On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 09:29:18PM -0800, Doug Berry wrote: > When I mentioned using Wal-mart or Amazon as vendors, that > is of course one way we could go. We will have that > automatically when we register with LSI. But the most profitable > way to go would be to sell any books ourselves. If a vendor > sells the book, they are going to add 15%, that is deducted > out of our profit, not from LSI. > > Setting up a web page and taking orders ourselves would mean > we would make the most profit from our book. The only real reason I would want to do this is if we decreased the purchase price accordingly. I think the less hassle we put on us (have distributors do the work for us), the better, and the extra bit in the price pays for itself. From what I understand, we're setting the wholesale price, not the retail price though. That's not to say I'm completely against doing the shipping ourselves. > I am not sure what you mean with the four different books. > Is that four books at once, or one at a time? Book sales > are almost impossible to predict. But I think that the first > book will sell. It may well pay for the other four. > The first set would be four books at once, aligning with the four foundations. We need a *lot* more marketing collateral on these and this is just another way to push that during this release cycle. > One way to gage this: at this upcoming FUDCON, if we are going > to be passing out release forms, maybe we could take a legal > pad or pledge cards and ask people "would you like to pre-order > the book your picture will be in?" If the people whose pictures > and names are going to be in the book, won't commit to buying > it, we might as well quit right now. > Great idea! I'll put those on the release forms we make up. > Then again, we are not even bound, no pun intended, to producing > a bound book. We could go magazine style: folded pages, stapled > in the middle, the cheapest type of book. We could do any amount > of pages, 20, 40, 80, 160. > I was thinking that the idea would be that we have a nice, high-quality physical book. Quite frankly, paperback would be the least I would go in quality. > I wonder myself, and I think that after the first couple of books, > which we could do bound, sales might drop off even from the > most committed Fedoreans. So maybe anticipating that and going > to a zine would be better in the long run. > The idea for books past the four foundations set would be for specific things -- like if the KDE SIG wanted us to produce one. The demand will still be there -- just in selective groups. And as I mentioned in a previous email, for the next 6 books (which I expect to at least take a few years to get through all of those), we don't need to buy any more ISBNs, because we will already have them, so that's a lot of the cost out of the way. > I definitely think it should be Max, or someone Red Hat. > LSI is going to like much better dealing with an established > corporation. All Max or whoever would have to do is go to > the Lightning Source web site, click on the "New Accounts" > button and fill out the form. Once we are registered, they > will assign us a "Guide" who will explain their system. > I'll talk to Max about this sometime when we're both awake. > I think I understand the point that Paul Fields was trying > to make the other day: we are a FREE Software foundation > and we don't want to appear to be morphing into a commercial > book publish phenomenom. But if it seems to be a Red Hat > venture and are just a Beta version of it, well.... > As the footers (seemingly ironically) say: we're sponsored by Red Hat, but Red Hat is not responsible for what we do. ;) We're a community, and this will be done by the community. It bothers me not that we should have a Red Hatter register with LSI, since that makes sense, but considering it a "Red Hat" venture seems... not correct ^_^ -- Ian Weller <ianweller@xxxxxxxxx> http://ianweller.org GnuPG fingerprint: E51E 0517 7A92 70A2 4226 B050 87ED 7C97 EFA8 4A36 "Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet." ~ Douglas Adams
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