How I Made $70k Self-Publishing a Book about Ruby on Rails

This is great, but it's also a single anecdote. Clearly there are people for whom it works out.

The real test is whether you, or someone using your identical methodology, can repeat it.

You're results are fairly atypical, but I think a lot of it heavily depends on the niche you publish under as well. I have friends that self publish romance books and they sell for ~$3-5. If they make 10k in a year they're happy. People see value in a $40 technical book over a typical novel.

A survey I saw recently had the median income for unagented authors at around $7k/yr for non-technical genres.

I think you really should qualify this for the sake of all of us amateur writers out there. I would've said "people severely, severely overestimate the amount you can make self-publishing."

Most of us don't have a book idea worth writing about or are really bad at writing, or both. It's also really hard for a lot of us to realize which group we're in.

You say "I raked in $TONS for a $40 non-fiction book that helps folks with business development" but I think the rest of us should recognize those details when we see your numbers. If I want to write a book about the subtle great things about unit tests, python, or the great American novel, I should tread with caution. My boring story will probably not make $TONS.

> very best authors they published would sell 10,000 books. Their cut was something like $2/book, they'd pull in $20k.

This is a more interesting part of your post, and worth highlighting. Self-publishing can net you a LOT more than working with a publisher. But for sure you've got to start with an idea that people think is worth buying.

I intentionally didn't want to keep the price high, hence the low % of paid purchases, plus the book is FOSS.

That said, I totally agree that self publishing is not held in high regard by most, even on HN I was told that "it's a guide" and not a book and when you mention it on you resume, the interviewer would expect a real book in a real store!

_If_ you hit the right niche, there is a lot of money in self publishing, that's for sure.

I agree completely if we're talking about self-publishing technical books. For fiction, my impression is that it's a whole other ballgame.

But, yes, I've been completely blown away too by how well my self-published book did. It really was a life changing experience.

ftfy

People enamored with the literary arts often don't have a marketable skill that would allow the freedom to pursue a book without an advance and outside capital/support. Good to see Kickstarter has helped change that.

I wrote and published on Leanpub, (https://leanpub.com/successfulunittest). My marketing was not good enough as I am not that good at it. I only managed to sell about 10 books. In my next book, I would build up the audience as mentioned in the linked article.

Congrats on the success now and in the future.

I'm considering self-publishing a fiction work that I'm working on as a hobby.

It would be nice to turn my passion into a source of income.

Just like with software, you can build the most amazing tool or product in the world. No one is going to buy it without marketing it.

Same with a book, it's all about the marketing.

And if you have any questions/concerns/feedback good or bad (you or anyone else reading this), I'm at sahil@gumroad.com.

Glad you're finding value in what we've built.

Part of the advantage of self-publishing is that you can be sophisticated in your product and not sell "just a book".

I released a book in May 2016 teaching PHP programmers how to refactor code with lots of loops and conditionals into collection pipelines.

So far it's made about $180,000 CAD.

~$30,000 of that came from the "just the book" tier, at $29-$39 (depending on if the customer bought at the discounted launch price)

~$75,000 came from a "book + screencasts" tier, at $59-$79

~$75,000 came from a book/screencasts/example application tier, at $135-$179

If I had only given people the option of the cheapest tier, I would've made less than half of what I made by adding additional tiers.

The absolute bulk of the value is all in the cheapest tier, in fact the screencasts are the same examples from the book + just two bonus examples, and the example application is a project I already had that happened to use a lot of the principles in the book.

You can take a look at the landing page here if you're interested: https://adamwathan.me/refactoring-to-collections/

I think this sort of success is pretty achievable, I just followed the strategy outlined by Nathan Barry in his "Authority" book: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/

Nobody is going to make a lot of money selling a $40 book through a traditional publisher. If you really want to produce content like this and be able to earn a living from it, you need to be a bit more strategic about it, which includes things like tiered pricing.

I don't think it's deceptive to call it a "book" just because the author put in the extra effort to give people the option to pay a premium price for some bonus material; that's the right way to self-publish a book if you actually want to earn a decent income from it.

I think they definitely could if they self-published, but not if they went through a traditional publisher.

The cut that a publisher takes is insane compared to the value they provide. For fiction, it may be worth it because they act as a quality control filter and send a signal to readers that the book is may be better than the sea of self-published novels out there.

