6 ms·

How I made $3,300 on a short niche philosophy book

97 points by exolymph 6y ago

orf 6y ago
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51900848-based-deleuze https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51900848-based-deleuze for anyone interested. The reviews don't seem great, for what it's worth. And from a guy who tweets > "Not even being provocative but if you think Greta Thunberg has the maturity to guide global policy-making then you cannot object to Jeffrey Epstein paying 16-year-olds for sex." and gives courses on "how to be an intellectual". 1. https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1176703990056267777?lang=en https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1176703990056267777?lang=e...
- Barrin92 6y ago
  Oh this is Justin Murphy. He got some attention in the British press when he was kicked out of academia for a whole slew of public statements (https://thetab.com/uk/soton/2018/10/02/southampton-uni-launch-investigation-into-professor-who-compared-abortion-to-necrophilia-74712 https://thetab.com/uk/soton/2018/10/02/southampton-uni-launc...) he seems to have attempted to turn that into a sort of career by the looks of it
  - hopfscotch3 6y ago
    And I wish him nothing but the worst.
- prvc 6y ago
  He doesn't appear to be taking a position affirming or denying either the antecedent or consequent propositions in that tweet; he merely states a relationship between them.
  - orf 6y ago
    Yes, there is clearly a relationship between thinking “Greta has an opinion on climate change that I agree with” and “pedophiles are ok”. I’m glad that he brings this valued point to the discussion and I’m thankful someone so impartial brings this up during the very important “Agree with scientific consensus on climate change == agree with pedophillia” debate.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      > I’m thankful someone so impartial brings this up during the very important “Agree with scientific consensus on climate change == agree with pedophillia” debate. I mean, his point was fallacious in more than one ways, but we should always debate against the strongest possible interpretation of the other side's argument. Straw men are so easy to knock down that there isn't even much value in doing so.
  - tunesmith 6y ago
    > he merely states a relationship between them "a" relationship? It was an if/then relationship! That's hardly an amorphous undefined relationship! The if/then is the objectionable part! Man, sometimes abstract thinking gets really silly.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  I figure the author is here so 1. Maturity doesn't equal consent. 2. Even if legal, consent does not equal lack of manipulation 3. It's attacking a strawman, and is inherently provocative. Provocative doesn't have to mean wrong, but in this case it fails on it's premise. It's concerning to me the author doesn't have a basic understanding of why underage laws exist. It doesn't mean that anyone underage can't make mature decisions. It's there because it's a time ripe for abuse in a manner that's difficult to prove. Without getting very realistic, dark, and entirely off topic I can't go into details, but there are very good reasons why that exists. It doesn't mean they can't not be trusted to drive, or handle money, or whatever. There isn't a relation.
  - orf 6y ago
    > It's concerning to me the author doesn't have a basic understanding of why underage laws exist. I think he does, he is not stupid. I guess he just wanted attention and tweets like that play well into his base, who might not have the same understanding.
  - entropyneur 6y ago
    > It doesn't mean that anyone underage can't make mature decisions. It's there because it's a time ripe for abuse in a manner that's difficult to prove. I am unable to see the contradiction. If Greta was indeed guiding global policy (which she's not even remotely close to doing) there would exist very strong incentive to manipulate her and the aggregate potential harm would greatly exceed that of a single instance of child abuse. It's indeed a total strawman on the face of it, but I think the actual point he's making is that forbidden thoughts exists and the replies on Twitter are a proof of that point imo.
  - bondarchuk 6y ago
    You are replying to inflammatory twitter bait in a reply to not-the-tweeter on hacker news. Seriously, also @orf, why take this here? Clearly the impulse to reflexively argue about this is too big to handle for some. Go do this on twitter where you copied it from.
    - 6y ago
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  The biggest problem with his Greta Thunberg comment is that he started it with a lie. He did say it to be provocative. There are other ways he could have made the same point without being offensive, but then it would have been an uncontroversial opinion.
- jowday 6y ago
