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Comment by boyter | Hacker News Reader

Its quite amazing how much money you can make with self-published books. For example I wrote a book about Decoding CAPTCHA's. I have the top ranking post on most search engines for this which is the only marketing channel.

I collect about $35 a month from it without spending any additional time marketing. Not very much but such a small niche it really surprised me.

Oddly enough the main reason for writing the book was to deflect all the emails I used to get about the subject. Not only did it achieve this aim it supplies beer money for me every month.

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I work in digital marketing. There is a whole scene of guys that do nothing but create simple digitally published ebooks. They will research the market for the niche. Research the topic in depth (something like frying chicken can be deciphered and recipe and method variations can be collected in 20 hours) Then create content on the niche and sell it. Even a $3 ebook can make several thousand dollars a year.

How do they get traffic to it? I'd imagine the vast majority of time is spent on marketing and not on content creation.

I just checked then. Say you write a book with the title "Cooking with Buttermilk" and built a unique book page you are likely to rank on the first page pretty easily for the search "cooking with buttermilk book".

With a book you can always pull out excerpts for SEO value too.

I would image if you could churn reasonable content for a low price this might be a sustainable business model, assuming you can pick the right topics.

>buttermilk

>churn

I see what you did there.

I wonder how many hits HN will get because of these key words, and a few others here.

as always, the question is how to locate the niche...

A friend of mine does exactly this with self-help books (NLP, hypnosis, dating, how to quit smoking etc.). He makes in the low five figures a month with this business. He identifies niches, by now using his existing audience. For example, he once had a blog post on a subject that received surprisingly many views. So he hired a writer to write a book about it, and then marketed it through his channels. It's surprisingly lucrative.

As someone who actually likes books, this makes me sad. Leanpub and Gumrroad are already full of quite mediocre content, to the point that I avoid them altogether--which is a shame, since there are some serious self-published authors that would benefit from a good platform. These cheap ebooks (e-brochures?) also made their way into Amazon, which really annoys me.

> CAPTCHA's

You don't need the apostrophe to indicate a plural, even with acronyms (or backronyms). "CAPTCHAs" is fine. I wouldn't normally comment but it is the title of your book.

Being your own editor is hard. Cheers. I'll push an update with corrections.

>Its quite amazing how much money you can make with self-published books. (...) I collect about $35 a month from it

In what way does the first claim follow from the example?

It might be possible to make a lot of money from self-publishing books, but $35/month, whether with or without additional marketing, is hardly a proof for that.

If anything, it's a proof of loss, as the book took you time to write. If you value those hours at the minimal wage rate, it would take ages to recoup those costs...

I think you are missing my point which is that even very small niches can produce income even without marketing efforts. Small niche. Zero marketing effort. $35 seems pretty good to me for the effort spent.

If you'd like to continue earning from this and SEO is your only marketing, I would kindly suggest you diversify. That is having all your eggs in one basket that you have very little direct control over.

It's not really anything I'm worried about. Its not really worth putting any effort into as the whole thing is just set and forget. I would also imagine it would be very hard to topple the see value of the page that's driving sales, which for the amount of money we are talking about isn't worth it.

How long did it take to write?

The book itself took about 10 hours or so and was mostly just a collection of writings I already had and email responses.

I have spent more than 10 hours on a single online post multiple times.

I just checked it on Amazon, and there's not a whole lot of concrete information of what I will find in the book. I guess it is a niche indeed and people who are looking for it will know already. Maybe image algorithms?

If you had to take a picture of the most interesting / telling page of the book (to try to sell the rest of it) which page would it be? And do you mind doing it.

I actually get almost no sales through Amazon. Most come through either Leanpub followed by Gumroad.

http://www.boyter.org/decoding-captchas/

That's the link that generates 99% of sales. It gives you a fair idea of what is contained. Email me via my profile if you need more information.

That seems to be what I was asking for, thanks. Seems interesting.

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