How I Made $6K With My eBook | Hacker News Reader

How I Made $6K With My eBook

macournoyer.com

160 pointsxutopia69 comments

Your approach to the whole thing was very much affiliate/internet marketing oriented: list building via PPC, squeeze page, product sold through ClickBank, generous kickbacks to affiliates, high price for low page count, artificial urgency created through a limited time offer, and so on.

Here is what I admire:

* You managed to do all this without pissing off geeks, who are very sensitive to bullshit and tend to have an holier than thou attitude towards these techniques.

* I didn't buy the book, but I suspect it's rather high quality, compared to most junk sold on ClickBank.

* Your landing/squeeze page is surprisingly classy. It manages to accomplish a good CRT, despite the lack of autoplaying audio/video, exit popups, and the typical centered column look.

In short, good job.

Thx a lot! I'm also surprised by the low quality of most products on ClickBank & other sites. That's why I'm talking openly about it, I'm sure most geeks here could do way better then everything on those sites.

In the 'Creating Passionate Users' sense, you made something that helps your audience be awesome - which is the best possible thing to create. Communicating that properly helps, but the product is king.

PS. I'm interested in buying your book now too, because I believe it will personally make me awesome.

The landing page is really sweet. What do your adwords ads look like?

> “ The book I want to read. ”

— Matz, creator of the Ruby language

The amazing review / testimonial the author probably was able to ask for because he's credible and an active member of the Ruby ecosystem (tinyrb).

Another lesson on the value of real working relationships.

Of course, it also implies that Matz did NOT read the book... :-/

Right. Says nothing about the quality of the book.

Also, I'd like to read the book, but not for the price the author is asking.

I'm impressed that one can sell an e-book for near $1/page, though. I realize that, in the end, it's about value delivered, not page count, but still.

It tells me that people are not as price sensitive to some things as I thought.

That's why it's important to sell more than just an ebook. I included 2 full languages you can use in OSS, http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ started from the Ruby language included in the package. + screencast and more. Also the book is amazingly good :p

Good points. :)

And a better deal.

Taking advantage of "This is a not a dead tree" is sorely lacking in the E-books I see. Even the page layouts of E-books assume you're using some shaped-like-a-page viewer, rather than allowing for a flexible layout that works well across different screens and devices.

It was a single tweet (http://twitter.com/yukihiro_matz/status/3875573878). A more direct translation is "book I want".

I'm glad the site links to the source, though. I like easy to verify testimonials.

Indeed I thought it was a joke until I read the testimonial.

There has got be a better way to think about this market that just selling eBooks. It's premium information conveyance, right? Like a stock tip sheet?

My brother is in a marketplace that depends heavily on advertising to get customers. He spends several hundred a year, just on newsletters and eBooks that tell him how to best utilize his advertising budget, which seems to be over a thousand per month.

he pays for newsletters? Can you share which ones?

I self-published a PHP programming book (http://www.littlehart.net/book) and I've sold about the same number of copies as he has (~200 between PDF and LuLu) but (a) I didn't charge as much as he did and (b) didn't hook up with any affiliate marketing / promotion until October of 2009. Sold about 150 copies (PDF + Lulu) before I found my current publisher.

Why have you left Lulu?

I'm using LuLu for print-on-demand copies of the book, just like I did before. I went with someone else to help with PDF sales.

Cool tips. I especially like the part about testing the market before actually doing the work. Clever.

That's a case from Tim Farris book ( at least the first time I read about it)

Yes exactly! It works for everything you want to sell online.

The Mahalo theory, only with substance to back it up.

No, common sense!

Do you worry about people pirating your eBook, or worse yet - infringing your copyright by taking the information in the eBook, and publishing it as their own? It seems that by going with a publishing agency, one would have a lot more legal protection in that regard?

No I'm not worried. I'm just trusting people buying the book like they are trusting me by buying it. I hate penalizing everyone for what some people might do.

Also, it's a pretty small niche and it got good exposure when it came out. I think it would be hard to copy and sell it to the same market again.

How much time did it actually take you to write the book?

