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>, I launched a _course_ called The Complete Guide to Rails Performance. Since then, I have sold just over 500 copies, for gross revenue of $70,714.20 ($1350/we

by jasode 10y ago

>, I launched a _course_ called The Complete Guide to Rails Performance. Since then, I have sold just over 500 copies, for gross revenue of $70,714.20 ($1350/week). (The emphasis on "course" was mine.) It looks like much of the revenue was the full course which means videos and Q&A webinars. I'm not going to say it's clickbait but it's slightly misleading to put "Book" in the article's title since most tech authors including Douglas Crockford, John Resig, etc will not be able to pull $70k in 12 months whether they self-publish or let a traditional publisher like O'Reilly market the book. That said, congratulations on producing content that people want to pay for. Your numbers seem to be better than the author royalties from Pluralsight/Lynda for a single course.

nateberkopec 10y ago
Someone above already chimed in with results far better than mine, and they sold just a book (and it's like half the length of mine). So it is definitely possible. Part of the advantage of self-publishing is that you can be sophisticated in your product and not sell "just a book".
- jasode 10y ago
  >Someone above already chimed in with results far better than mine, and they sold just a book I saw that "Secret Sauce" also had a video package with a Slack channel so it's not clear to me if austenallred was talking about about receiving $124k for "just a book" with no value-added content. >be sophisticated in your product and not sell "just a book". Yes, that makes since. On that note... since you have a year's worth of data, have you determined if the "Slack channel" for the $99 package to be a big factor to encourage purchase?
  - nateberkopec 10y ago
    I don't really have a way to know the Slack channel's value because I don't offer a package without it. But I can say it's been very popular and is still very active a year after launch. The Slack channel was a last-minute afterthought when I was testing the product originally, but I kept it in and advertised it because so many of my testers thought it was a great idea.
adamwathan 10y ago
The most important thing you can do to increase your odds of success when releasing a technical book is to have multiple pricing tiers, adding additional content so you give people the option to pay you more than $30 or whatever you are charging for just the book. I released a book in May 2016 teaching PHP programmers how to refactor code with lots of loops and conditionals into collection pipelines. So far it's made about $180,000 CAD. ~$30,000 of that came from the "just the book" tier, at $29-$39 (depending on if the customer bought at the discounted launch price) ~$75,000 came from a "book + screencasts" tier, at $59-$79 ~$75,000 came from a book/screencasts/example application tier, at $135-$179 If I had only given people the option of the cheapest tier, I would've made less than half of what I made by adding additional tiers. The absolute bulk of the value is all in the cheapest tier, in fact the screencasts are the same examples from the book + just two bonus examples, and the example application is a project I already had that happened to use a lot of the principles in the book. You can take a look at the landing page here if you're interested: https://adamwathan.me/refactoring-to-collections/ https://adamwathan.me/refactoring-to-collections/ I think this sort of success is pretty achievable, I just followed the strategy outlined by Nathan Barry in his "Authority" book: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ Nobody is going to make a lot of money selling a $40 book through a traditional publisher. If you really want to produce content like this and be able to earn a living from it, you need to be a bit more strategic about it, which includes things like tiered pricing. I don't think it's deceptive to call it a "book" just because the author put in the extra effort to give people the option to pay a premium price for some bonus material; that's the right way to self-publish a book if you actually want to earn a decent income from it.
- sireat 10y ago
  Really nice landing page! Curious, how many of these buyers have some sort of corporate backing, ie businesses buying it for their employees? I was very sceptical at first to see people paying $100+ to learn how refactor their PHP code into functional style. Then again it sounds realistic enough: 1000 book buyers 1000 "screencast" buyers 500 full package buyers So there is a market for 2500 PHP developers willing to improve themselves. It just seems like a $100+ would a be lot to spend to progress beyond something like this article: https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/refactoring-pipelines.html https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/refactoring-pipelines.... EDIT: I mean writing functional map. reduce. filter. style code will be "nicer" looking in many cases, but is there really a financial payoff to refactoring loops?
munificent 10y ago
> most tech authors including Douglas Crockford, John Resig, etc will not be able to pull $70k in 12 months whether they self-publish or let a traditional publisher like O'Reilly market the book. I think they definitely could if they self-published, but not if they went through a traditional publisher. The cut that a publisher takes is insane compared to the value they provide. For fiction, it may be worth it because they act as a quality control filter and send a signal to readers that the book is may be better than the sea of self-published novels out there. For technical books, the market is totally different. It's not that crowded, and most readers will find the book through you, the author, and not through bookstores or the publisher's own marketing efforts. In fact, most technical publishers aren't even interested in you if you don't already have an audience. A publisher might help you get on bookshelves (though you can do that while self-publishing too), but I haven't seen much evidence that they will otherwise significantly increase your sales. Given how big a slice of the pie they expect to take, you should be confident that they will do something like increase your sales by 8-9 times before they are earning their keep. Publishers also help with the other production stuff: developmental editing, copy editing, design. I'm not convinced they are very helpful at the former—again you already need an audience and you are more clued in on what they audience wants than the publisher is. Copy editing you can just hire a freelancer to do and throw a relatively small fixed chunk of money at them for. Likewise for design. If you decide to self-publish, you do have to do lots of grunt work yourself—managing mailing lists, dealing with freelancers, talking to foreign publishers for translations, etc. All of that is a drag, and there's value in outsourcing it. The interesting question is whether you would be willing to pay a separate company something like 80% of your profits, forever in order for them to do that. Given that it amounts to writing a few emails and filling out some forms every now and then, that seems like a pretty steep price to me.