  Most of Murphy's discourse around "how to be an intellectual" focuses on how to support yourself financially and build an audience or platform while doing work that traditionally relied on support from academic institutions, not "how to be smart" or anything like that. Most of Murphy's actual intellectual work seems slapshod, but his efforts to figure out how to essentially do academic work outside of academia are interesting and seem to be in good faith. I don't get the same vibe from his as I get from alt-light or alt-right "Anti-academics". He doesn't spend an inordinate amount of time lambasting colleges for restricting free speech or supporting Marxists or any of the other standard talking points.
- centimeter 6y ago
  Looks like many of the reviews are from people who didn't even read it but want to cancel the author.
- hopfscotch2 6y ago
  Sick shit. Mods remove this post. This guy deserves no attention. Really he deserves much worse...
- post_below 6y ago
  After reading the post article (which was interesting), that tweet fits his MO, which seems to be "convert words into money without particular concern for quality or value". I doubt he actually believes the two things are comparable, rather he knows there's the right mix of pseudo logic and gratuitous drama to appeal to his target demographic.
massaman 6y ago
This reminds me of that time I made $200 on a short comment in HackerNews by pretending I was doing an hour of coding.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- xmprt 6y ago
  You can't say this and not include a link
  - centimeter 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502507
    - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
      Well, that is indeed a link.
      - fsckboy 6y ago
        the old hacker news switcheroo, hold my sliderule, I'm going in...
sokoloff 6y ago
> writing, which was my main project for about 2 months. > The writing itself only took about 70 hours (measured hours of focused time actually writing, not a vague estimate of my time at the desk) AKA: How I made slightly under $50/hr for about 2 months of work. I don't want to take anything away from the author (I've written zero books), but it's not an indication to me of an extraordinary outcome relative to the time, effort, and expertise required.
- awillen 6y ago
  The question, though, is how long he'll continue to make sales. I wrote my first short book on a couple of plane rides, and it has reliably done $50-100 a month in royalties since launch. I'm not doing anything at all now to maintain it, so the effective hourly rate of my time spent working on it just keeps going up.
  - jjice 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, what was the book? Seems pretty impressive to write a book in a few plane rides, good for you!
    - awillen 6y ago
      https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Small-Apartment-Buildings-Successful/dp/1520291337 https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Small-Apartment-Buildings-Succ... The first version was really short, something like 80 pages and priced at $2.99, though as you can see from some reviews people apparently thought that was too short even for that price. I ended up writing what was going to be a sequel but just added it into the original and upped the price. It's been interesting to see the price elasticity of it... I actually sell about the same number of copies at $2.99 (even when it's the longer version of the book) as I do at $6.99.
      - joshspankit 6y ago
        Sounds like a good enough reason to test higher prices even for the short book. Some percentage of people will always complain about cost, but I (and many others) have found that you actually get more of those complaints at lower price points. At a certain threshold price: the people buying already see the value in it no matter the length, or they see the value of their time as so high that taking the time to request a refund actually has a low ROI.
hmcamp 6y ago
> It all started on June 20th, when I tweeted an idea for a short book. It only got 6 retweets, but that was enough to take the idea seriously. What an epic product test
awillen 6y ago
Very cool, congrats. I've published a couple of books on Amazon with similar levels of success (https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Interview-Manager-Process/dp/1075470986 https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Interview-Manager-... is the most recent), and the one thing I'd strongly recommend to you is to try Amazon advertising. It's very simple to set up and has been profitable the whole way. Nothing earth-moving; in the last month I've spent about $30 in ads and that's yielded about $80 in profit (before the cost of ads). The sales from ads also help keep your book higher in search, which can generate organic sales. Congrats again!
- amrrs 6y ago
  Do you have any blog post on your experience of writing the book? I've got a few topics but I couldn't get started at all. Perhaps, the fear of not completing it or the # of pages I see with Packt Books (like ~300 pages). Do you have any tips for cases like this?
  - awillen 6y ago
