Last Monday, Amazon announced that Crime novelist John Locke (no relation to the John Locke from Lost) has become the first independent author to sell more than 1 million eBooks through the Kindle Direct Publishing program.
With Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), would be authors can self-publish their books on the Amazon Kindle Store. The program is free, fast, and very easy to use. Books self-published through KDP receive up to 70% royalty, which is much higher than the royalty offered by traditional book publishers.
Locke is fairly new to the eBook self-publishing game, but he picked up on the power of the business model pretty quick. Books that are listed for $2.99 to $9.99 give the author a 70% royalty rate. However, books that are outside of that price range get a royalty rate of 35%. The lowest price at which an author can list a Kindle eBook is 99 cents.
John Locke attributes much of his success to his 99 cents pricing model. Originally, he planned to use his 99 cent eBook as a lost leader but found they would sell 20 times more than a $2.99 eBook. The lost leader suddenly became the business model. Locke has self-published nine novels through the Kindle Store, including New York Times bestselling eBook Saving Rachel, all priced at 99 cents. On Monday, his eBook sales passed the one million mark.
Want to know how John Locke did this? Well, you can because Locke has written an eBook about it. How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months details the marketing system he created to sell more than 1,100,000 eBooks in five months, part time, without an agent, publicist, and at virtually no marketing expense. The book cost $4.99, which is more than his normal 99 cent eBooks but it’s still a damn good price and worth picking up.
The Affiliate Summit East 2011 happens August 21 to 23 in New York city and I have TEN Gold Passes, worth $549 each, to give away to ten lucky John Chow dot Com readers. The Gold Pass gives you admission to Affiliate Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, Keynotes, Sunday educational sessions; access to all recorded session videos; PowerPoint presentations; and Affiliate Summit Social Network.
To enter, all you have to do is explain in the comments why you should be awarded a Gold Pass to the Affiliate Summit East. The better your comment, the higher your chances of being a winner. Please only enter if you actually plan on going. If you are selected, you must attend. The pass is not transferable and cannot be resold because it will have your name on it. I am only giving away the passes. I am not paying for your travel or hotel. However, I should be hosting another Dot Com NY Pizza event that all winners can attend. I just need to find a sponsor for it first.
IMPORTANT – please note the following: You must notify the recipients that they cannot be transferred, and the pass codes become invalid in the event the conference sells out. Also, anybody registering for a complimentary pass who neither checks in at the conference or cancels will be ineligible for future complimentary passes.
The winners will be announce this Saturday, June 25 during Dot Com Pho. This should give you enough time to book your air and hotel if you need it. I know I have lots of readers in the big apple that want to go to the Affiliate Summit but can’t afford the cost of the pass. This is your chance to go! Good luck and enter now!
I like the wish all the fellow fathers out there a big Happy Father’s Day! Normally, I don’t keep track of holidays but then a reporter from Postmedia (Canada’s largest newspaper operator) contacted me about a story on dads spending less time with their kids because of professional pressures from the work life. She wanted to find out how I traded 14-hour workdays as a bricks-and mortar business-owner for two-hour workdays as an Internet entrepreneur.
The story was published in Friday’s Vancouver Sun and is now being syndicated across the Postmedia network of newspapers and websites. I have a noticed a spike in traffic since the story went live.
The interview and resulting article reminds me what is truly important in my life. The money the Internet makes me is great, but it’s the time freedom that I really cherish. Thanks to the power of the Dot Com Lifestyle, I’m able to spend my time on the things that truly matters.
It seemed like only yesterday when I made this video of Sally and I at the park.
This morning, I woke up to this custom card from Sally. I know that any other Father’s Day gifts I get is going to pale in comparison.
It’s Saturday and that means it’s time for another episode of Dot Com Pho. This time we have Sally Chow and Lexi Fung meeting for the first time in Seattle! You can tell the two really like each other.
In addition to Sally meeting Lexi, this episode of Dot Com Pho has some Dot Com Pho history, beer as dessert, Tapei humidity as it relates to a bowl of Pho, an unripe mango salad, and Sally cracking the whip! Anyone is welcome to join us for Dot Com Pho. Follow me on Twitter to find the time and location of the next one.
