Erich Christian wrote:
Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
I look at this the other way around. What's a reasonable markup?
How much money are we likely to raise? What can we do with that
amount of money?
... once there is some to talk about, right?
As for what to do with the money, let's all talk about it on the
list. I definitely want to talk about it. It's OOoAuthors' money,
not mine! I have some ideas, but none of them are fixed, and I
want to hear from some other people before I throw out my own ideas.
for quite new members of the community (like me ;-) it could be useful
to read a few ideas here, to learn what's possible at all...
It may be some time before there are any "profits" to spend,
because there are some expenses to cover first. I'll explain.
At the moment the books are being sold using Lulu's free service.
This means they do not have an ISBN. Anyone can put links to the
Lulu store on other websites, or in email signatures, or in any
other form of advertising, and anyone can resell the books
through other online stores -- any place that does not care that
the books don't have an ISBN. But we cannot get them listed at,
for example, Amazon.com, without an ISBN.
The ISBN service cost money... around US$150 per book, if I
recall correctly. I think we want to get listed on Amazon.com and
other big online stores, because this dramatically increases the
chance that people will learn about the books -- and it's good
for OpenOffice.org too. My idea is that the first $150 raised
from sales should be spent on Lulu's ISBN service for the Getting
Started book, and the second $150 on an ISBN for the Writer
Guide. The next $150 should be saved to buy the ISBN service for
the next book to be published in print, and so on until all 7
books in the set are in print and on Amazon. That's US$1,050,
which respresents approx. 260 books sold, before we even get to
the "profit" stage.
Having said that, it's not too soon to start talking about other
ways of spending the money. (I'm sure we all hope to sell many,
many more than 260 books! And who knows, this could happen quite
quickly, esp. if everyone publicises them widely.) Thank you to
Daniel for offering some suggestions, all of which I think sound
good. Sponsoring OOoCon2006 appeals to me as a way of directly
feeding any profits back into the OOo community. Another
possibility is to donate profits to TeamOOo (the official place
for donations to OOo). I also especially like Daniel's suggestion
of giving printed copies of the books to schools, along with OOo
CDs. We could also donate books and CDs to anyone running booths
at shows. Those books and CDs could be sold at the booth to help
cover some of the costs of the booth -- another way of spreading
the word about OOo. All of these suggestions benefit OOo more
than OOoAuthors, so to my mind they are very legitimate uses of
the profits... when we have some.
Cheers, Jean
