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Comment by DVassallo | Hacker News Reader

Self-publishing is a very underrated way of exchanging knowledge for money with high ROI. I'm approaching $200K in 6 months from 2 self-published info products: one is a short ebook on AWS (160 hours to produce), and the other is a video presentation about building an audience (16 hours to produce).

https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488

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I just thought, I know that name ... DVassallo ... oh, yes, now I remember! You're this guy who comes here to brag about his income in regular intervals! Always a pleasure :)

Not quite comparable to your success, but it was nice to get a few sales of my self-published book on Data Analysis with Rust Notebooks (https://store.shahinrostami.com/product/data-analysis-with-r...)...

Is Gumroad.com worth considering?

I’m very happy with Gumroad. I can’t think of an easier way to host and sell self-published material.

Do you spend a lot of time on marketing/sales?

I'm sure it doesn't hurt to have 35,000 followers :)

I've noticed a trend that these success stories usually flow out of an already existing user base.

Does anyone have any success stories from someone with no social media presence?

Yes, I attribute practically all my sales to having an audience. I doubt I would have sold any if I didn't have any followers.

That said, I only had 10K followers when I announced my first product, and 24K for the second. But I've seen a few people get similar results as I had even with 3-5K followers.

Not a lot, but I didn't track the hours. The only promotion I did for my second product was sending 5 tweets and 2 emails, so maybe a couple of hours towards promotion. That made $85K in sales: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1270940834989355009

I promoted the first product similarly, but I also experimented a bit with paid ads and I invested some time there, so I'd say about 20 hours total. That product made $97K in sales, $13K of which from paid ads ($6K spent on ads).

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