Paying my bills with 'free' ebooks | Hacker News Reader

Paying my bills with 'free' ebooks

learnbyexample.github.io

85 pointsasicsp22 comments

Hi Sundeep,

[Leanpub co-founder here.]

Thanks for the kind words about Leanpub, and for choosing Leanpub as one of your publishing platforms!

We're fond of our pricing sliders and of our newsletters as well :) Also, thanks for the very fair comparison with us and Gumroad. Gumroad is an excellent service, and this type of detailed information will be helpful to many authors.

In terms of the differences on payment timing, the reason Leanpub takes longer to pay is so that we can offer the 45-day risk-free 100% refund policy on all purchases, which we believe helps increase sales...)

Finally, two questions for you:

1. Have you considered also converting your books into courses in Leanpub? We think we've built the best and easiest way to produce courses based on Markdown. Also, courses naturally have a higher price point than books, especially when bundled into course sets.

2. Would you like to be on our Frontmatter podcast (https://leanpub.com/podcasts/frontmatter)?

Thanks,

Peter

Yeah, agree that 45-day refund policy is a great option for readers and thus increases the likelyhood of a purchase.

Regarding the questions:

1. I thought courses were video, similar to Udemy. I just went through FAQ and found that video is optional. Courses has quiz, certificates, etc. Personally, I'm more interested in an interactive programming environment where users can execute code snippets and exercises can be solved from the website itself. I've also thought about creating a desktop application as an alternative.

2. Thanks a lot for the offer, I would like to think about it. I'll let you know if I'm interested.

Sounds good re. #2. Re, #1, we don't offer anything in terms of an interactive environment at the moment, and we probably won't do so for a long time. That seems like a full startup in itself.

Instead, we are differentiating by focusing on being the easiest way of making a course based on Markdown (since our books are already typically written in Markdown, so the conversion is simple). These courses need to have automated marking and certificates of course, but everything else (video, interactivity, etc) is either optional (like video) or not supported (like interactive exercises).

For us, the big win is on making courses which are easy to update: recording a video course takes a long time, so updating a video course regularly typically just doesn't happen...

Don't let those negative reviews get you down! I'm traditionally published. We get some amazing trolls. They're just noise. Great that you are making things and teaching, and even more awesome that you are giving back with free versions. Thank you for all you do.

Skimming, I saw the author lives in India for about $150/month, and made about $200/month previously, maybe a little more now.

I guess its a great option if you live in a low COL country and sell to high COL places, but it won't even cover rent in Mumbai, forget US/EU.

It’s all relative. I once paid $150/mo for a parking spot. In some places $150/mo would be life changing.

Your parking spot was not in Manhattan..

Seriously, I was thinking "150/month for a parking spot is cheap"

The guy doing acoup.blog is doing essentially the same thing (free, well-researched historical analysis blogs), and last time I checked he was getting enough in Patreons per month to pay rent in major metropolitan areas in the US. It would be interesting to know where his supporters found him. I think his success is due to being excellent in his field, analyzing both pop-culture for historical accuracy as well as hitting the "maker" demographic with his series on how people made things, being good at showing not only why he thinks his conclusions are correct but always demonstrating how one goes about analyzing the topic, and being very consistent about publishing something every week.

That seems like a super stressful way to make a living.

Most of the people doing Pateron content I know seem to see any growth in income as requiring most of that money to go back into content (better cameras, editing, trips to film interesting content, whatever).

That works great when the trend is upward, but what about when it's flat, or declining?

You could go to semi-remote places in India, where Rent + food expenses will be in the ballpark of 120 USD (home cooking, for single person)

Internet is quite fast in most tier-2 and tier-3 towns. 4G costs about 15 USD a month, unlimited data (caps that carry forward)

The title is a bit misleading: the post is a much broader look at the author’s experiences in tech writing. Quite a nice read, and I definitely appreciate the information.

>Quite a nice read, and I definitely appreciate the information.

Thanks.

>The title is a bit misleading

Initially I chose the title as "My book writing experience" which felt boring (the url is still based on that title).

I think you can make more money, a lot more. It seems you have revenue as much as $200 per month selling these books, in total. But I have to say, when I was younger ( and a lot poorer ), I paid up to $200 for a single college textbook. So as patio11 would say: "raise your prices".

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-...

The author made a principled choice to not charge...

As someone from India, where the currency exchange rate (with respect to USD, EUR, etc.) is forever depreciating rapidly while inflation is relatively quite high, I appreciate it when content creators offer lower prices and/or offer purchasing power parity discounts.

Patio11’s advice may be good for certain creators or services providers, but it has absolutely no consideration for consumers who, for no fault of their own, have to make do with a lot less and are instead encouraged to pirate content or forego knowledge. Of course, I can understand a viewpoint that says that nobody is owed anything, but that would apply to creators too.

Hey, fellow Indian here trying to go down the same route you did. Is it okay if I pm you with a question?

Thanks.

Sure, my twitter DM is open: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample or you can mail me

    echo 'bGVhcm5ieWV4YW1wbGUubmV0QGdtYWlsLmNvbQo=' | base64 --decode

Would you consider putting these books on Medium for more revenue? I wrote the code to import all the Pragmatic Programmer books there and can help since I at least know the pitfalls. But I think your books would probably transfer over nicely.

That's very cool, good on you, and thanks for sharing. Given how much expensive places take advantage of cheap labour, it's cool to see that this can work for the benefit of the people on the other side too.

Holy crap I hadn't realized this was the Martin Kleppman! You sir were the reason I learnt about kafka which led to a bunch of moves which led me to a stint at Linkedin many many years ago!!! Thank you for the transformation!!

I'm wondering why the author considers himself only an author. He has already stepped far beyond this and is an educator with a mission, making knowledge/skills accessible and even offering workshops. Wonderful.

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