    Unfortunately I probably don't have much of anything that'll be useful. The genesis of that book was that I was on sabbatical and had decided to get a job again, so I interviewed at a ton of places. I took a lot of notes for my own sake, and when I saw how many sales the most popular PM interview book on Amazon was getting, I figured if I even got 10% of those it'd still be worth my time to compile the notes into a book. In terms of general tips on writing this kind of thing, I just start with a big Google Doc and start writing sections about whatever's on my mind. If I'm thinking about a particular interview question, I write about it and leave it with some kind of a note to make it easy to find when I'm searching later. Once I've got a fair amount of content, then I start organizing and filling in the rest.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
> From beginning to end, I clocked 195.28 hours Given the author made $3,300 on the book, that comes about to $16.92/hour.
DVassallo 6y ago
Self-publishing is a very underrated way of exchanging knowledge for money with high ROI. I'm approaching $200K in 6 months from 2 self-published info products: one is a short ebook on AWS (160 hours to produce), and the other is a video presentation about building an audience (16 hours to produce). https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488 https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488
- amelius 6y ago
  Do you spend a lot of time on marketing/sales?
  - symplee 6y ago
    I'm sure it doesn't hurt to have 35,000 followers :) I've noticed a trend that these success stories usually flow out of an already existing user base. Does anyone have any success stories from someone with no social media presence?
    - DVassallo 6y ago
      Yes, I attribute practically all my sales to having an audience. I doubt I would have sold any if I didn't have any followers. That said, I only had 10K followers when I announced my first product, and 24K for the second. But I've seen a few people get similar results as I had even with 3-5K followers.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - DVassallo 6y ago
    Not a lot, but I didn't track the hours. The only promotion I did for my second product was sending 5 tweets and 2 emails, so maybe a couple of hours towards promotion. That made $85K in sales: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1270940834989355009 https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1270940834989355009 I promoted the first product similarly, but I also experimented a bit with paid ads and I invested some time there, so I'd say about 20 hours total. That product made $97K in sales, $13K of which from paid ads ($6K spent on ads).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jfb_20 6y ago
I made 3x more 10 years ago on also super short and on point http://jailfreebook.com/ http://jailfreebook.com/
kebman 6y ago
The recipe seems to be to make moldbug-esque similes and exaggerations, and POOF! now people will buy your book and give it a one star rating. :)
hopfscotch3 6y ago
@dang this violates your precious site guidelines
jungletime 6y ago
Are there any philosophers that make video games? I stopped playing because most games are so repetitive and intellectually boring.
- mjcohen 6y ago
  Don't know, but there do seem to be philosophers that have trouble dining.
ArthurRainbow 6y ago
as a warning to HN users unfamiliar with the author, this article should probably be taken with a grain of salt -- the guy is known to be somewhat of a jester within that very same niche philosophical community he talks about. think of him as the tai lopez of french theory internet enthusiasts he's built a reputation basically making memes & posting hot takes on twitter for retweets, and harnessed a sort of following among people who mostly get their knowledge of philosophy through memes and fb groups. the article probably reflects more of a marketing lesson than anything else you can judge that based on his very content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmdWfFrevzI; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmdWfFrevzI; he gives a very generalized account of the eternal return (one of the central concepts in D&G's, klossowski's and nietzsche's philosophy) which probably wouldn't get a passing grade in an undergrad philosophy course
- nyolfen 6y ago
  he does have many genuinely good and interesting takes; he is definitely purposefully inflammatory and i can’t really evaluate his philosophy writing as someone who doesn’t pay attention to any, but his blog has some excellent and well argued essays. this was my introduction to him and my favorite: https://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/07/13/supertoxic-masculinity/ https://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/07/13/supertoxic-masculinity/
StavrosK 6y ago
How I made $3,000 on a short, freely-available Python tutorial ebook: https://leanpub.com/learn-python https://leanpub.com/learn-python Spend two hours writing the tutorial, paste it into an ebook and wait ten years.

97 points by exolymph 6y ago

orf 6y ago

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51900848-based-deleuze https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51900848-based-deleuze for anyone interested. The reviews don't seem great, for what it's worth. And from a guy who tweets > "Not even being provocative but if you think Greta Thunberg has the maturity to guide global policy-making then you cannot object to Jeffrey Epstein paying 16-year-olds for sex." and gives courses on "how to be an intellectual". 1. https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1176703990056267777?lang=en https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1176703990056267777?lang=e...

Barrin92 6y ago
Oh this is Justin Murphy. He got some attention in the British press when he was kicked out of academia for a whole slew of public statements (https://thetab.com/uk/soton/2018/10/02/southampton-uni-launch-investigation-into-professor-who-compared-abortion-to-necrophilia-74712 https://thetab.com/uk/soton/2018/10/02/southampton-uni-launc...) he seems to have attempted to turn that into a sort of career by the looks of it
- hopfscotch3 6y ago
  And I wish him nothing but the worst.
prvc 6y ago
He doesn't appear to be taking a position affirming or denying either the antecedent or consequent propositions in that tweet; he merely states a relationship between them.
- orf 6y ago
  Yes, there is clearly a relationship between thinking “Greta has an opinion on climate change that I agree with” and “pedophiles are ok”. I’m glad that he brings this valued point to the discussion and I’m thankful someone so impartial brings this up during the very important “Agree with scientific consensus on climate change == agree with pedophillia” debate.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    > I’m thankful someone so impartial brings this up during the very important “Agree with scientific consensus on climate change == agree with pedophillia” debate. I mean, his point was fallacious in more than one ways, but we should always debate against the strongest possible interpretation of the other side's argument. Straw men are so easy to knock down that there isn't even much value in doing so.
- tunesmith 6y ago
  > he merely states a relationship between them "a" relationship? It was an if/then relationship! That's hardly an amorphous undefined relationship! The if/then is the objectionable part! Man, sometimes abstract thinking gets really silly.
devwastaken 6y ago
I figure the author is here so 1. Maturity doesn't equal consent. 2. Even if legal, consent does not equal lack of manipulation 3. It's attacking a strawman, and is inherently provocative. Provocative doesn't have to mean wrong, but in this case it fails on it's premise. It's concerning to me the author doesn't have a basic understanding of why underage laws exist. It doesn't mean that anyone underage can't make mature decisions. It's there because it's a time ripe for abuse in a manner that's difficult to prove. Without getting very realistic, dark, and entirely off topic I can't go into details, but there are very good reasons why that exists. It doesn't mean they can't not be trusted to drive, or handle money, or whatever. There isn't a relation.
- orf 6y ago
  > It's concerning to me the author doesn't have a basic understanding of why underage laws exist. I think he does, he is not stupid. I guess he just wanted attention and tweets like that play well into his base, who might not have the same understanding.
- entropyneur 6y ago
  > It doesn't mean that anyone underage can't make mature decisions. It's there because it's a time ripe for abuse in a manner that's difficult to prove. I am unable to see the contradiction. If Greta was indeed guiding global policy (which she's not even remotely close to doing) there would exist very strong incentive to manipulate her and the aggregate potential harm would greatly exceed that of a single instance of child abuse. It's indeed a total strawman on the face of it, but I think the actual point he's making is that forbidden thoughts exists and the replies on Twitter are a proof of that point imo.
- bondarchuk 6y ago
  You are replying to inflammatory twitter bait in a reply to not-the-tweeter on hacker news. Seriously, also @orf, why take this here? Clearly the impulse to reflexively argue about this is too big to handle for some. Go do this on twitter where you copied it from.
  - 6y ago
rootusrootus 6y ago
The biggest problem with his Greta Thunberg comment is that he started it with a lie. He did say it to be provocative. There are other ways he could have made the same point without being offensive, but then it would have been an uncontroversial opinion.
jowday 6y ago
Most of Murphy's discourse around "how to be an intellectual" focuses on how to support yourself financially and build an audience or platform while doing work that traditionally relied on support from academic institutions, not "how to be smart" or anything like that. Most of Murphy's actual intellectual work seems slapshod, but his efforts to figure out how to essentially do academic work outside of academia are interesting and seem to be in good faith. I don't get the same vibe from his as I get from alt-light or alt-right "Anti-academics". He doesn't spend an inordinate amount of time lambasting colleges for restricting free speech or supporting Marxists or any of the other standard talking points.
centimeter 6y ago
Looks like many of the reviews are from people who didn't even read it but want to cancel the author.
hopfscotch2 6y ago
Sick shit. Mods remove this post. This guy deserves no attention. Really he deserves much worse...
post_below 6y ago
After reading the post article (which was interesting), that tweet fits his MO, which seems to be "convert words into money without particular concern for quality or value". I doubt he actually believes the two things are comparable, rather he knows there's the right mix of pseudo logic and gratuitous drama to appeal to his target demographic.

massaman 6y ago

This reminds me of that time I made $200 on a short comment in HackerNews by pretending I was doing an hour of coding.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
xmprt 6y ago
You can't say this and not include a link
- centimeter 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502507
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    Well, that is indeed a link.
    - fsckboy 6y ago
      the old hacker news switcheroo, hold my sliderule, I'm going in...

sokoloff 6y ago

> writing, which was my main project for about 2 months. > The writing itself only took about 70 hours (measured hours of focused time actually writing, not a vague estimate of my time at the desk) AKA: How I made slightly under $50/hr for about 2 months of work. I don't want to take anything away from the author (I've written zero books), but it's not an indication to me of an extraordinary outcome relative to the time, effort, and expertise required.

awillen 6y ago
The question, though, is how long he'll continue to make sales. I wrote my first short book on a couple of plane rides, and it has reliably done $50-100 a month in royalties since launch. I'm not doing anything at all now to maintain it, so the effective hourly rate of my time spent working on it just keeps going up.
- jjice 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what was the book? Seems pretty impressive to write a book in a few plane rides, good for you!
  - awillen 6y ago
    https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Small-Apartment-Buildings-Successful/dp/1520291337 https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Small-Apartment-Buildings-Succ... The first version was really short, something like 80 pages and priced at $2.99, though as you can see from some reviews people apparently thought that was too short even for that price. I ended up writing what was going to be a sequel but just added it into the original and upped the price. It's been interesting to see the price elasticity of it... I actually sell about the same number of copies at $2.99 (even when it's the longer version of the book) as I do at $6.99.
    - joshspankit 6y ago
      Sounds like a good enough reason to test higher prices even for the short book. Some percentage of people will always complain about cost, but I (and many others) have found that you actually get more of those complaints at lower price points. At a certain threshold price: the people buying already see the value in it no matter the length, or they see the value of their time as so high that taking the time to request a refund actually has a low ROI.

hmcamp 6y ago

> It all started on June 20th, when I tweeted an idea for a short book. It only got 6 retweets, but that was enough to take the idea seriously. What an epic product test

awillen 6y ago

Very cool, congrats. I've published a couple of books on Amazon with similar levels of success (https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Interview-Manager-Process/dp/1075470986 https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Interview-Manager-... is the most recent), and the one thing I'd strongly recommend to you is to try Amazon advertising. It's very simple to set up and has been profitable the whole way. Nothing earth-moving; in the last month I've spent about $30 in ads and that's yielded about $80 in profit (before the cost of ads). The sales from ads also help keep your book higher in search, which can generate organic sales. Congrats again!