Writing took about 2 months IIRC. But the learning took >1 year :p

I would be really interested to hear about the learning process. Was there something in particular that you read that was especially helpful? Did you buy other e-books to learn how to write and market e-books?

It started as an experiment to apply what is described in the 4 Hour Work Week book, Muse Project chapter. I've learned about marketing and ebook publishing mostly by looking at how others did it. http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/ came out a little bit before mine so I was inspired by it a little.

2 months of work for $6000? While making money probably wasn't the only reason for doing it, isn't that a pretty bad payoff? I know you will keep making sales, but (especially for technical writing) it will have a short shelf life...

The kind of technical books that have short lives are ones about specific products/versions. This is a book about creating programming languages by the sounds of it.

Other books in this field are still available at my local mass market bookstore after 15-20, even 30 years in print.

Look at TAOCP how old is that now? Like 40 years?

It took him 2 months but we don't know how many hours per day. Also this was the first book he wrote, maybe with the next one he'll make 6000 in one week. You can't expect to win big the first time.

If it's a good book, maybe he can revise and update it, add more chapters, and make a 2nd edition (with a new marketing campaign behind it).

Of course I was not working full time on this. Most publishers give an advance of $6K when writing a full book, which can take a year or so. Nice article about this: http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/

No. That's a pretty good payoff.

How do you feel about ClickBank? One of my weekend projects is a little site that'll make selling digital goods online really simple, targeted at a non-technical audience. Obviously, you are technical, but how'd you feel about the various sites that are out there? Did you try other services before ClickBank?

ClickBank is ok, a little better the e-junkie, but e-junkie has digital delivery built-in, but still... we're very far from the nice UIs we usually take for granted in our community. My dream setup would be Shopify + http://www.fetchapp.com/ but this is quite expensive for my low volume.

Interesting; I wonder if I've never heard of Fetch because I'm not really involved in this kind of business.

If you have any thoughts you'd like to share on what sucks about your experiences with any of this stuff, I'd love to get an email and pick your brain.

I wonder how many more sales he will get for it appearing on hn?

I've seen this book from an HN link a few months ago, so he already got one boost. This will probably bump his sales nicely again though.

5 so fare fyi.

How I made 6k with my eBook How I Made 6k With My eBook

I'd love some more details: 1. How did you come up with this as a topic for an eBook?

2. Is this your area of expertise, or did you see a niche market?

3. What are some specifics on your AdWords campaign?

4. Looks like you have a strong online presence. Do you think that helped sell your book or was it completely irrelevant to its success?

1. I've been interested in language and VMs about 1 year ago, built http://code.macournoyer.com/tinyrb/ and a couple other languages.

2. No, it all started w/ a passion for languages. I had the idea to write a book after reading 4 Hour Work Week

3. What do you want to know exactly? I used the keywords "create programming language" iirc

4. Yes, I think it helped a lot. The only "marketing" I've done is on Twitter and my blog (also recently on my site http://refactormycode.com). I was surprised by the success, but I'm now convinced that OSS can pay in a way or another.

I am impressed with the fact that he made $6k. A few years ago, I took a writing class that was taught by a published author. At the time, she had 4 books published, all Sci-Fi, by a New York publisher. She told the class that she got an advance of $5k for her first book. When that sold well enough to cover costs for the publisher, she started receiving royalties. At the time, she had gotten about another $5k. So for about 1 years worth of work and over 5 years time, she made about $10k.

I know fiction is a different market than programming, but just the number comparison is interesting.

yeah. uh, so far I've made less than that on the book of xen[1] and the publisher has said that it is selling 'surprisingly well' - he (my publisher) warned me going in that writing technical books doesn't pay as well as most things a qualified person can do.

But then, I get a real kick when I walk into Fry's and see my book.

[1]http://nostarch.com/xen.htm

I dream of being a published author one day and walking into a book store and secretly signing my books :)

I have heard that technical books don't sell well, but then again, this author is not very well known and her books don't sell well either. She said that every agent and publisher takes on new authors hoping they become the next William Gibson (or other huge name). Most authors barely survive off of writing.

