My cofounders and I developed Softcover [1] to support the business model used by the Ruby on Rails Tutorial [2], which combines "tech cred" with a profitable product business. I plan to reveal more detailed numbers soon, but I can say that the Rails Tutorial has made an order of magnitude more money than the "solid success" benchmark mentioned in the OP, despite (or perhaps because of) making the book available for free online. (I include revenues from screencasts, which are a lot of work to produce, but are much less work than initially writing the book.) Thus, with a platform like Softcover, authors don't have to choose between making money and building their brand.
Thanks for the pointer, encouraging to see success in online distribution models with content bundles and a free tier. A few questions, if you don't mind:
1) How critical were screencasts in convincing customers to purchase the ebook versions?
2) How dependent is this business model on books which are attached to fast-moving software?
3) Did you make any effort (like Scribd) to prevent scraping of content from the online viewer?
4) Have you had to request DMCA takedowns of ebooks or screencasts?
5) Do you plan to provide guidance or best practices on screencast production?
1) How critical were screencasts in convincing customers to purchase the ebook versions?
The big money is in product bundles, but the ebooks sold well (~$100/day) even before the screencasts launched. And that was back in 2010, when the Rails Tutorial was just getting started.
2) How dependent is this business model on books which are attached to fast-moving software?
It cuts both ways, but I suspect it's generally better if the software isn't fast-moving. Products covering fast-moving software require updates that lead to new sales cycles, but products covering slower-changing software have much longer shelf-lives. As one data point, I've actually designed the 3rd edition of the Rails Tutorial to be more future-proof than before, in the hopes that I won't have to update it as often. (Even then, full updates have only been required ever 1.5 years, with minor supplements in between.) And some future products I have planned will be designed to be even more evergreen.
3) Did you make any effort (like Scribd) to prevent scraping of content from the online viewer?
Not at all. The online version is plain HTML. You can even "save as PDF", but the real ebooks are so much nicer that hardly anyone bothers. In general, authors are way too paranoid about people stealing their content. You can give away huge amounts of information as long as the product you're charging for delivers real value.
4) Have you had to request DMCA takedowns of ebooks or screencasts?
No.
5) Do you plan to provide guidance or best practices on screencast production?
Yes, if there's demand. I take it there might be. :-)
> Yes, if there's demand. I take it there might be. :-)
Customers of softcover.io may be more comfortable spending $150 on additional bundles if there was a well-defined baseline for screencast quality. The pitch to potential authors and customers is to emulate the sales/quality success of the Rails tutorial, so it's in the interest of all parties (platform, customers, authors) to see that baseline met or exceeded.
Edit: will the "powered by softcover" banner/footer be required for authors publishing on their own ___domain? If so, it would help all authors if the link was directed to a list of domains "powered by softcover", rather than a pitch for softcover itself.
The idea is that Softcover's customers are the authors, much like WordPress's customers are bloggers. Purchasers of an author's products should notice the Softcover name only incidentally. We want to help authors build their own brands.
will the "powered by softcover" banner/footer be required for authors publishing on their own ___domain?
Don't underestimate the assistance that your brand can give to the brands of your authors. While toolsets for e-publishing may not act as editorial gateways, they still exercise a form of affinity/aesthetic filtering that can provide a discovery signal to book buyers.
Even a quick browse of the leanpub site (cited elsewhere in this thread) showed a clear difference from softcover viewing aesthetics. Over time, you may discover a correlation between "authors who liked the softcover toolchain" and "readers who buy from more than one softcover author". That would last until word got out, then you would have a flood of new authors who were attracted primarily by revenue opportunity, not toolchain/distribution aesthetics.
BTW, it's quite informative whether someone chooses to publish on WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr, statically-generated html, or Facebook.
I can't speak for softcover or mhartl, but I made the jump to self publishing via leanpub for http://wewut . I haven't sold enough copies to make an impressive amount of money, but I've sold enough that I don't feel like writing the book was a complete waste of time.
1) I've found that supplementing material makes a massive difference in sales. However, when you see a larger percentage of the revenue, you definitely feel more inclined to create supplementing material
2) wewut isn't tied to fast moving software at all. I wouldn't consider that a necessity, though it does help ensure future editions
3) For some reason, self published materials seem to pop up less on piracy sites. Google a professionally published book and it's easy to find a free copy. The same hasn't been true for the leanpub books I've searched for.
4) Is it even worth the effort these days?
5) There's a bunch of stuff out there on this topic already - a quick search should get you plenty of pointers. Screencasts have been around awhile. Don't skimp on audio equipment has always been the #1 advice I've seen.
[1]: http://www.softcover.io/
[2]: http://www.railstutorial.org/, but watch http://news.railstutorial.org/ for an announcement of 3rd edition draft chapters, which I plan to start releasing shortly