amrrs 6y ago
Do you have any blog post on your experience of writing the book? I've got a few topics but I couldn't get started at all. Perhaps, the fear of not completing it or the # of pages I see with Packt Books (like ~300 pages). Do you have any tips for cases like this?
- awillen 6y ago
  Unfortunately I probably don't have much of anything that'll be useful. The genesis of that book was that I was on sabbatical and had decided to get a job again, so I interviewed at a ton of places. I took a lot of notes for my own sake, and when I saw how many sales the most popular PM interview book on Amazon was getting, I figured if I even got 10% of those it'd still be worth my time to compile the notes into a book. In terms of general tips on writing this kind of thing, I just start with a big Google Doc and start writing sections about whatever's on my mind. If I'm thinking about a particular interview question, I write about it and leave it with some kind of a note to make it easy to find when I'm searching later. Once I've got a fair amount of content, then I start organizing and filling in the rest.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

> From beginning to end, I clocked 195.28 hours Given the author made $3,300 on the book, that comes about to $16.92/hour.

DVassallo 6y ago

Self-publishing is a very underrated way of exchanging knowledge for money with high ROI. I'm approaching $200K in 6 months from 2 self-published info products: one is a short ebook on AWS (160 hours to produce), and the other is a video presentation about building an audience (16 hours to produce). https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488 https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488

amelius 6y ago
Do you spend a lot of time on marketing/sales?
- symplee 6y ago
  I'm sure it doesn't hurt to have 35,000 followers :) I've noticed a trend that these success stories usually flow out of an already existing user base. Does anyone have any success stories from someone with no social media presence?
  - DVassallo 6y ago
    Yes, I attribute practically all my sales to having an audience. I doubt I would have sold any if I didn't have any followers. That said, I only had 10K followers when I announced my first product, and 24K for the second. But I've seen a few people get similar results as I had even with 3-5K followers.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- DVassallo 6y ago
  Not a lot, but I didn't track the hours. The only promotion I did for my second product was sending 5 tweets and 2 emails, so maybe a couple of hours towards promotion. That made $85K in sales: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1270940834989355009 https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1270940834989355009 I promoted the first product similarly, but I also experimented a bit with paid ads and I invested some time there, so I'd say about 20 hours total. That product made $97K in sales, $13K of which from paid ads ($6K spent on ads).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jfb_20 6y ago

I made 3x more 10 years ago on also super short and on point http://jailfreebook.com/ http://jailfreebook.com/

kebman 6y ago

The recipe seems to be to make moldbug-esque similes and exaggerations, and POOF! now people will buy your book and give it a one star rating. :)

hopfscotch3 6y ago

@dang this violates your precious site guidelines

jungletime 6y ago

Are there any philosophers that make video games? I stopped playing because most games are so repetitive and intellectually boring.

mjcohen 6y ago
Don't know, but there do seem to be philosophers that have trouble dining.

ArthurRainbow 6y ago

as a warning to HN users unfamiliar with the author, this article should probably be taken with a grain of salt -- the guy is known to be somewhat of a jester within that very same niche philosophical community he talks about. think of him as the tai lopez of french theory internet enthusiasts he's built a reputation basically making memes & posting hot takes on twitter for retweets, and harnessed a sort of following among people who mostly get their knowledge of philosophy through memes and fb groups. the article probably reflects more of a marketing lesson than anything else you can judge that based on his very content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmdWfFrevzI; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmdWfFrevzI; he gives a very generalized account of the eternal return (one of the central concepts in D&G's, klossowski's and nietzsche's philosophy) which probably wouldn't get a passing grade in an undergrad philosophy course

nyolfen 6y ago
he does have many genuinely good and interesting takes; he is definitely purposefully inflammatory and i can’t really evaluate his philosophy writing as someone who doesn’t pay attention to any, but his blog has some excellent and well argued essays. this was my introduction to him and my favorite: https://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/07/13/supertoxic-masculinity/ https://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/07/13/supertoxic-masculinity/

StavrosK 6y ago

How I made $3,000 on a short, freely-available Python tutorial ebook: https://leanpub.com/learn-python https://leanpub.com/learn-python Spend two hours writing the tutorial, paste it into an ebook and wait ten years.