Comment by nathanbarry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathanbarry | Hacker News Reader

Very nicely done! Selling books and training is a great way to get into products. My first ebook was released 2 weeks ago ($20k+ in sales so far).

To anyone wondering if they could do it to, the answer is yes. I can point to a dozen stories of successful ebooks that have made over $10k in 6 months. Not to mention to increase in credibility and readership that the author gains.

Here are my quick tips on writing a technical guide:

1. Find a topic that is in high demand. I chose designing iOS apps, anything related to popular programming languages or new technologies.

2. Talk about the value to the customer (time saved, better understanding, etc) rather than the features of your product (100 pages, PDF, ePub, etc). You need to mention the details of what the purchaser gets, but that isn't what will sell them on your product.

3. Don't just sell an ebook. Ebooks are cheap and simple or at least that is how they appear. Sell the book, but with it package code samples, video tutorials, expert interviews, and anything else that will give the reader a head start. This has the advantage of increasing the value of your product which helps with pricing.

4. Have more than one package. With my book I had three packages, with different amounts of extras in each. The base one included the book and a couple templates, the middle included 5 detailed video tutorials and more templates as, and the largest one had even more templates and code samples. Each package built on itself and the price increased accordingly.

Many people, and especially companies, won't hesitate to buy a more expensive package if it looks like it will save them more time.

5. Price high. My packages are at $39, $79, and $169. Setting those high prices is the best decision I made. The highest priced package has made almost as much money as the previous two combined. Jim does a great job with a price of $42.

I hope that helps anyone considering selling an information product like what many people on HN have done recently.

For reference you can checkout the sales page to see how my packages are organized: http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook/

The problem is that books that try and sell me based on promising some improvement in my lifestyle usually set my BS radar off.

I have a lot of programming books on my shelf about various topics , but I don't have one called "make a shitton of money with your text editor".

It would feel a bit like those ebooks that promise to make it easy to generate effortless income on the stockmarket or get highly attractive women into bed with you.

I have no doubt that such books sell, but I wouldn't feel confident writing something that might not necessarily do exactly what it said on the tin for everyone reading it.

Email me at brennan at planscope.io and I'll forward you a dozen emails from people who've bought my book (http://doubleyourfreelancingrate.com) who now have a higher income and a better lifestyle.

The books on your bookshelf are meant to improve your lifestyle - they teach you new skills that you can charge for. Some books, however, do that on a higher, more general level.

I just glanced over the URL in your post and it took me a while to figure out your book wasn't called, "Double Your Freelancing Ingrate." :) Too bad too, because I thought the book was about how to gracefully get rid of ungrateful clients and that would actually be a great book too!

I'll back up Brennan 100% on his claims. I've _successfully_ raised my rates +30/hr after reading his ebook. The advice was relevant, pointed, and easy to implement. The book paid for itself in the first week I owned it.

After reading Brennan's book I raised my rate from $100/hr up to $150/hr. When I mentioned my rate to 4 new prospects they didn't seem to notice. It didn't seem expensive at all to them.

Maybe I should raise my rates further...

I'm not sure why you need a book to tell you that you can raise you rates if you think that people will pay your higher rates.

I've thought that I could raise my rates for over a year now. But Brennan's book gave me the drive to actually do it.

Why did you buy those programming books sitting on your shelf? Because you wanted to learn to code so you could do X. (Probably get a job, get clients, make cool things, etc.) Copywriting is an effort to connect with the reader and tell them that the product matches up with what they need/want.

There is nothing wrong with marketing. Marketing is how honest people get paid for doing honest work. (Both Jim and Nathan are honest. I've exchanged email with them both.)

I wouldn't feel confident writing something that might not necessarily do exactly what it said on the tin for everyone reading it.

In that case you'd never write it. The discussion isn't over some magic book of spells here.

It's about an honest product offer that with a modest amount of work the reader will move from point A to point B. Now you as writer could promise to refund the reader's money if it didn't work out, whether because the work was too much or the results didn't materialize.

