How Sacha Greif and Nathan Barry sold $39k worth of eBooks | Hacker News Reader

How Sacha Greif and Nathan Barry sold $39k worth of eBooks

sachagreif.com

81 pointssgdesign28 comments

Very interesting. I can't speak to the podcast but I highly recommend the transcript.

My takeaways:

(1) If you are an expert in something and are disciplined enough to set up a consistent routine for writing you can probably write an ebook. (2) At least for designers you probably don't need to sell in any format but pdf. (3) If you want to maximise your reach or the growth in your personal brand it may be best to sell something at impulse buy levels. (4) To maximise the cash you earn directly, in sales, you should offer different packages at different price points. (5) Both of these authors spent significant time and money (works out very similarly) on layout, look and feel, different formats.

Personal commentary

Ebooks do not need to be that long, at least technical ones. Sometimes books can be dense or have content that is valuable not because it's hard to understand but because rediscovering it yourself takes valuable time. I don't think either author put in more than 200 hours work; I don't believe either put in more than 150.

You should offer at least three packages if you're price segmenting. This has two purposes, the middle package looks totally reasonable compared to the premium one but if you only have more or less impulse buy and middle people will go impulse. The bigger reason is that most of your money will come from people buying the complete package for whom real actionable advice saves them their time and money, or people with corporate credit cards for whom the difference between $50 and $150 is non-existent.

I doubt if having more than five packages helps because that's about the limit of gradations people can hold in their heads intuitively rather than as abstractions. The reasoning for three packages is given above, anchoring. Probably a good idea to a/b test it.

Regarding the eBook size, that's the approach I'm taking with a serie I'm working on at the moment.

I set myself a limit of 50 pages per volume, the eBook is highly focused on one subject and does it well (hopefully). I found two main advantages with this approach :

- The first one is that I have a short attention span and it allows me to write a page here and there, as the focus is on one subject it's much easier to just drop a draft, come back later, format it and add it to the overall. I do that very often, mainly in my morning commute in the tube.

- The second one is that it doesn't require me to invest 6 months (or even more) of my time on a huge overtake (I started like that, but after 6months of work and being barely half way, I changed the approach and split the work in smaller pieces), the first ebook took me a bit more than a month to write and format, as I had quite a few things to figure out, now I'm two weeks in the second ebook, and I'm almost done.

I'd say I'm around 200 hours in. Probably more. Especially because I wrote really slowly at first. Now I can write my 1,000 words a day in an hour (sometimes less), but when I started it could take 3-4 hours.

I wouldn't use more than 3 packages. 5 would just be overwhelming.

Hey everyone, I'm happy to answer any questions about writing, marketing, and selling technical ebooks. I'm sure Sacha would be happy to answer questions as well.

The books being discussed are here:

http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-handbook

http://sachagreif.com/ebook

Thanks Nathan, can you point us to a few of the apps you've worked on as a starting point. Thanks

Here are the two big ones that I did for myself. I have a bunch more for clients:

http://thinklegend.com/commit http://onevoiceapp.com

What's great is that both of us have had about the same number of total book sales, but you decided to segment out your product packaging... And as a result have had made twice as much as me.

Really, really nice job Nathan.

Multiple packages is one of the best decisions I made. Though I have to give credit to Chris Guillebeau (http://chrisguillebeau.com) for that one. He told me how important it is.

Thanks for the book and other goodies, Nathan. I've watched all of the videos included in the package and will be actually reading the book soon. I initially skimmed because I wanted to checkout everything else that was included. I'm liking everything so far. Well worth it!

I may have missed this somewhere along the conversation thread but would you mind to explain the process of writing the eBooks from publishing perspective?

(i.e.: the tools, the output format, what are the considerations for various devices, etc)

Do you write using a tool that can produce outputs of multiple formats or that can fit to multiple devices?

