Tell HN: After 2.5 years, I finished an eBook series on iOS at 2,050 beta sales
I ended up selling 2,050 copies while in early access. That number changes a bit, since some of those were from companies who bought team packages. Looking back, I don't think I would ever start another book series again. It was a massive task that ate up virtually all free time. If I hadn't of put a deadline of promising updates for the series every two weeks, I would have (no doubt) fizzled out. Writing this series, though, taught me a very valuable lesson in opportunity cost. I was put on this earth to eat pizza and ship iOS apps, but I simply couldn't do the latter while writing the book series. There just wasn't time, and that's been a very hard part of all of this for me. It's a big part of my identity, and I find so much joy in it.
In the end, I feel very proud to have finished this thing up, though. I'll update it going forward when new versions of iOS come out. I like to think I've built up enough trust at this point (shipping 55 updates on schedule, never missing one update cycle) over the years while it was in beta, so I think folks know I'm good for it. Logistically, I ended up switching from Gumroad when they changed to a flat 10% fee over to Lemon Squeezy. It's a newer platform, and I'm mostly happy with it. My biggest pain point is that I can't do bulk sales for companies (trust me, I've tried) but other than that, it's nice.
Tooling wise, I wrote the whole thing in Ulysses. I've really grown to enjoy that app, and it's still the best place to write in my opinion.
If you have any other questions on the topic, how I marketed it or absolutely anything else, I'm always happy to answer questions.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534988 [2]: https://www.bestinclassiosapp.com