Sublime

When publishers invented the agency model of e-book pricing (discussed above and in Chapter 5), they put down a marker, which was that they wanted to get 70 percent of what the consumer spent on e-books. Amazon took the same number as their new royalty basis for self-published authors. Upload your e-book to them, follow certain pricing and other gu

see “1,000 True Fans” (here). By design, The 4-Hour Workweek benefited from the launch of Twitter at the SXSW conference circa 2007, where I gave a keynote presentation. I was deliberately aiming for tech early adopters. I’ve done this for each book launch since, embracing different technologies that are uncrowded but gaining influence quickly (e.g

Fast forward to the Renaissance, and Thomas More was taking quote whoredom to a new level, asking his friend Erasmus to ensure that his book Utopia ‘be handsomely set off with the highest of recommendations, if possible, from several people, both intellectuals and distinguished statesmen’.

This is a critical point. There’s a huge data set proving that digital books are a price-sensitive market, and that maximum revenues are achieved at a price point between $.99 and $4.99. So the question is: why aren’t publishers pricing digital books to maximize digital profits?

Read Jeff Bezos’s three-page letter he wrote to shareholders in 1997. In

Publishers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about doing audience research and understanding who the likely buyers of a book are and how to reach them with the right message at the right time. Social media and targeted advertising based on browsing and shopping habits take the middlemen—sales departments and brick-and-mortar stores—out of the