Very smart, to drive even more sales of both books with a podcast "series" starring both authors. Which one of you came up with that genius idea? Will you cover the podcast in the podcast?

I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic… I guess you have a point both ways: it's true this is a way to promote both our eBooks. But we are also sharing valuable information and addressing real questions that people have asked us.

If you didn't find any value in the podcast then I guess only the self-promotion angle would remain, and I can see how that would be annoying.

I just read this on the train and you absolutely ticked the valuable information and real questions boxes for me!

Happy to answer questions as well!

Hey, excuse me if this is covered in the podcast, but I can't watch it right away and so I thought I'd take the opportunity while you're sticking around here to ask the question:

Did either of you follow the route of doing an intro/TOC/first chapter before you did the entire book then start marketing it to test out the response and do some lead gen?

If not, do you have any thoughts on that approach? (including potentially doing pre-sales of the book before you've actually gone ahead and written it?)

I'm working on a couple of eBook concepts right now and these are some concepts I've been thinking about, would be very interested in your point(s) of view.

Congrats on the publishing success!

I didn't do that myself but I think it's a very valid strategy. The only problem I can see is that it might hurt your momentum: sometimes you just need to go ahead and write without having to wait for feedback or A/B test results for every chapter.

Same with presales, it's a great strategy as long as you don't spend so much time promoting the pre-sale that you forget to write the book!

It might sound like I'm exaggerating but there is so much you can do to market eBooks that the book itself can sometimes become almost an afterthought…

Got any other good design ebook you want to recommend other than the two in this thread? I'm always looking to read more :)

Disclaimer: I bought yours and I'm going to purchase Nathan's in the near future (i.e.today).

To complete the series, here's the third "design-ebook-that-was-launched-on-HN-and-made-a-surprising-amount-of-money": http://bootstrappingdesign.com/ :)

i have one, any chance I'll ever get to see the copy i bought, considering paypal won't return my money?

What do you mean? You couldn't download the book? Did you get in touch with me?

Hey, really liked the transcript. My wife is a Doctor and she's writing an ebook on health related topic and I'm trying to find ways to market it. Can you kindly share few pointers on marketing? Thanks in advance and wish you very good luck.

I was very surprised to see that you weren't publishing on iBooks or Kindle, but truly self publishing through your websites. How the heck do you get yourself out there to the point that you're raking in 10k a month? (Besides HN.) And do you think that'll drop off once your main readership has bought the book?

Speaking for myself (Sacha), I raked in 10k a month the first month. That initial boost came mainly from HN. Sales dropped off dramatically since, and now it's probably more around $1-200/month, if that.

Nathan, you should probably think of removing part of the description from your Gumroad page, as just about anyone can easily grab the zip file without paying for it.

view-source:https://gumroad.com/l/AppDesignComplete

Nice. That's awesome. Had no idea Gumroad displayed the receipt in plain HTML. Oops! Foxed now, thanks for pointing it out.

1. Do you guys focus mainly on iDevices? What's your take on the UI of Android?

2. Have you had any exposure to copyright infringement? If so, was it for the positive or negative?

Thank you both for showing up here.

1. I've entirely focused on iOS. Not that I am opposed to Android, it's just that there are so many things to learn in tech I haven't gotten around to Android yet. I think you can create high quality experiences on Android as well, but people don't seem to be putting in as much design effort as they do on iOS.

2. I haven't encountered copyright or piracy issues (yet). I'm sure when it happens I will get frustrated at first, but just accept it and move on. I'd much rather focus on teaching and creating new content.

1. As a designer I don't have a specific focus, I work on web apps as much as iOS apps. Haven't worked on an Android app yet, though.

2. I haven't had anybody pirate by book as fas as I know. Maybe it's because of the low price point? That being said I wouldn't really care even if it did happen. I do not believe it would take away from sales much, probably just expose my book to people who would never have bought it anyway.

So in a way, piracy is a form of market segmentation that enables you to reach even the cheapest customers!

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