If you can answer YES to any of these statements you should read this interview with Nuubuu.com founder Ameya Bhatawdekar. Nuubuu allows anyone to sell a digital product without having to store any files, setup a store or apply for a credit card merchant account.
- You have a lot of contacts or regularly meet new people.
- You want to charge ANY price you like—more than 9.99 or less than $2.99 for your book AND keep at least 70% of the sale price.
- You don’t want or need to use Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble or other online stores to sell your eBook.
- You have other digital products besides eBooks to sell, like music.
Why give 30% or more of your profit away if you can sell your eBooks direct to your fans for only a small transaction fee? Granted, selling direct may not be for everyone but for those authors who have a following and wish to maximize revenues it is something worth looking into.
David Wogahn: How did you come up with the idea for nuubuu.com?
Ameya Bhatawdekar: My father started publishing e-books sometime ago. He has a blog where he announces his new e-books. I was helping him sort out some issues on his blog site when I started combing through the sales data. I noticed that the sales distribution curve for his e-books followed a pattern where the sales would spike immediately after the book announcement on his blog and then tail off; the sales would spike again when he mentioned the same book in a later blog post. There was some correlation between the blog posts mentioning his book and the sales of his book – and it was reasonable to conclude that his marketing efforts were responsible for a non trivial percentage of his book sales. And, he was paying a significant amount of the revenue from these sales as transaction fees to the big digital-goods marketplaces.
Having an additional channel, that enabled him to retain a larger share of the sale revenues – especially in those cases where he was driving the traffic via his own marketing, made sense. But the prospect of developing and setting up a solid, secure e-commerce feature on his blog was daunting.
This was the germination of an idea for a solution that would make it easy for content creators (like my father) to sell digital creations on their own while retaining a much larger share of the revenues.
DW: Tell me a little bit about nuubuu.com. How does it work? And, how does it differ from setting up a store?
AB: Setting up your own store can be a formidable task. The time and investment for building an online store with the appropriate security and reliability, the e-commerce features, and not to mention the ongoing maintenance, is considerable. For many self-published authors, building an online store to sell their e-books is just not a viable options.
nuubuu.com is a simple way to sell your digital creations online, like eBooks, music, movies, stock photos – anything that can be saved as a file. Getting started on nuubuu.com is easy. Create your account, upload the eBook file to nuubuu.com and share a short URL via your blog/facebook/twitter/online forums/ etc.
Your customers can purchase your eBook via a simple, elegant and secure web page (here’s an example). Your customers can pay for the purchase using their credit card or via PayPal. The eBook will be delivered to them via a secure, expiring link.
nuubuu.com charges a 5%+25 cent transaction fee. There are no other fees – no subscription fees, no storage fees, no bandwidth fees.
nuubuu.com will payout the sale proceeds at the end of the month.
DW: What does nuubuu mean?
AB: I wanted an easy to remember, fun name for the website. Another requirement was that a corresponding “short url” should be available. So a coffee fueled search yielded “nuubuu.com”, a two syllable, simple and a fun name. And, I was lucky to get “nbuu.co” as well – a short URL that would let users share links to their eBooks via Twitter.
DW: Any other considerations for selling direct?
AB: This isn’t our requirement but I know that Amazon and maybe other online stores regularly search websites to make sure authors and publishers are not selling their books at a lower price than they have it listed on Amazon. If you sell your eBook on your site for the same price as you sell in other online stores you won’t have a problem.
DRM is another topic that some authors have strong feelings about. No one except Amazon can copy protect Kindle eBook files (the author is who decides this, not Amazon). The other stores also add copy protection if the author wants it. Right now there is a big debate about this topic but it is up to the author to decide. nuubuu does not add copy protection to your files.