I co-wrote a book ('Web-Graphics for Non Designers') and later tracked it down in a Borders/similar store in London and got my photo taken with it there. Certainly a novel experience for anyone who's not a f/t author, but not so exciting that I'd be dreaming about it! I was writing to a very difficult deadline, fried my brain in the process and it was hardly lucrative.

From my experience, I'd be hard-pressed to be convinced to do it again. I got a few thousand as an advance for writing three of the books ten chapters and it involved research, a plan, fleshing out the content, providing supplementary assets and then a couple of rounds of editing. I've done better out of non-spammy MFA sites in terms of return on time invested.

I've heard ppl selling a lot more then I did in a lot less time. Self-publishing is probably less glamourous, but surely more profitable.

nice landing page! it makes me want to create my own language and i don't even have enough quality time with the ones i already know!

Any reviews of his actual ebook?

http://createyourproglang.com/

http://www.rubyinside.com/how-to-create-your-own-programming...

Man, if it's tough to get programmers to buy a set of custom controls or developer tools, it must be ten times more difficult to get them to buy an eBook. I'll admit, the site does portrait credibility.

I thought that too, but I think the difference is that a developer could look at a program and say, "hey, I could build that" but with a book they might not see it the same way.

No way, I buy lots of eBooks. I consider them a cheap education, especially with some of those great $10 deals that some publishers have for modern titles (e.g. friends of ED, Manning).

FWIW, review of this eBook in HN earlier

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813133

Edit: In the comments, you can actually see the author asking advice to improve the copy of the landing page :)

Did you consider using DRM or is it just a freely distributable PDF?

How did you choose the price point?

Based on other similar package/eBooks around at that time and the price it cost me to run AdWords for 1 day. The initial market research w/ AdWords can also help choosing a price. According to my tests, I guessed I could sell one book per day w/ ads, which cost ~50$/day. I thought $50 was too much, so cut it back to $40.

Thanks for sharing! One of your questions was about laying out the ebook.

For my own, I started with InDesign but found it too painful to use (I only used it for the cover). I used LaTex (since I had some math equations) but the benefit is that it's all plaintext and easy to modify with quick scripts. It also gives you really nice typography. Again, this is probably most useful if you end up having math equations inside :).

Aww yes I need to learn LaTex :/

Yeah unfortunately there's a steep learning curve, but worth it for anything math-related.

Here's a sample chapter laid out with LaTeX: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://betterexplained.com...

The #1 rule is to not use the default styles unless you want your book to look like a master's thesis.

Quick, Someone write an E-book on LaTex ;)

Interesting set of ideas, thanks for the link! I hadn't actually heard of the book before, but I'm intrigued. Maybe they should include a last step of "post about book in popular geek hangouts". I'd also be curious how many sales were generated after the blog post, if they'd consider revealing that data.

Also, "Help Me Promote My Book And Get 50% on Each Sale"

Now THAT'S a good way to sell a book. Hooray pyramid schemes!

That's not a pyramid scheme.

Ah, my mistake, not pyramid scheme. Just pyramid sales (if nested within itself).

Thanks for sharing.

How do you like e-junkie? What other alternatives did you consider?

e-junkie is OK, but the UI is horrible, it's all in flash. I went w/ e-junkie at 1st because of the coupon code that gave me 120 days for free & because they handle all the digital delivery logic like link expiry. I'm now w/ ClickBank as it seems to be more popular w/ affiliate marketers, only costs an upfront $50 & can accept multiple methods of payment.

do you use any other marketing tools/techniques other than clickbank?

1. Who did the design and how much did it cost?

2. Can you show me your landing page for the initial adwords exploration campaign? How much was your CPC? How much did you bid? What was your quality score? (Thank you SO much)

1. I did everything myself, except reviewing

2. Sorry the old page is gone, it was a very crappy 2 colors page w/ a box in the middle w/ bullet points. My idea was, if I get decent CR on this, I'm guaranteed to sell some. I don't remember the CPC and the bid, but I spent 50$/day for 2 days on just a few keywords (about 10 iirc).

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