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Comment by pxue | Hacker News Reader

So I don't consider my self an author but I wrote a 60 pages ebook in 3 month on a topic I consider am pretty savvy in.

I've marketed and sold 400+ copies of it at $19 so far and about to raise the price to $39, near 100% margin minus stripe fees.

What stops authors doing what I did? Plenty of people want to read, to blame lack of readership is just completely wrong.

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How did you market the book and how much did you spend on marketing?

Imo marketing is the biggest road block.

On X and Reddit, for free.

I basically gave bits and pieces of each chapter away as content - then funneled interested readers into DMs and profile visits with link to my ebook.

You wrote a book about a topic that you are very much into, and although it's only 60 pages, you were all about the contents, not the process or the readers. Often, authors just want to "write a book" or "be a writer". That rarely results in interesting books in my opinion.

Agreed. Much like a founder building a company for the sake of being a founder.

Rarely makes good products.

> What stops authors doing what I did? Plenty of people want to read, to blame lack of readership is just completely wrong.

Because for three months of writing and it sounds like numerous hours of marketing you’ve made almost $8000. While I imagine that puts you ahead of the curve for the average self published author, The hourly return on investment sounds pretty low, especially for a job that sounds marketing heavy, which is not everyone’s cup of tea

True in strict monetary senses.

But through this process I've

- gained an engaging audience on X - multiple inbound leads that turned into long term collabs - a discord community of my best readers where we meet once a week

Worth the investment

What stops authors doing that is that most authors struggle to sell 50 copies at far lower price point no matter how much effort they put in because most books just aren't interesting enough to enough people to be easy enough to sell without it turning into gruntwork paying far below minimum wage.

Congratulations, you're a massive success as an author, having sold more than most authors will. That's amazing.

But consider that most authors have no interests in writing business / self help books, and most who do still fail spectacularly because having success with those kinds of books tends to happen primarily if you already have an audience and a track record in the field you're writing about. E.g. the perceived value of your book is 99% your story about your track record, and most would-be authors don't have that track record.

You nailed it.

Thank you.

So just to clarify I didn't have an audience when I wrote the book. I took the time and told people my story over the past 6 months, and while I did that - sold books.

I think good storytellers should be able to build an audience regardless of the format - highly recommend any aspiring author to try it.

The thing is, most storytellers don't have nearly as compelling a value proposition. E.g. the best value a fiction writer can provide is a good story. Your value proposition is selling at least the hope of learning ways of bringing in money. It doesn't need to have a very high chance of success before it's perceived net present value is higher than the cost of your book, while fiction writers are competing with enormous amount of free or already paid for entertainment and fiction from a writer you don't know is often seen as having a sufficiently high risk of being a waste of time that the perceived risk adjusted value for a lot of people is negative.

Getting people to take unknown fiction even for free is an uphill battle.

You're describing self-publishing a business-related e-book. TFA describes the harsh reality of traditional paper publishing of fiction. It also has a section on self-publishing, incidentally.

They had entire section on substack as well, which is basically what I'm doing.

Stat seems like only 15(?) authors on substack makes $1,000/m or more. Which is wild.

I find your site and sales pitch interesting but honestly, I can't help but feel like a schmuck for giving you 20 USD for this. It feels akin to giving money to Tai Lopez or some other guru selling a pipe dream.

No offense to you, I want to like what you're offering, but I can't excuse it. Do you have a PDF of the first chapter or the intro at least? I want to see a bit before I send you 20 bucks.

Absolutely get what you mean and that's ok!

Send me an email, I'll share you the first chapter

How are you “publishing”?

Is it just an ebook?

Do you sell paper bound? If so what service are you using? Would you recommend it or choose differently next time?

I have a site, user can pay and get an email with the pdf/Epub link.

No paper.

I write in notion, export to markdown, then compile to pdf / Epub with pandoc

It's super easy, highly recommend

Link to your book?

500k.agency

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