[Ambassadors] Re: Picture Book....

[Ian Weller]

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 at gmail.com>                  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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