
Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author - joshearl
http://blog.leanpub.com/2014/01/leanpub-ebook-sales-guest-post.html
======
jonnathanson
Congratulations! Leanpub seems really interesting, and to a greater and
greater extent, I'm itching to try it out for my next book. I love reading
stories like these.

A consistent theme that comes up in many of these success stories is the
importance -- if not quite the all-importance, then perhaps the primary
importance -- of email marketing.

Your list is your launchpad. It's also your church: it's where your customers
and followers are inspired, and from which they go out into the world to
evangelize. It's your customer support lifeline. It's a compelling data set,
to be analyzed frequently. It's all of these things. By and large, the most
successful self-pub, blogging, and Kickstarter projects I've seen have been
those with well-cadenced, legitimately interesting email updates. (As a very
successful blogger once put it: 'I'm not writing a blog; I'm writing a mailing
list. The blog is lead-gen.')

Email marketing sometimes gets a bad rap because of its vague associations
with spam. Good emails are not spam. They're not auto-blasts. They are
important communications to a base you have been cultivating and nurturing by
hand. If you've got a modest, but high-quality list, and you're sending high-
quality emails, you're in a better position than someone shotgunning crap at a
larger, lower-quality list. Good emailing is non-scalable, hard work.

~~~
sireat
Only slight problem with e-mail marketing is, how in the world do you build
your e-mail list?

It is easy to sell 1000 copies of your book if you have a 5000 e-mail
subscribers interested in your topic.

If you write a good book on a useful topic but have no e-mail list, you will
not do very well.

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wikwocket
I have seen a lot of articles like this pop up recently.

I'm curious; do people think that any given software guy or other specialist
can just decide to launch a book based on their domain knowledge, and have a
shot at success like this? Or are these all the self-selected outliers, the
minority of self-publishers that actually make a buck and so decide to blog
about it instead of quietly abandoning the project?

I've gone so far as to draft an outline table of contents for a possible book
myself, but I never know if it would have a shot at taking off, or just be
likely to flounder in obscurity.

~~~
nonrecursive
It sounds like what you might be asking is - it worth it to risk taking the
time and effort to write a book? I'm going through the process right now, so
maybe my thoughts can help.

I'm writing a free online book, "Clojure for the Brave and True"
([http://www.braveclojure.com/](http://www.braveclojure.com/)), that has been
picked up by No Starch. A couple of the chapters, "Start Using Emacs" and
"Functional Programming" have done pretty well here on HN. I've made about $1k
on leanpub so far for the unfinished book (ebook buyers will get the full No
Starch ebook when it's ready).

The main thing that has worked for me has been to constantly get feedback from
readers. Every time I release a chapter I tweet it, send it to my mailing
list, and post it on reddit and G+. The comments have been overwhelmingly
supportive. If it weren't for that kind of enthusiastic feedback, I'm pretty
certain I would have given up.

Other people might have other ways to stay motivated, but this make the
project much more "real" for me. I feel proud to provide my readers with
quality content, and that they would choose to spend their time reading my
work. It also helps to get those leanpub emails saying that someone has paid
for the PDF - it's very encouraging when people pay for a free resource. To
sum up this point - try thinking about what kind of process will make the risk
worth it for you.

The second thing that's worked for me has been to write in a way that I,
personally, find entertaining. When I sit down to write, I crank up the Lady
Gaga and let out my inner idiot. It's way more fun that way, and people seem
to like the result.

I hope this helps!

~~~
teh_klev
Just curious about this:

"I've made about $1k on leanpub so far for the unfinished book (ebook buyers
will get the full No Starch ebook when it's ready)."

What happens if you burn out and decide you can't finish the book? Do people
get their money back or did they pay less for a beta/unfinished copy and
accept that this is what they're paying for?

~~~
peterarmstrong
[Leanpub cofounder here.]

We have an unconditional 45-day refund policy. This is so readers of the in-
progress book can judge whether they think it has stalled. If so, they can
decide whether they've gotten their money's worth, and if not, get a refund in
2 clicks.

In situations where books are abandoned after being dormant for a long time,
we can't issue refunds since we literally can't. (We take PayPal and we take
credit cards via PayPal Website Payments Pro, and we can only do refunds for 2
months with credit cards.) So, in these cases, it is up to the author to make
things right.

This happens very, very rarely though: having actual readers of your in-
progress book that you will disappoint if you stop is a great incentive for
you to finish.

~~~
waqf
> _we literally can 't._

This is hard to believe. Couldn't you mail them a check or something?

~~~
peterarmstrong
What I meant was that we can do a compensating transaction (say a PayPal
payment etc), but that it would not be a "refund" in terms of being a refund
onto their credit card.

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sergiotapia
Congratulations on the success! Leanpub is the best platform I have ever
bought a book on hands down.

They just send you an email with a link to the downloadable pdf or you can log
in and see your purchases with simple Download links. No DRM, not third party
software downloaders, just a simple File > Save As.

Really transparent and makes you feel safe buying things.

~~~
leoplct
Are you not afraid that people may send each other the .pdf file without
paying ?

~~~
RobAley
As an author on Leanpub
([http://www.leanpub.com/php](http://www.leanpub.com/php)) and one who's book
has made it onto at least one torrent tracker site, I can say that if your
book is worth pirating, it will be, and by trying to protect it with DRM you
are only going to lose readers. It's only my first book, but it doesn't seem
to have hurt my sales figures, and I've had plenty of complimentary feedback
about the leanpub experience.

~~~
alan_cx
From what I can make out, if something is worth pirating, other people will
happily pay for it. IMHO, the main question is; are there enough people paying
to make it worth it in itself, regardless of people sharing it freely? If so,
then the sharing doesn't matter.

------
nathanbarry
Congrats Josh! