My self published book made $11,000 before I finished writing it | Hacker News Reader

My self published book made $11,000 before I finished writing it

osherove.com

109 pointsroyosherove39 comments

Great analysis. One thing he missed: Kickstarter.

Two weeks ago I launched "Learn Ruby on Rails" with a Kickstarter campaign: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/909377477/learn-ruby-on-...

(You can read more about the book here:

http://learn-rails.com/learn-ruby-on-rails.html

if you want to help with a new book for Rails beginners).

In less than two weeks I've raised over $4000. Significantly, nearly a third of revenue is from people who found out about the book on Kickstarter. So, Leanpub is great, but first, do a Kickstarter campaign. You get advance sales, a significant market channel, sales of a book at multiple price points (customers choose different pledge levels), and the additional boost of time-limited, event-driven marketing. Publishing is not dead; it's booming thanks to new market channels like Leanpub and Kickstarter. And yes, you have to build a following first.

Good points!

Disappointed to read, among other exclusions:

- "No self-help material (books, videos, etc). This includes projects that offer (or produce materials that offer) business, emotional, financial, health, medical, sex/seduction, or other self-help advice."

- "Kickstarter cannot be used to fund websites or apps focused on e-commerce, business, and social networking."

IndieGoGo doesn't seem to have such a limitation. You can double-check me: http://www.indiegogo.com/about/terms

Pretty sure you're right, based on some other articles I read. But one consideration:

https://medium.com/p/2a48bc6ffd57

I'm kind of surprised that Kickstarter gets as much discussion in some circles as they do, because they seem to thumb their noses a bit at "us," or at least the "us" in software (hardware and other creative projects are in the clear, of course).

"...That means about 8,000 RSS blog readers and 10,000+ twitter followers that knew about my book while I was writing it..."

I always find these articles interesting. Usually the real story is more like "I know how to market stuff and made a lot of money" but the article titles are something along the lines of "How I made 40K by picking my nose online in one weekend!"

So the reader gets this great story of some guy picking his nose. All kinds of details about how he did it, why he did it, what tools he used, what kind of nose he has, and so on. All kinds of little details here and there to get lost in. Maybe some graphs of his nose, or a bunch of charts showing traffic to his site hour by hour and a discussion of how using a bold font increased conversion by .2%. In short, nerd candy.

Once again, the important story here is marketing, in-depth interaction with a target audience, but this is always downplayed or ignored by the author, a specialist in getting your attention and engaging you. LeanPub is not the story, although it has a role. E-books are not the story, although they also have a role. Having a huge blogging audience and Twitter following, and leading them into a meaningful conversation about value? That's the story.

"...I do very little marketing, and it is mostly on my blog and twitter, in the form of sidebar links from my various websites..."

Right now somewhere around 100K HN readers are reading this story, thinking about team leadership, making money online, agile, and so forth. Some significant percentage are going to sign up for the RSS feed, perhaps buy the book. They are going to begin a process of discussion around what's important to them and what they're willing to pay for.

Dude. If that isn't marketing, I don't know what is. Great job.

(ADD: This looks like a great book, btw. I don't mean to impugn the author or make it out like he's purposely trying to trick anybody. HN is traditionally a startup forum. Just trying to take a fresh look at material like this from the viewpoint of somebody who might want to do it themselves one day. What I learned from this piece is that my current Agile Team Tune-Up email list of around 200 (http://bit.ly/15sz0Pl) needs to expand by about 40-fold before it would be worthwhile to start a conversation about books. Perhaps more than that depending on my engagement skills. This is really good stuff to know.)

slow clap Daniel, I think you are absolutely right. Having a real conversation is the point. KNowing what touches people is part of that too. But tools like leanpub didn't exist until a year ago. They enable a conversation while something is being done (like kickstarter a bit).

Kudos on the book! Need to check it out.

You're right about LeanPub. Interesting stuff. But I'm much more curious about how you built such a great following over the years, especially since we both work with similar audiences.

Flashy tools are cool and all, but people been making lots of money on books having conversations with target audiences long before things like LeanPub came along.

Good point. Perhaps this conversation needs to be continued elsewhere. You can ping me at roy at osherove dot com

I wish I could give 100 upvotes for this ;)

It is worth noting that people who do not have 8,000 blog subscribers or 10k twitter followers have used essentially the same playbook and made significant amounts of money doing so. Take Nathan Barry or Brennan Dunn, for example. I think some HNers know who they are these days, but a year ago, "nobody" knew them, and they both have published stats in the mid five figures for their first books.

