Selling sample libs (i.e. ones you made yourself)

[Mattias Westlund]

I'm going to throw this question out here and see where it goes.

I have a couple of "private" sample libraries, stuff that I recorded myself, originally with the intention of making them free and open and sharing them publicly. But a lot of time went into recording and editing them, so much in fact that I ended up deciding that no, I'm not going to just give these away.

To be clear, both libs are of the sfx variety so no multisampled instruments or anything like that. More like a ton of seriously creepy atmospheric sound effects, all in high quality. For a sound designer or a composer doing horror film/game scores, I think they could be a small gold mine.

Sadly I'm lousy entrepreneur so I've never gotten farther than thinking "I could probably sell these samples for a few bucks". So they've been sitting on my hard drive for several years now. I've used them in my own music from time to time, but that's about it.

I'm basically stuck on these two questions:

1. How much can you reasonably ask for raw sfx samples (i.e. trimmed and normalized but not mapped as playable Kontakt instruments or whatever)?

2. How do you go about selling your stuff in case you don't have enough of it to warrant setting up and managing a web shop on your personal site?

I would be very grateful for any input on this.

[Otto Halmén]

If these fall outside the realm of musical composition or virtual instrument, I'd look into different microstock sites like AudioJungle, Pond5, etc. There's a ton of them out there, and most of them let you keep about half of what people pay for your stuff. Some of these sites also have a set of licenses (and predetermined prices) for different production sizes, so that might be a good starting point to get a hang of what people pay for stuff.

[Paul Battersby]

(05-29-2016, 07:14 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: 2. How do you go about selling your stuff in case you don't have enough of it to warrant setting up and managing a web shop on your personal site?

Setting up a web shop might not be as difficult as you think. You are already running Wordpress for your personal web site. That means you can add the free WooCommerce plugin to enable to you to sell digital downloads from your existing site. Configure WooCommerce to work with a PayPal account so that your customers can pay with a few different credit cards and you're all set. Even though it's PayPal, your customers do not need a PayPal account.

[Mattias Westlund]

(06-01-2016, 05:31 PM)pbattersby Wrote: Setting up a web shop might not be as difficult as you think. You are already running Wordpress for your personal web site. That means you can add the free WooCommerce plugin to enable to you to sell digital downloads from your existing site. Configure WooCommerce to work with a PayPal account so that your customers can pay with a few different credit cards and you're all set. Even though it's PayPal, your customers do not need a PayPal account.

Thanks Paul, I didn't know it was that simple. That surely is something to think about.

[Samulis]

The easier you want it, the less profit you will get//the more fees you will encounter. I have spent a lot of time finding the most 'economical' way to set things up.

The solution I use was modelled after Embertone (I don't know if they still do this, but it's how they did things about 2-3 years back)-
Customers buy things via Cartloom -> payment processing by Stripe OR Paypal -> product delivered via Amazon S3

Cartloom is the best ecommerce platform imho, because it charges no fees per transaction, just a $10 monthly rate (just a tad over Netflix!). Pretty much everything else I found charges per-transaction fees around the standard rate of $0.30 + 2.9%. All you do to set it up is add their javascript snippet and add-to-cart snippet to each page and it handles the rest.
Stripe is popular for credit card processing and is super easy to integrate with cartloom, and can deliver directly into your bank account, or, into paypal (note that you will be hit with a fee again with paypal). Customers buy more valuable products with stripe than they do with paypal.
Paypal is, well, paypal. About 70% of our business is via paypal. People love it, people hate it, but everyone uses it because it's safe and reliable.
Amazon S3 charges only for use. I hear you have unlimited bandwidth on your hosting. If you can spare the storage space, use it, don't bother with S3 or other hosting options.

Essentially with this system, each transaction only loses at most $0.30 + 2.9% (although paypal charges approximately an extra 1% for currency conversions).

Here's the deal... if you were to have a particularly messy payment system, say:
Ecommerce system ($0.30 + 2.9% fee) + Credit card Processor ($0.30 + 2.9%) -> Paypal Account ($0.30 + 2.9%) ... you would pay over 2.5x the fee that you would above.

Here's another option:
Bandcamp (15% fee) + Paypal ($0.30 + 2.9%) - ouch! With a $10 or $20 pack on the market, that could add up quickly.

Now, if you were to go and sell it via a reseller/botique/store out there, do not expect more than 50% commission! That's a huge hit, and in my opinion, more or less highway robbery (but, most of those places will cover hosting, distribution, ecommerce, and even advertising, so I guess it is a bit of a trade-off). Sampleism is a good place to start; the guy who runs it is really nice and it is open to both Kontakt instruments and just sound packs.

[sig-ex]

Hi,

I recently started something similar and found that Gumroad is quite noob friendly and just takes 5% + 0.25 cents per sale. However, it is a site for selling almost anything (legal), so you have to depend on your own site/publicity for visibility.

Sampleism costs more but has better targeted traffic.

Cheers