Hey, thanks. It really wasn't difficult at all to get it into the system -- anyone who has anything digital to sell can do it. First you've got to set up an account with Wave, for a fee of $25.00 a year. Then it's just a matter of creating an HTML file that you want to sell (in my case HTML, for others it would be images or zips or whatever), uploading it to Wave's server, which encrypts it as an SMO file, then downloading it back to my server. After that, whenever someone clicks on the link, they're referred to Wave's server to pay for the purchase (or set up a Wave account). Then the file is decrypted for them and they own it.
Now about the cut that Wave takes. For me, that's the one drawback which I meant to mention in my earlier post. For small transactions like these (under $3.00), Wave takes a hefty 50%. The percentage goes down as the price increases however (you can find a table listing the percentages on the Great Stuff Network information page). The way payment works is that Wave collects payments from anyone who buys products through their system, then at the end of the month they take their cut and send you a check. Pretty simple. I guess when I first thought about it, fifty percent seemed excessive. But then I got to thinking about the royalties you get when you publish a book in the traditional manner -- much less than fifty percent, I assure you. Of course, you don't get any upfront payments when you self-publish like this.
Now all I've got to do now is go to work and start doing some marketing. I'd like to be the first big web publishing success story. Anyway, the system really does work very easily. Anyone who wants to can sell their electronic stuff over the web. It's pretty fun. |