Also, if you're savvy about things, the "$ per audience member" has enough dynamic range in it such that it makes up for a smaller audience size. "Revenue divided by Twitter followers" strikes me as a pretty silly metric, but if we accept it as a rough test of the proposition "Being Internet famous means you make mad bank, conversely, there is no profit without Internet fame", I have personal knowledge of enough data points to say that that metric has greater than X to 100X dynamic range.

It's also worth noting that 1) HN is it's own market now, with people who sell into the crowd, and 2) "I'm an expert on X" is becoming a cottage industry, with folks claiming to know all sorts of interesting things that may or may not be true.

Not trying to be cynical. Once again, my goal here is to separate the things we consume on HN from the actual business models in the background. Yep, it's certainly not as simple as $ per Twitter followers. There's also a Heisenberg Effect here, where the closer the HN audience looks at a thing, the more distorted the results we get are.

I'm a big fan of Brennan and Nathan's. I've also spent quite a bit of money on things the HN crowd thought was cool for startups which didn't amount to a hill of beans. It's very difficult having a discussion with 100K of your best buds about ways to find your own way in the X arena. Too many slightly diverse interests all playing out at the same time in the same forum :)

Geesh. I could start a list of high quality services offered by great HNers for startups. Things that, if you need them, could easily pay for themselves. Some of your stuff would be at the top of that list. It would not be a short list.

That would actually be an extremely useful list, if you fancied creating it...

Whoa, nice work! I did something similar with my book[1] and made about $3000 prior to final release (whole story here[2])

I'll be interested to hear how your Facebook ads pan out since I'm looking for more ways to drive traffic.

[1]: https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments

[2]: https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing

Yes, I'd be interested to hear about this too - my suspicion is that ppc ads will have a pretty woeful ROI for books (would love to be proved wrong).

Interested to hear about his experience with traditional publishing.

$12,000 was the advance paid on the book that I co-authored and published through Wrox back in 2008 (and again in 2010). I think it took around 12 months to earn out the advance and start receiving additional royalties.

Could you tell us, roughly, how the royalties work with Wrox publishing? How many copies did the book sell for $12,000 to come your way?

From what I have heard about traditional publishers, the royalties to the author are on the order of 5%, 10% of list price, which is not very interesting.

From personal experience [1] I can tell you that's the range.

I don't think that making lots of money is a very good reason to write a book - or if that is your reason, you're likely to be disappointed.

A better reason is that it's great resume material: it can be a springboard to getting recognition and open doors that you probably wouldn't enjoy otherwise.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Isapi-Chris-Wuestefeld/dp/15620...

I couldn't agree more. The effort involved means the hourly rate is fairly dismal. But right or wrong it immediately establishes you as an expert and certainly stands out on a resume.

This is a great (=true) answer, but doesn't it basically argue that Copyright is a false premise? The evidence seems to be that (1) 90% of the money does not go to the author; and (2) In spite of (1) it still makes sense to do what it takes to publish. Logically, one infers that a copyright monopoly is fairly replaced by something with 10% of the social cost, provided that "springboard to getting recognition and open doors" effect is neutral. Is this lattr assumption only possible through copyright? What if there was something like an Award or &tc stamped your resume?

It says nothing of the validity of copyright, but it says a lot about the importance of distribution and marketing.

On Leanpub, the author gets 90% royalties minus 50 cents per copy. So, on a $10 book, the author gets $8.50 (85%) royalty, and on a $20 book, the author gets $17.50 (87.5%).

Just because publishers have historically paid 10% royalties does not mean it has to be that way in the future.

So, questions of copyright should be a debate about what is fair based on a range of arrangements. Personally, I'm in favour of 14 year copyright, not the "author's death + 70 years" madness that exists now...

Sorry I can't get my hands on the sales volumes easily anymore. For us the royalties ranged from 5% and 15% depending on various conditions. For example:

- 12% from standard sales in the US and Canada,

- 5% from standard sales elsewhere,

- 5% from sales of the work at discounts of 56% or more,

- 10% from sales in electronic form,

- 15% from sales to book clubs, etc.

If you're curious, I shared all the numbers I could on a book I wrote for Apress several years ago (Beginning Ruby): http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/

Interestingly, $12K is over twice the average advance in the publishing world, which says something about the health of the technical publishing ecosystem.

If you don't mind my asking (customer discovery process here), what tools did you use to write the book?

I got around 6,000 advance on first edition as first time author, which covered first 6k copies sold. It was also split into three parts, each at every third of the book being done.

[Leanpub cofounder here.]

One great thing about this is that with Leanpub, the money you earn while your book is in-progress and selling is not an advance (i.e. a loan), it's earnings. You own your work, and you can sell it with a traditional publisher at any time.

We've had traditional publishers pick up a few Leanpub books, and attempt to get more. If you look at our bestsellers list (https://leanpub.com/bestsellers_lifetime) you can see why.

