Excellent suggestion!
Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
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
--
Andrew Pitonyak
My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
My Book: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/oome.htm
Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
See Also: http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/index.html
