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Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

I'm not in any way trying to diminish your accomplishments but just writing a note of caution to those trying to replicate your success before they plow a lot of time into writing a book: Jordan is a talented developer who has 27K followers on Twitter, who I imagine largely follow him for some of the same things that are in his book. He had a natural audience to market to (I imagine he had less than that a year ago). If you don't have 27K followers already interested, you may not be as successful with self publishing.

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Great point. His twitter bio states how he's been solving bugs since ios4.

The fact that he's advocating how easy this could be, without alluding to his already-pre-existing direct user base -- one could relate this to Tim Ferris, IMO

> The fact that he's advocating how easy this could be

If that is the takeaway, I truly wasn't careful or thoughtful enough with how I worded this post. Definitely not easy, still isn't. To throw myself a bone though, I have never had a HN trend or anything - so I kinda wrote this on a whim instead of doing a blog post on the book's one year anniversary and walked away. Then it picked up on me.

This is important to note, however you can somewhat infer it from the post:

> I settled on adapting one of my more popular [blog posts][2] that I keep updated through each version of iOS into a five book series (one for each topic of accessibility, design, UX, APIs and a catch all bonus one).

They have a blog, around for years, and a post which is popular compared to others, constantly updated and comprehensive enough to be the basis of a book.

Really doesn’t sound like an overnight thing. And not surprising to pass 10K followers when you have such a free offering.

Smdh, people always forget to mention their existing following in these case studies.

I totally hear what you're saying - but to be honest, I didn't mention it because I feel weird about it in a way. When you make posts like these, you inherently draw attention to yourself - so I kinda try to be cognizant of that and not try to puff out my chest, so to speak. Hope that makes sense.

At that scale your audience is a legitimate marketing asset, not a humble brag.

A noble instinct but misplaced in this case. Regardless, thank you for sharing, and congrats on your accomplishments!

It is such a powerful factor, it cannot be left out.

Yes - it’s absolutely true that an existing audience is super helpful. No doubt about it. But I also like to tell people, it takes a long to get there too. But hey, there is never a perfect time to launch - so if someone is reading this and wanting to take a crack at it, I’d definitely encourage that!

Yes. Launch you must. There is never a perfect time to launch. Rome was not built in a day :)

Yea but it’s like you said there’s an opportunity cost. And if you don’t have a strong following, so therefore a lower probability of success, that calculation is even worse.

Well….they had a following and an asset they transformed.

Step one is build the asset and the following. The book is almost the easy part relative to that.

But some don’t realize they can just….provide something useful and people will follow them. And others do have an audience and don’t realize they can make a product for them.

Why not actually follow up on this, and find an example of someone with success [that you're advocating], that goes beyond or similar success without the twitter following.

Sounds like a simple, control experiment. It's just -- will you do it?

Given the simplicity, perhaps you could do it instead?

I can't find the link right on hand, but I believe it was on HN - but there is a guy who does Ruby courses if memory serves. When I looked, he had around 9k followers on Twitter, and his courses have made over 1,000,000 to date. If someone is reading this is and it past of the Ruby community, they may know who Im talking to.

While no books related but apps, I know 3 or 4 Indies who are a wonderful living (close to 1mil) with their apps and their social following isn't huge - but they are great of marketing outside of it. Not the same thing, but kinda the same thing.

Yes. With high follower numbers you can write ebook, fart in jars, sell bath water or tshirts and still make good money.

Looks like I should stop the book series then and go pick up some Ts from WalMart

But is it really? This is very counter intuitive as I hear stories about people with a lot of followers on insta that tried to sell smh and it did not translate to anything.

Thank you for that. Good point.

That’s the only key thing in the whole post.

Take away that, and no matter how good that book was, sales would be closer to 0.

Actually getting this success is more likely like this:

- spend last 5 years getting followers on Twitter by writing engaging content, reply to others.

- spend also many years in your website and include a mailing list

- email your email list regularly with very interesting things

- spend 1 year to write a book

- send a blast email and tweet about your new book: Most likely people will buy whatever you say at this point because they trust you already.

This is the secret formula, which is hard work and 99.99% can’t do this consistently. (In addition, but not really required, also be smart and bring something new to the table)

From the author:

- I wrote on my blog for nearly a decade before I could launch a book that I sold.

- Announce it, ask for email sign ups if they are interested, keep them in the loop, and then launch. The mailing list had about 1,000 people on it once I launched (about two months from announcing it to doing the early access launch)

- I settled on adapting one of my more popular [blog posts][2] that I keep updated through each version of iOS into a five book series

Actually full details are here

https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-best-in-class-book-beta-la...

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