Having a great time with the book, sorry if I came off as whining.
A few notes. A high % of the KS money went into rewards (books printed averaged $20 shipped).
I did make 3x though Amazon, but if I had gone through gumroad, I would have done double the revenue.
Biggest tl;dr complaint is that as an avid reader of about a book a week I had no idea that authors paid both 30% of the total price plus the delivery fee. The other main competitors don't do this... just found it odd and wrote about it.
"I did make 3x though Amazon, but if I had gone through gumroad, I would have done double the revenue."
Not nearly as many people know about Gumroad or use it, so for any given marketplace, some percentage of the buyers in that marketplace are potential customers but they are stubbornly proportional. If Gumroad has 10% of the customers that Amazon has and you get 2x the revenue per book sold, you will only see an increase proportional to 10% of the sales at Amazon. As a worked example
219 Amazon customers $5.10 per book -> $1117 in revenue
22 Gumroad customers $9.25 per book -> $209 in revenue
It's the area under the curve that is important. In a traditional publishing arrangement you would give a bigger 'discount' to a big seller (say Barnes and Noble) vs a boutique seller like 'World Books'. One has 10,000 stores, the other 4 stores. Because while you get less per book, you sell more books and make more overall (price * volume, not just price).
So I seriously doubt you would even have matched the Amazon revenue, if you had gone through Gumroad and precluded Amazon.
So when you look at it you need to sum all of the sales, and all of the margins, and you will get your 'average selling price' or ASP. This will help you understand how much you can profitably 'invest' in putting together a book. As your reputation grows, if you garner an audience, then you can 'count' on more total revenue per book and take some of the guesswork out of the planning.
The other part of the equation is time, since it takes a while for people to get the book and recommend it, there can be several months of 'growth' before you really know what the market for your book is.
I totally understand that you were surprised had the additional charges that Amazon specified but didn't make clear (and that Apple does a better job of this I think is a good thing since they are the competition). Unfortunately PDF is a horrible book format as it pre-computes for a given render and that means that it looks like crap on readers that don't fit the mold. Epub is much better, as is mobi. For what its worth the last time I was looking through the Writers Guide (one of my daughters is looking to creative writing as a career) selling 1500 travel books if you weren't Michelen or Fodor's was a 'big' title, so selling 300 pretty much right off the bat is huge. I wish you great success!
But if you had gone through gumroad, you wouldn't have done the same volume. If they renamed the "delivery fee" as "hosting and market placement" would you feel okay about it?
from my personal experience I have never used Gumroad before, so if it was $9.95 from Amazon and $9.95 from Gumroad then i would have bought from Amazon.
I think you may have made the same profit but your readership would have been much lower if you hadn't used Amazon, which is an important consideration if you want extra exposure.
A few notes. A high % of the KS money went into rewards (books printed averaged $20 shipped).
I did make 3x though Amazon, but if I had gone through gumroad, I would have done double the revenue.
Biggest tl;dr complaint is that as an avid reader of about a book a week I had no idea that authors paid both 30% of the total price plus the delivery fee. The other main competitors don't do this... just found it odd and wrote about it.