Leanpub raises the BATNA to doing a deal with a traditional publisher. Since we pay 90% minus 50 cents per copy in royalties, you earn $17.50 from a $20 ebook. The types of books that HN readers would write would do well to be priced at this price point. Authors choose the minimum and suggested price. So, if you sell 1000 copies at that price, that's $17,500; if you sell 5000 copies at that price, that's $87,500.

Because of this, lots of "niche" books that would sell fewer than 5000 copies (and not be worth it for a traditional publisher) are totally worth it to be done on Leanpub, just for the direct revenue. Plus if you consult, a book is a great business card...

Wow, that's fantastic. I recently published my own book last month and had a similar experience. Not quite the same profits (heh), but overall it was a great little adventure. I don't really do any marketing or promoting, I'm currently just getting by with a simple link on my website. I tried to bill it as a bathroom reader for the scientifically curious.

http://www.amazon.com/Zidbits-Learn-something-today-Volume/d...

One thing I found is that if you're going to write a book yourself, get someone (preferably multiple people) to check it for errors. Better yet, pay a professional. You may think you can find all the mistakes or grammar errors, but I guarantee that you won't. I learned the hard way.

I don't know if others had a similar experience, but writing an ebook version for the Kindle (through Amazon's KDP) was more difficult than writing an actual paperback. Createspace's paperback publishing seems to be more forgiving.

The nice thing about Amazon's publishing services is that they allow you to update and/or change your books if necessary.

Great to see 99designs in there. I am of the opinion that digital marketplaces will be the future of self-publishing services, by providing writers with the opportunity to connect with providers with 'in-house' experience. Can make a massive difference (as Roy's endeavours will attest to...).

I don't get it. A good book is an enormous amount of work.. probably several months full-time, at the very least, and a bigger risk than contracting for example. If it's about the money (which happens to be the title of the post), it doesn't look like a success to me. What am I missing?

Publishing a book often lets you double your contracting rate.

This a metric point that isn't talked about much. I would really like to see a metric for $/hr measured from the start of writing the book to book launch, or to when first sale occurred.

Like some of the other comments indicated, it will be quite low, but the payoff is in other areas such as recognition and profile elevation.

If you are keeping a blog anyway (like the author did), then the marginal effort to edit/repackage your best work into a book is not that great.

(Another data point: I have a math blog, and did the same ebook repackaging for 12 of my favorite topics; it's an Amazon as a Kindle ebook/paperback & PDF on my site, makes low 4-figures monthly).

If you write on an evergreen topic (management philosophy, math, etc.), the effort can definitely be worth it. Of course, having an established audience helps (So start the blog today! In 12-18 months of not-too-much writing effort, the book may emerge.)

Interesting that you did spec work for the cover. A very distasteful move.

I'm curious why that's distasteful.

He's probably one of those anti-spec work people. See http://www.nospec.com/faq

Good design is being commoditized and the marketplace has shifted. Some designers are fearful of change, but as a customer I feel I get a better end product because of the competition.

If you're a designer and don't like spec-work, don't do it. I don't write mobile apps for a similar reason.

Distasteful is exactly the right word. It means it's not in "good taste." It doesn't mean wrong, or strategically poor, just a violation of subjective standards of behaviour.

Quote often, such subjective standards exist to erect a barrier to entry for people outside of a social caste. For example, it was considered "In poor taste" for lawyers and doctors to advertise their services.

Of course, if you can't advertise, you lead to a situation where the lawyers with the best word-of-mouth and the best rolodexes take nearly all the profit from the business, and it's very hard for a newcomer to break into the business.

When I read the word "distasteful" or the phrase "in poor taste" or perhaps the word "unprofessional," I always ask myself, "Who benefits from discouraging this behaviour?"

If this is the same Andrew Hyde, then Andrew is actually a pretty respected dude having worked for Techstars, starting startup weekend, Ignite, TedX boulder etc... I think he even worked on a startup that focused on linking people to design companies.

I think in a way though you have hit on a great point that while Spec Work haters may have some good points (Less thought, analytics, design principles go into the designs you get from things like 99designs) however, I think a lot of it is just fear.. "These people are willing to make a logo or book cover that I would normally charge $2000 for, for $350).

I think there is room for both parties and find it funny that someone so focused on innovation would be worried about the innovation in the design area. The people willing to pay $350 for a logo probably aren't the type of customers a design firm would want.

Same situation exists in tech shops today, I feel. In my mind, outsourcing jobs to india and other places is the equiv. of contests on 99designs. you have many options, if you take the time you might find good quality, but it will never be as good as having an in house team with direct communications.

some companies have people in india, and others don't.

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