by jasode 10y ago

nateberkopec 10y ago

Someone above already chimed in with results far better than mine, and they sold just a book (and it's like half the length of mine). So it is definitely possible. Part of the advantage of self-publishing is that you can be sophisticated in your product and not sell "just a book".

jasode 10y ago
>Someone above already chimed in with results far better than mine, and they sold just a book I saw that "Secret Sauce" also had a video package with a Slack channel so it's not clear to me if austenallred was talking about about receiving $124k for "just a book" with no value-added content. >be sophisticated in your product and not sell "just a book". Yes, that makes since. On that note... since you have a year's worth of data, have you determined if the "Slack channel" for the $99 package to be a big factor to encourage purchase?
- nateberkopec 10y ago
  I don't really have a way to know the Slack channel's value because I don't offer a package without it. But I can say it's been very popular and is still very active a year after launch. The Slack channel was a last-minute afterthought when I was testing the product originally, but I kept it in and advertised it because so many of my testers thought it was a great idea.

adamwathan 10y ago

The most important thing you can do to increase your odds of success when releasing a technical book is to have multiple pricing tiers, adding additional content so you give people the option to pay you more than $30 or whatever you are charging for just the book. I released a book in May 2016 teaching PHP programmers how to refactor code with lots of loops and conditionals into collection pipelines. So far it's made about $180,000 CAD. ~$30,000 of that came from the "just the book" tier, at $29-$39 (depending on if the customer bought at the discounted launch price) ~$75,000 came from a "book + screencasts" tier, at $59-$79 ~$75,000 came from a book/screencasts/example application tier, at $135-$179 If I had only given people the option of the cheapest tier, I would've made less than half of what I made by adding additional tiers. The absolute bulk of the value is all in the cheapest tier, in fact the screencasts are the same examples from the book + just two bonus examples, and the example application is a project I already had that happened to use a lot of the principles in the book. You can take a look at the landing page here if you're interested: https://adamwathan.me/refactoring-to-collections/ https://adamwathan.me/refactoring-to-collections/ I think this sort of success is pretty achievable, I just followed the strategy outlined by Nathan Barry in his "Authority" book: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ Nobody is going to make a lot of money selling a $40 book through a traditional publisher. If you really want to produce content like this and be able to earn a living from it, you need to be a bit more strategic about it, which includes things like tiered pricing. I don't think it's deceptive to call it a "book" just because the author put in the extra effort to give people the option to pay a premium price for some bonus material; that's the right way to self-publish a book if you actually want to earn a decent income from it.

sireat 10y ago
Really nice landing page! Curious, how many of these buyers have some sort of corporate backing, ie businesses buying it for their employees? I was very sceptical at first to see people paying $100+ to learn how refactor their PHP code into functional style. Then again it sounds realistic enough: 1000 book buyers 1000 "screencast" buyers 500 full package buyers So there is a market for 2500 PHP developers willing to improve themselves. It just seems like a $100+ would a be lot to spend to progress beyond something like this article: https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/refactoring-pipelines.html https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/refactoring-pipelines.... EDIT: I mean writing functional map. reduce. filter. style code will be "nicer" looking in many cases, but is there really a financial payoff to refactoring loops?

munificent 10y ago

> most tech authors including Douglas Crockford, John Resig, etc will not be able to pull $70k in 12 months whether they self-publish or let a traditional publisher like O'Reilly market the book. I think they definitely could if they self-published, but not if they went through a traditional publisher. The cut that a publisher takes is insane compared to the value they provide. For fiction, it may be worth it because they act as a quality control filter and send a signal to readers that the book is may be better than the sea of self-published novels out there. For technical books, the market is totally different. It's not that crowded, and most readers will find the book through you, the author, and not through bookstores or the publisher's own marketing efforts. In fact, most technical publishers aren't even interested in you if you don't already have an audience. A publisher might help you get on bookshelves (though you can do that while self-publishing too), but I haven't seen much evidence that they will otherwise significantly increase your sales. Given how big a slice of the pie they expect to take, you should be confident that they will do something like increase your sales by 8-9 times before they are earning their keep. Publishers also help with the other production stuff: developmental editing, copy editing, design. I'm not convinced they are very helpful at the former—again you already need an audience and you are more clued in on what they audience wants than the publisher is. Copy editing you can just hire a freelancer to do and throw a relatively small fixed chunk of money at them for. Likewise for design. If you decide to self-publish, you do have to do lots of grunt work yourself—managing mailing lists, dealing with freelancers, talking to foreign publishers for translations, etc. All of that is a drag, and there's value in outsourcing it. The interesting question is whether you would be willing to pay a separate company something like 80% of your profits, forever in order for them to do that. Given that it amounts to writing a few emails and filling out some forms every now and then, that seems like a pretty steep price to me.