That way everyone wins.

I'm much more confident of a book's ability to teach me how to program in Javascript that I am of a book's ability to teach me to make some arbitrary amount of money,

You haven't read many JavaScript books then, have you?

"The problem is that books that try and sell me based on promising some improvement in my lifestyle usually set my BS radar off."

Luckily for saturnflyer, nathanbarry, bdunn, and me, plus many others, that problem isn't a generalized one. A few folks obviously agree with you, but it doesn't seem to be impacting our sales or our customers' happiness.

That opinion is a minority.

Thank you for giving me the title for my upcoming book:

"Make a shitton of money with your text editor: a genius stockpicker's guide to bedding the women of your dreams."

Advance praise from Armando Montelongo.

When can I pre-order?

I think another key to your success: you are writing a book about design and your front page is stunning... congrats! I would happily trust your judgement on design based on your home page. Did you design this yourself?

Thanks! I appreciate the compliments. Yes, it is my design.

I guess I should have included that you should know something about the topic you choose to write about. Being able to demonstrate some level of expertise is important. But that doesn't mean you should wait until you are speaking at conferences before you start teaching on your blog.

I'm loving reading all your comments about your process. Would you mind sharing some advice on writing your first ebook? What kind of roadmap should you aim for? Who should you have edit it? Should you? How much? Should you pay someone to do it? All of this kind of information would be great!

To anyone wondering if they could do it to, the answer is yes.

How did you go about marketing it?

I guess that is an important topic to cover as well. Let's dive in.

1. Start by writing one or two really useful blog posts on the topic. Use a provider like MailChimp (free up to 2,000 subscribers) to embed a signup form at the bottom of the post. Just something simple that mentions the product and tells them to signup to hear more about it.

2. Promote these posts on Twitter, HN, Reddit, mailing lists, etc. If it is valuable content than people will share it. I wrote an article on UX lessons from the new Facebook iOS app (http://nathanbarry.com/ux-lessons-from-facebook-ios/) that was shared over 100 times on Twitter. That article alone got me 300-400 subscribers to my book launch list.

3. Put together a more official landing page for your book. It should have information on the topics the book will cover, link to your blog posts, and have a signup link. Pick a launch date as early as possible.

4. As your email list grows continue to write blog posts to promote it. Occasionally send out useful tips, tutorials, and updates related to your book to the subscriber list. This will keep the book on their minds. The last thing you want is your book to be released and the pre-launch subscribers to have forgotten who you are. But keep the emails useful.

5. A couple weeks before launch get review copies to a 5-10 experts in your industry. If you don't know anyone, start with smaller blogs and work your way up. Give them a free copy and ask for feedback. Often this will turn into book reviews published on their site or testimonials you can use on the sales page.

6. On the day of the launch send out an announcement email to your pre-launch signup list. You should also give them a discount or special offer of some kind to reward them for signing up early (and to motivate immediate purchases). I like to have guest posts go live on related sites the same day as the launch. For my book launch on September 4th I had 5 guest posts go live that day.

That's basically all I did. To give you an idea of my influence online (hint: not much) 2 weeks before the launch my blog had 150 RSS subscribers and I had ~700 Twitter followers. Not a lot.

By launch day I had a pre-launch list of 800 subscribers + about 1,000 on my iOS Design Weekly newsletter. I was able to leverage that small subscriber base to $12,000 in sales in the first 24 hours. Even if you do a tenth of that it is still decent money. Plus my blog subscribers have doubled (still not many) and my Twitter followers have gone up to around 1,100.

Seriously, try launching a product. You will learn a ton and you won't regret it.

Edit: that's not to say you won't make mistakes. Here is a post on a few of the mistakes I made during launch: http://nathanbarry.com/product-launch-mistakes/

Those are some great suggestions. Thanks Nathan!

Great - thanks a lot! Will definitely be trying it out for something I have in mind.

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