Dot Com Pho Vancouver – Dot Com Pho: Riot Damage Edition
In Vancouver, the crew talk about the riots that ensued after the Stanley Cup Finals and show off Samsung’s answer to the MacBook Air.
The Apple iPhone is the world’s number one smart phone and more and more people are using it to access the Internet. Because of its popularity, many big websites have created their own iPhone app so their readers can receive a much better user experience. You can get the John Chow dot Com iPhone app here.
Normally, creating an iPhone app is an expensive affair that requires hiring an iPhone developer and paying fees to Apple. Now, thanks to a new free service call Bloapp, any blogger can convert their blogs into a native iPhone app in less than five minutes.
Advantages of Bloapp
Besides being 100% free, Bloapp removes the following issues when creating your own iPhone app:
Signing up for Apple iOS developer program $99/year (review takes around 1 month)
Hiring iOS developer for your app
Hiring UI designer for your app
Developing the app (2-3 months)
Waiting for 1-2 weeks for apple to approve your app in iTunes
Creating an iPhone app for your blog takes less than five minutes. All you have to do is register for a free account, enter some information about your blog, upload a logo, decide on the color scheme and you’re done!
Once you’ve saved all your settings, your app is available instantly in the Apple Appstore via the bloapp app that serves as the reading platform for your app. Bloapp even generates a QR code for you to promote your application to your blog readers.
If you don’t have an iPhone app for your blog and don’t want to spend the money it takes to create an independent app, then Bloapp is a pretty awesome solution. An Android version is coming soon.
The Apple iPhone is the world’s number one smart phone and more and more people are using it to access the Internet. Because of its popularity, many big websites have created their own iPhone app so their readers can receive a much better user experience. You can get the John Chow dot Com iPhone app here.
Normally, creating an iPhone app is an expensive affair that requires hiring an iPhone developer and paying fees to Apple. Now, thanks to a new free service call Bloapp, any blogger can convert their blogs into a native iPhone app in less than five minutes.
Advantages of Bloapp
Besides being 100% free, Bloapp removes the following issues when creating your own iPhone app:
Signing up for Apple iOS developer program $99/year (review takes around 1 month)
Hiring iOS developer for your app
Hiring UI designer for your app
Developing the app (2-3 months)
Waiting for 1-2 weeks for apple to approve your app in iTunes
Creating an iPhone app for your blog takes less than five minutes. All you have to do is register for a free account, enter some information about your blog, upload a logo, decide on the color scheme and you’re done!
Once you’ve saved all your settings, your app is available instantly in the Apple Appstore via the bloapp app that serves as the reading platform for your app. Bloapp even generates a QR code for you to promote your application to your blog readers.
If you don’t have an iPhone app for your blog and don’t want to spend the money it takes to create an independent app, then Bloapp is a pretty awesome solution. An Android version is coming soon.
Tonight was game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals between the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins. Playing in Vancouver, fans had high hopes for their first ever Stanley Cup victory. However, like they’ve done so many times in the past, the Canucks let them down again by losing to the Bruins 4-0. Then a riot broke out. Right now, as I am writing this post, they’re still rioting on the street. There are cars on fire and looting all over downtown.
I’m not really shocked that the Canucks lost. They have a history of building up their fans’ hopes to a fever pitch and then slapping them down with a huge disappointment. I guess I really shouldn’t be shocked at the rioting either. After all, this happened 17 years ago when the Canucks lost to the Rangers in game 7. You think people would learn from history, but I guess they just repeat them.
I know I’m going to get comments that those rioters were not Canucks fans. I’m sorry, but they are Canucks fans. They wore the jerseys. They cheered on the team and they started a riot when the team lost. Sure, it may have been a small number of trouble makers but don’t go making excuses that they were not fans.
I was disappointed when the Canucks lost, but I’m more disappointed by the Vancouver Canucks fans. I can see why they’re considered the worst hockey fans in the league. They gave the best city is a world a huge black eye tonight. I guess it’s a good thing the Canucks don’t make it to the final too often. Once every 17 years is more than enough.
