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How I make $400/month with my technical eBook
- GarrisonPrime 7y agoNice story. I’m not sure web scraping is a “niche” subject anymore though.
- ksahin 7y agoThanks! You're right it's not a "niche" subject. But Web Scraping with Java is probably a little "niche"!
- endothrowho333 7y agoThat's because OP is playing the internet marketing game (very good work, OP ;), in that world "niche" means "market vertical subset." For OP's case: > Market Vertical = Technology > Niche / Market Vertical Subset = Webscrapping Interesting how each world places its own connotations on words, and if you don't speak the "language" -- even though we're all speaking English! -- miscommunication is guaranteed.
- jameshart 7y agoYou would expect this book to be filed under ‘general interest’ in a bookstore?
- AlchemistCamp 7y agoNiche compared to something like nutrition, personal finance or even "learn to make web apps".
- tasogare 7y ago@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. 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...
- ksahin 7y agoHey thanks for the comment (better to write in English on HN I guess). Go for it! Self-publishing is obviously much better in terms of margins, but you have to take care of the distribution (in my case the blog was useful)
- alasano 7y ago"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 indeed have a medium term (non technical) project which is moving forward one step at a time but sometimes I tell myself it won't work..." The only way to know is to try your best. At least you won't have doubts about whether it could have worked and you'll undoubtedly learn something.
- baby 7y agoPerso j’ai choisit de publier avec une maison d’edition pour le premier bouquin. Je pense que ca aide.
- nif2ee 7y ago"How I now make 2x/month by posting a thread about how I make x/month"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- happy-go-lucky 7y agoAgree, but it's part of the game (:
- stanferder 7y agoI did learn something new though. I would have assumed that either zero or tens of thousands of people would buy a technical ebook, in the same way that any random musician's album usually makes $0 or becomes a hit. Small consistent sales are a surprise to me.
- mysterydip 7y agoThat's interesting. I wonder if that's the same reason indie developers will write books or make assets rather than games that may or may not be a hit.
- est31 7y agoCopied the rapper recipe.
- shiftpgdn 7y agoThis 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.) Seems fine if I load it in Firefox.
- Strom 7y agoYeah I've had the same issue with Chrome + uBlock Origin. The issue is there even with uBlock disabled. The workaround that I've found is that you first load twitter.com and then paste+go the actual tweet link in that same tab.
- Daniel_sk 7y agoSame issue.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- johnnycab 7y agoYou could give Nitter a try. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849744
- revicon 7y agoReminds me of this author’s post on here a while back on the command line tools he used to write books... https://thorstenball.com/blog/2018/09/04/the-tools-i-use-to-write-books/ https://thorstenball.com/blog/2018/09/04/the-tools-i-use-to-...
- batt4good 7y agoI'd almost question if $400/mo. warrants the time put into creating the book and subsequent marketing efforts to continue making $400/mo?
- sciencewolf 7y agoThis is a great point. It's $400 in sales per month. I'm willing to bet hosting, domain, any paid ads, any fees from leanpub, etc. makes up at least $100-200 a month. Probably be better to just do freelance/consulting on the side and make an extra $100/hr in a day.
- batt4good 7y agoGlad someone else shares my perspective. As a frugal person who watches their finances closely and also enjoys having profitable side-projects, said side-projects still have to be worth my time to really "enjoy" them if I intended to make money. As someone with a tech background, the cost and time involved in marketing / support is something I still underestimate.
- ativzzz 7y ago> Probably be better to just do freelance/consulting on the side and make an extra $100/hr in a day. Creating a technical book about a specific subject is a great way to advertise yourself as a freelancer/consultant as well.
- ksahin 7y agoOP here, the number I gave is after fees. The website is static, hosted (for free) on Netlify. It’s not just about the money as I said in the tweet! It’s about being (a little bit) paid for doing something I like (writing)
- sciencewolf 7y agoTotally fair, thanks for clarifying.
- nif2ee 7y ago
- michaelbuckbee 7y agoA few thoughts: 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! 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. 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. 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. All around, I just want to say nicely done and that I would love to see more developers do similar.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago> 2. OP could probably double their sales by offering the first chapter for free Maybe! IDK. What are the percentage of people that would make the the first chapter in and fail to convert - vs the people that would have bought then likewise never finished?
- xenonite 7y agoLet's say that preview shouldn't discourage "buying for the shelf", with the plan to read the book one day even if that never happens. I presume this accounts for a wealth of turnover in the book market.
- munificent 7y agoFor what it's worth, I offer my entire book [0] online for free, and I am very happy with both the print and eBook sales. [0]: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoI get that this model is successful (when it is)... But the counter-intuitiveness is hard for me to overcome.
- bweber 7y agoSounds 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027026
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Murkin 7y agoAlways wondered about the pricing, I wrote an eBook as well (https://redux-book.com/ https://redux-book.com/) But our pricing is WAY lower ($0-$16). Do people really pay $29-$69 for an ebook? Wonder if author tried other pricing to see if it can increase sales. Our biggest jump was once we moved to "pay as you like". PS. Made ~$20K over 3 years. PSS. If anyone has any suggestions on how to promote eBooks, would love to know
- polycaster 7y agoI imagine the more niche the subject is the higher you can go. Also, I'd expect that whoever buys books about web scraping has a very specific goal in sight.
- ksahin 7y agoYep people really pay $29-$69 for a 130 pages eBook! I tested all the prices between $9-$99 and I found these three tiers approach to be the most effective. To be honest, this was a very difficult subject for me, here was my thinking process: - How much does a physical tech book costs --> I checked the best sellers on Amazon and saw $25-$35 - Since I was selling an eBook, I was thinking that I should AT LEAST divide this price by 2. - Not only that, but I "only" had 3 years of experience, so I should again apply another discount. So I launched at $9...! Then I learned about pricing strategies, value-based pricing and all. I did some experiments, increasing the price every month, and I was completely shocked to see that the conversion rate was still the same. Hope it will help.
- baby 7y agoA 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). Is there something that I should really be doing while I’m writing the book? And not after? [1]: https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=Realworldcrypto&a_bid=ad500e09 https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=...
- unlikelymordant 7y agoYour conclusion has a misspelled word 'crypotgraphy'
- braythwayt 7y agoFirst, good job! 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. Third, I happened to use LeanPub to publish incrementally, and that worked very well for me. 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. 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. 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. Lastly, I didn’t get into writing for the money, but I started charging because: 1. People take words more seriously when they cost money. It’s true. It shouldn’t be true, but it’s true. 2. I take writing my words more seriously when I set a goal of asking people for money. 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. 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. 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.
- akudha 7y agowhat is your book about?
- braythwayt 7y agoThere are a couple, but this is the one that was somewhat successful in a monetary sense: https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix