I sold 640 copies of my book in one year

Well done. That's a respectable number of sales for your first year!

The economics of self publishing is interesting. When I think back on my first book I count at least 5 years research that enabled me to be able to write it, 3 years writing it and then many years selling the thing around industry. By a pessimistic account I was about £500k down :) Like you, the first year I sold about 500. Unlike online fulfilment today, I spent that time stuffing envelopes, staring at a slowly shrinking pile of boxes in the corner of my study, printing labels, with occasional trips to the post-office. It was actually work, and many times I thought 'this is crazy'. It doubled for two more years until dealing with the orders actually became too much (while doing a "real job").

On the other hand, it got me a string of well paying jobs, established me as the go-to consultant in a niche, invitations to talk and teach all around the world, and basically transformed my career. So putting a "net profit" number to it seems unfathomable. Each book you write, if researched from scratch, is kinda equivalent to a PhD.

What happened next is that I sold the title, from my own publishing company to a large publisher (MIT). Publishers don't take many risks these days, but they will buy a book that already has reasonable number of sales as a going concern. The advantage is that all mechanics and business is suddenly off your hands. Without an advance to pay back you then have a modest income stream and time to write the next book.

Another effect of being a semi-professional writer, as a side gig, is that other people want to pay you to edit, typeset, and review works. Learning LaTeX and various markups and text processing tools has been a huge gift. That can be quite fun if you're in a vibrant field that genuinely interests you. And you don't have to be associated with academia or a big-name institution for that to work. In fact I'd say that academics these days never have time for writing and that most other successful authors I know are independent.

I hope your book takes off even more, but right now I think you can count 600 sales in the first year as a definite success!

My own experience convinces me there are many extra benefits to having written a book. My first book has been out for 4.5 years now. I know many people on Hacker News have read it and I'm grateful to all of you.I've enjoyed getting emails about it. Especially regarding "badly managed startups" and "abusive bosses" many of you have reached out to share similar stories. Maybe at some point I'll do a blog post that collects some of those email stories. Some people thought I was destroying my career by revealing the dark side of startups, but some entrepreneurs appreciate my realism and practicality, so I've gotten three very lucrative consulting jobs, thanks to that first book. And, surprisingly, the book has gotten more and more popular. It sold more this last year than it sold during its first two years. I assume that at some point the book will seem dated and obsolete, but at least for now it still strikes people as current, so the benefits of writing that book continue to pay dividends.

I sold around 300 in my first year (which ended recently), which is much less than the other book I wrote via my publisher. Yet, even though it is sold at a lesser price, my self-published book made almost more money. This is essentially because the percentage I make on every sales with my publisher is really low (10%). So for my next book, I'll self publish as well.

(the book btw https://securityhandbook.io/)

As one of your 640 customers - thank you!

Having a lightweight reference for simple things that I only do occasionally is a godsend and a massive time saving. I can dive into Deployment from Scratch and tweak something that needs updating, or even deploy a new system in less time than it takes me to lookup and parse/refresh my knowledge from the actual documentation on most topics. And even if I do need to refer to the docs for something not in the book, it is much much quicker as I have the context already.

Sounds like a great success.

Back when (long before ebooks) I helped with their self publishing. A minimum press run of the book-length projects would often be 500 or 1,000 copies. I'd tell authors to expect to sell half the run or less and to be generous with "review copies" and so on.

I always love transparency like this from authors, thanks for sharing!

This line resonated way too much with me: "Initially, I thought five months might be enough for me to write it, but the scope quickly grew, and the progress was slow."

Somehow, even though I've been writing for years now, I consistently underestimate the scope and time commitment of every writing project, even after attempting to adjust for my tendency to underestimate.

Good success. The $24k is misleading, in that there is more 'untapped value' now this has been done once. If he makes a video series based on the same thing for example, it should be easier to make the next $24k using all that is set up for marketing.

Before I got into writing novels I had a small publishing business centered around books for magicians. I started this when James Randi off-hand mentioned to me that every magic book sold at least 300 copies because there were that many diehard collectors out there who bought everything.

I figured that if my break even was at or below 300 units I could put out two or so titles a year and not worry about going into debt. At the time a $40 book earned about $16 wholesale. Cost of printing was ~$3. I’d usually sell 200 copies directly ($7,400) and another 500 to wholesalers ($6,500.)

