Kevin Kelly’s got a post up on his site called 1,000 True Fans. I found this to be especially true when it was posted the same week that Nine Inch Nails released their first album without a major label.

Ghosts was released on Monday morning with a few different options for purchase. Options include free, $5, $10, $75 and $300. The $300 release includes all kinds of fancy pants stuff like raw tracks for remixing, four LPs of the album, a Blu-Ray high definition audio version, an autograph and some prints. There was a limited run of 2,500 of these and it sold out with 36 hours. This was a genius move of Trent Reznor’s part.

The album is complete, but the physical discs will not ship for another month at the minimum. The regular CDs packages start shipping beginning of April, the deluxe edition doesn’t ship until May and I can’t recall when the ultra-deluxe edition ships. With the pre-ordering (especially the ultra-deluxe edition), he’s covered the costs of pressing all the discs and made money back as well. He’s been forthcoming about numbers in the past (see Techdirt’s Dear Trent Reznor: Don’t Be Disheartened Yet) and I’m sure we’ll see some numbers from him this time around too.

Jeph from http://questionablecontent.net/ does something similar regarding the t-shirts he sells. All the shirts are available as pre-order only, which cuts the cost off making extras and storing extras completely.