A few thoughts:<p>1. OP isn't as bad a designer as he thinks. The goal isn't a beautiful page so much as "no trust destroying indicators" like weird fonts, bad formatting etc. Good Job!<p>2. OP could probably double their sales by offering the first chapter for free with email signup on the landing page and then offering a time-limited discount as part of an email sequence.<p>3. We (in the dev space) have a weird view of these sorts of things as we make relatively so much in salary. But $400/mo is a decent car payment, another way to thinking about this is that OP wrote himself a free car.<p>4. OP could have taken all this knowledge applied it in his job, etc. but by making this very public and consumable objective proof of his knowledge he's put a solid milestone in his career path. I've friends that have done similar and then picked up six figure consulting gigs, lucrative job offers, etc.<p>All around, I just want to say nicely done and that I would love to see more developers do similar.
First, good job!<p>Second, I also made what I consider very good money (for a side-project) from an ebook using a markdown-based approach. All I will say is that I broke six figures in USD and/or Euros.<p>Third, I happened to use LeanPub to publish incrementally, and that worked very well for me.<p>Fourth, yes you can charge real money for a technical e-book. I think I have consistently asked for around $30.00, although the interface allowed people to pay less.<p>I always allowed people to read the book online for free, and people still paid. Did they pay out of a sense of fairness? Did they pay for the convenience of reading an offline copy in iBooks, Kindle, and/or PDF? You be the judge.<p>Many, many people paid more than the minimum. I have now dropped the minimum to zero, and I still get people paying me more than $20.00.<p>Lastly, I didn’t get into writing for the money, but I started charging because:<p>1. People take words more seriously when they cost money. It’s true. It shouldn’t be true, but it’s true.<p>2. I take writing my words more seriously when I set a goal of asking people for money.<p>Combining 1 and 2, I felt that whenI set out to charge money for writing a book, I would write a better book. Whether people paid me or not, writing a better book would be better for me, so I couldn’t lose.<p>Those of you seeking to write for money may have different goals. But those two things drove my decision to charge and to change a non-trivial amount of money.<p>If you had told me that by charging less, I would make more revenue, I still might not have charged less, because I wanted to force myself psychologically to write a book worth $30.
Reminds me of this author’s post on here a while back on the command line tools he used to write books...<p><a href="https://thorstenball.com/blog/2018/09/04/the-tools-i-use-to-write-books/" rel="nofollow">https://thorstenball.com/blog/2018/09/04/the-tools-i-use-to-...</a>
This is mostly unrelated but does anyone else now have a problem with clicking "See Replies" on twitter and having the page not do anything in the last few weeks? (Chrome running uBlock origin and twitter in dark mode.)<p>Seems fine if I load it in Firefox.
Sounds like the author is using a similar stack to me, markdown -> PDF, epub. I wrote a bit more about the writing process and consideration for traditional publishers here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027026" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027026</a>
A few questions: I have been writing a book (about cryptography[1]) and have done very light advertising for now (even though the book is available in early access).<p>Is there something that I should really be doing while I’m writing the book? And not after?<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=Realworldcrypto&a_bid=ad500e09" rel="nofollow">https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=...</a>
Always wondered about the pricing, I wrote an eBook as well (<a href="https://redux-book.com/" rel="nofollow">https://redux-book.com/</a>)<p>But our pricing is WAY lower ($0-$16).<p>Do people really pay $29-$69 for an ebook? Wonder if author tried other pricing to see if it can increase sales.<p>Our biggest jump was once we moved to "pay as you like".<p>PS. Made ~$20K over 3 years.
PSS. If anyone has any suggestions on how to promote eBooks, would love to know
@ksahin: En lisant le titre je me suis dis que vous deviez en vendre des tas par mois, puis en voyant le funnel... auto-édition bien sûr ! C'est impressionnant qu'avec une petite/moyenne audience on peut se 40% du revenu minimal si on ne passe pas par le circuit traditionnel.<p>En tout cas merci pour les chiffres et les plateformes utilisées, c'est motivant. J'ai en effet un projet à moyen terme (non technique) qui avance pas à pas mais des fois je me dis que ça ne fonctionnera pas...
I'd almost question if $400/mo. warrants the time put into creating the book and subsequent marketing efforts to continue making $400/mo?