It averaged out to about $15,000 per book a year….but then the books kept selling year after year. Some made me over $250,000 in a ten year period. I hadn’t factored in for the long tail - which made it even more lucrative.

There are much better opportunities than publishing, but there’s some money to be made if you understand the actual addressable audience and have a passion for it.

Amazing! Niche tech books definitely have a market in them. I wrote a generic "teach yourself to program" self-help book and sold ~100 copies my first year.

Started with 0 audience, 0 idea of how to write a book and ended up turning it into a fairly sizable newsletter (1k+) and made a couple grand for my month or two of time spent.

I wish I knew much more about self-publishing when I published it, but for my second book, I'm very prepared this time around and have strategies to help it perform better that I got from a book called "Published".

https://www.amazon.com/Published-Proven-Blank-Published-Auth...

I think the real challenge of self-publishing is advertising, marketing, and simply getting your name out there. The writing part is fairly easy!

640 copies ought to be enough for anyone:)

Congratulations, anyway.

Congrats! I never counted my sales for different periods of time, because I always felt the feedback is what counts the most to have a long tail of sales. If the feedback is positive, the sales will go on. So I rather focused on this aspect, but it seems to go well for you from the feedback side as well :)

I too released my first self-published book The Road to React on HN (initial in wrong English "The Road to learn React" haha) a few years ago and the community helped tremendously to get this project off the ground. Thanks to all of you! And I wish your success continues too :)

I bought your book. I am just starting out as a backend developer. Titles like these are badly needed. But your book needs a lot more polish. There were typos in a lot of places. Also it would have been great if you could cover Ubuntu. It's a lot of effort to map fedora commands to that.

Finally, compared to what you are charging for your book, The Unix and Linux System Administrator's Handbook costs 60 USD, covers way more, in better detail, and has much better presentation. The advantage your product should have is much more focus on backend deployments but it falls short in the quality of coverage and by extension, ease of use (for newbs).

Well done and thanks for sharing your experience. Having written my own book a few years ago I can truly say job well done and congrats on a huge milestone. It's no small feat. As you hint in the blog post, writing a book is a full time job to get it done and also requires working a second full time job to pump up the marketing around it.

Then, once it's out in the world, comes the job of maintaining it and keeping the momentum high. A slog to say the least and often times very demotivating. So, from one author and self publisher to another, congratulations! You should be proud of your success.

That’s pretty great! I sold 1000 on the first day (http://catonmat.net/awk-book).

This is exactly the resource I was currently looking for! I've recently started a pet project as a way to learn deployment and CI. I work in a big company, where the devops parts are worked on by different teams, are mighty complex and are pretty much black boxes for other teams. I've already submitted my request for the book. Best of luck for the author and thank you!

This is really impressive! I recently hit $1000 in sales on mine and celebrated with a glass of something nice. You're right about how much time marketing takes - I don't spend nearly enough time on it but I'm trying to get myself into a pace where I alternate iterating on the book itself and then doing some marketing (reddit, twitter, website).

Makebook of levels.io was made the same way. Sell the book first, then write it later.

I will never forget the first day I made a $15 sale of my first book.

A moment to be forever treasured

Have you considered pursing public speaking? Having a book helps a lot to get your foot in the door for conferences. I'm acquaintances with a few authors and the bulk of their income is from speaking.

Get to the front page of HN isn't going to hurt either.

Congratulations; putting a book together is a challen hard enough all on its own. Actually selling copies is another.

I think it is a very solid number for your first book and first year. The topic is unique too. You are doing good!

It looks really useful to me. I am someone that deploys projects to $10 VPS using digital ocean guides for some minimum security setups. Never had a problem.

I'd probably buy this if and when it is offered as paper. I don't really like to read on a screen.

Congratulations! Cool achievement :)

As others have noted, beyond the revenue of the book itself, having published one creates opportunities. My TypeScript book helped me grow my audience, meet cool people and land some consulting gigs.

There's a graph with 3 items per time period and no legend. And nothing about profit vs revenue really, how much did each book cost vs profit?

Apart from that, very informative.

Congratulations!