For technical books, the market is totally different. It's not that crowded, and most readers will find the book through you, the author, and not through bookstores or the publisher's own marketing efforts. In fact, most technical publishers aren't even interested in you if you don't already have an audience.

A publisher might help you get on bookshelves (though you can do that while self-publishing too), but I haven't seen much evidence that they will otherwise significantly increase your sales. Given how big a slice of the pie they expect to take, you should be confident that they will do something like increase your sales by 8-9 times before they are earning their keep.

Publishers also help with the other production stuff: developmental editing, copy editing, design. I'm not convinced they are very helpful at the former—again you already need an audience and you are more clued in on what they audience wants than the publisher is. Copy editing you can just hire a freelancer to do and throw a relatively small fixed chunk of money at them for. Likewise for design.

If you decide to self-publish, you do have to do lots of grunt work yourself—managing mailing lists, dealing with freelancers, talking to foreign publishers for translations, etc. All of that is a drag, and there's value in outsourcing it.

The interesting question is whether you would be willing to pay a separate company something like 80% of your profits, forever in order for them to do that. Given that it amounts to writing a few emails and filling out some forms every now and then, that seems like a pretty steep price to me.

I had the same experience (started Rubying in late 2015). I had much more success with RubyMonk, Metaprogramming Ruby 2, and some other "Ruby for Perl hackers" blog posts and such.

I understand there are no clear-cut rules to go by, but even a generic "If you don't have 10k email list, 50% of PragProgs sales will most likely be higher" might helper writers understand when to get help.

Something you've left out is "correct pricing". I'm happy to pay $10 or even $15 without much thought for a technical book on a topic of interest. Once the price goes above $15, I put a lot more thought into the decision, and usually don't buy.

People are too quick to throw out "$50 for a book that helps you get your work done is nothing". That's true, but $50 is not pocket change, and my expectation is that most books I buy will provide either no value or a little value. In other words, be careful if you start doing calculations of book sales at $40. Sales of books that you think are priced at $50 are driven largely by discounted sales. (I have seen some numbers on this, but don't have the reference, sorry.)

But since I don't spend money advertising, and I'm going to write about what I'm going to write about regardless of 10k visitors or 70k, I don't see the value.

Also, programmers are privacy-sensitive. I think people like looking at their Ghostery icon on my site and seeing nothing is being blocked.

I've been having success playing with http://goaccess.io/ recently. Not doing much with it (partly as nobody is really visiting my site and there's not yet much real content up :)) but it seems good and doesn't require you to change what you're doing.

All I can give for advice is to build a snowball - start as small as possible, and work on it consistently. Eventually the success will come.

You should save that for later. Once you've made your money, you'll need a way to lose it...

Most of us who participate in communities like this have this insane super power of being able to create something out of nothing (but time and effort) that has value to people.

We can build little things that work their asses off for us forever, just requiring a nudge once in a while to keep them moving.

I've released two digital products in the last year, a book and a video course. The book will be a year old in May and still makes me $2500-5000/month, and the course (which came out in November) is still making ~$30,000/month, although I expect that to slow down soon.

Even still, with a little bit of maintenance marketing effort, I can expect those products to keep making a few thousand dollars each month for the next couple years while being able to dedicate the vast majority of my time to creating new products (assets) for my portfolio.

It feels a lot like the mentality that's pushed in "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" of owning things that generate cash flow, but instead of having to find money to purchase real estate, folks like us can invent these assets out of thin air. Really blows my mind.

After Ruby is a "hot" language (years ago), it becomes a legacy language where companies will pay money for assistance with their products. In the $10-$15 niche, you need individual engineers to think a language is neat. In the $40-$10,000 niches, you need companies to think they can save some engineering time.

Both can be very valuable.

(My book sells for around $30-$40 rather than $15, but the math is similar.)

To your specific question the vendor's EULA may have language that puts in restrictions (e.g. most restrict benchmarks). So, give the EULA a close read to get a sense. Second issue that you will have to pay attention to is trademarks, you'll need to seek some guidance so as to not put you on the wrong side of trademark law.

I didn't do a free version because it's a premium product - if you want the "free version" of my stuff, you read my blog.

I did not consider physical printing.

Mostly likely most of that $70k came from corporate credit cards.

Also, I generally write enough stuff that I don't need any one particular post to succeed, but keeping my domain off any "blacklists" is very important to me. Vote manipulation would be a very, very bad decision for me.