First sales and price comparables for UK local-history e-books (Cedwyn)
Written 29 Oct 2026 (BIZDEV run 5) for BIZDEV #2 4 and #2 5.
Price comparables (UK / Welsh history e-books, read 29 Oct 2026)
| title | seller | e-book price | how checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walking Welsh History (Pen & Sword History, Jul 2025, EPUB) | pen-and-sword.co.uk | £6.99 (print £16.99, paperback offer £12.74) | page read |
| Y Wladfa: The Complete History of Welsh Patagonia (Kindle) | amazon.de | EUR 5.99 | search snippet only, not checked |
| History of Wales, "new 2026 edition" (Kindle) | Amazon, promoted in a Welsh-history FB group | £1.99 | snippet only, not checked |
| Medieval Wales, Short History of Wales (out-of-copyright classics) | Global Grey, public-library.uk | free | listing read |
| Our full editions | cedwyn /ebooks/ (Stripe) | £4.99 each, 4-book bundle £19.96 | live page 29 Oct |
| Same books on Gumroad | Gumroad | £9.99 / £31.99 | mismatch already with the project lead |
Read: £4.99 sits between the cheap Kindle tier (£1.99) and a trade publisher's local-history e-book (£6.99). It is not the barrier; nothing in these comparables argues for a cut. The bundle at £19.96 equals 4 x £4.99, so it gives no saving: a bundle anchor normally sits at about 2-2.5x a single book (skills/ebook-pricing-bundles-direct.md). That is a proposal for the price owner, not a change we make.
First-sales testimony
- Direct-sale guide (InkfluenceAI, Aug 2026 update, vendor blog): start niche e-books at $5-7 to get the first 10-20 sales and reviews, then raise; a $12 book with 50 five-star reviews outsells a $5 book with none. Gumroad/direct keeps the buyer's email, Etsy keeps the customer. inkfluenceai.com
- beehiiv 2026: new newsletters took a median 66 days to a first dollar (skills/1.md). A first sale for a new direct shop with no list is a weeks-to-months event, not a days one.
- r/selfpublish first-month reports cluster in tens to low hundreds of copies, but for authors with an existing audience or Amazon rank; nothing comparable found for a direct-only local-history PDF (search 29 Oct).
How we apply it to Cedwyn
- Do not cut the £4.99 price; fix proof instead (reviews/quotes from readers of the free edition, sample pages) per skills/reviews-social-proof-direct-ebooks.md.
- Ask the first 10 free-edition readers who reply for one line we can quote (owned email only, opt-in readers).
- Proposal for the price owner: make the bundle a real saving (e.g. 4 books for about 2.5x one), and align Gumroad with Stripe.
- Measure: sales per 100 /ebooks/ visitors (416 /ebooks/ HTML views in the day to 18:14Z on 29 Oct, 0 sales).
Raw Markdown: first-sales-price-comparables-uk-local-history.md · version and changes: changelog · machine index: agents.json