Ebook research.
 

Hi Again everyone,

I was looking at some more mainstream revenue and I see people have mentioned ebooks. My personal experience is that I have bought a lot of them. Some quite expensive but good, some cheap and ok. A lot of the self published ebooks are however complete dross (Not all, just a fair portion!)

Occasionally I get asked to write ebooks for various people about subjects I don't really care about. I do like writing and an ebook may be an extra non-adult string to the bow. It is just something extra to add to my current business because although writing is providing me with good money it just doesn't scale. It tends to be:

1) write up content. 2) Provide to customer. 3) Get paid (60 days later)

Yes, some people may be tempted to tweak and resell the content but when you are being paid $1000 for a days work it isn't even worth the potential agro as well as being bad form all round when customers pay for unique and interesting.

So to the meat of my question:

I want to understand the ebook market from a content producers standpoint.

1) Is there any way to gauge popularity or see how well other books in same niche do? I focus more on technical and nerdy content so that is my market that I know :)
2) How do you decide on a price per book. For example I bought a book on Nuclear accidents and it cost me about $20 and was by someone I had never heard of in the field. Sure it could have been better in some respects but it was a fair price for a 600 page whopper.
3) Does size matter (Yes yes, lets get the jokes over with!). Personally I would love to have a book that taught me the fundamental concepts of something rather than 200 pages of waffle. However I am not sure if I am in the minority on this one lol. What do you fellow mainstreamers think ?