Many people have asked me what stat software I used to show my charts in my real life on page SEO case study post. The software is WordPress.com Stats and it’s one of the best stats plugin ever made for WordPress.
There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your blog visitors. A tool like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information. However, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a blogger. That’s why Automattic, the creators of WordPress, created its own WordPress.com Stats to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface. Best of all, it makes all that information available right in the WordPress dashboard. There’s no need to load another browser window or a piece of software to view your stats.
Installing this stats plugin is much like installing the Akismet anti-spam plugin. All you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. To get an API key for WordPress.com Stats, you need to sign up for a free WordPress.com account and WordPress will email you a key.
Once it’s running, WordPress.com Stats will begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave.
A small chart will appear in your admin bar if you are running WordPress 3.1 or later. Each line in the chart represents the traffic for the hour in relation to the previous hours. Clicking the chart will bring up the full WordPress.com Stats page.
Because all the processing and collection runs on WordPress.com servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use. WordPress.com stats report new visits typically within ten seconds.
HasOffers, a company that knows how to party, has just announced the development and beta application process of a new cookie-less technology enabling advertisers to see the true influence of multiple affiliate and publisher relationships on a single user. You can apply now to be among the first of a select group of advertisers, networks, and publishers with access to the Adtribution Beta, coming this summer.
“Everyone realizes buying habits are changing as users spend more time online, yet advertising platforms have stayed the same,” said John Marsland, User Acquisition at Zynga. “Each user decision is influenced by multiple publishers, and advertisers need the ability to compensate those publishers based on the part they played. That’s why I’m excited to see what HasOffers has come up with.”
Performance advertising, also referred to as affiliate marketing, has become an $8 billion industry in the U.S. alone, making it the fastest growing advertising channel. Yet the disparity between increasing Internet usage and online advertising budgets remains tremendous. Even though performance advertising has laid the sales foundations for companies like Amazon.com, Netflix, and even Groupon, it is still very limited by the tracking technology available to support it.
“We hear from people all the time – my affiliate program sucks,” said Lucas Brown, CEO of HasOffers. “Frankly I’m not surprised. That’s the real reason we entered into the performance advertising space, because we believe technology needs to fill a gap. Advertisers have no transparency, and they are often double and triple paying for acquisitions while some of the most valuable publishers are losing out big on commissions. This makes it really difficult foradvertisers to increase their online advertising budgets and allow the industry to grow. We’ve been working on a new way to measure influence on buying decisions and can’t wait to unveil the beta this summer.”
To support long-term growth in performance-based, online advertising, HasOffers is currently in production on a second edition that targets the need for more reliable, more transparent tracking technology to support advertisers, networks, and publishers in a quickly changing Internet landscape.
Here’s an update on my real life SEO case study. When I made the video case study on Sunday, the American Chopper: Senior vs. Junior post had received 1,900 views, which I thought was great for a Sunday. However, I didn’t know that Discovery Channel was about to start an American Chopper marathon.
The Sunday marathon generated a ton of searches for the show. The top nine search terms were all American Chopper related and my normal number one term, John Chow, was shoved to tenth place! I ended Sunday with 6,134 views to the Senior vs. Junior post.
Since I wrote the American Chopper post, it has been viewed 19,670 time in five days, with over 10K views coming on Sunday and Monday because of the marathon. The extra traffic has resulted in a 20% increase in newsletter sign ups. If these subscribers give me the same ROI as normal subscribers, then this will do down as the most profitable SEO post ever.
John Locke attributes much of his success to his 99 cents pricing model. Originally, he planned to use his 99 cent eBook as a lost leader but found they would sell 20 times more than a $2.99 eBook. The lost leader suddenly became the business model. Locke has self-published nine novels through the Kindle Store, including New York Times bestselling eBook Saving Rachel, all priced at 99 cents. On Monday, his eBook sales passed the one million mark.
Once you’ve saved all your settings, your app is available instantly in the Apple Appstore via the 
