publisher announced its closure. Thanks to some helpful friends, the morning after the announcement I pushed my new book page live over coffee and hoped for the best. But it’s still scary when it’s your own work that’s being offered up.Ĭan you really make any money if you make paying for your product completely optional? Will anyone pay for something they could also just take for free? These were the questions I was worrying about as I moved forward with my plan. It was risky.The “pay what you’d like” model isn’t new of course, Radiohead did it famously and they haven’t been the last to use it. I had no idea if this would work and I’d never tried anything quite like it before. To me it seemed like the best way I could keep sharing what I’d learned with the community even without the help of a publisher’s reach and expertise. Thankfully it was only available in digital formats so I had that flexibility to try something like this. There would be no strings attached, paying would be encouraged but entirely optional.
My solution was to take matters into my own hands and make my book available on my site with a “pay what you’d like” price tag. But I wanted to turn it into something more positive and I knew that whatever that was, it had to happen fast. Losing your publisher definitely falls into the category of bad news. Change of plans, Tuesday, we have some big decisions to make! Their site was gone, along with any way of finding or purchasing any of their books, including the book I authored: The CSS Animation Pocket Guide. One Tuesday morning not so long ago, I woke up to the news that my publisher had abruptly closed its doors.
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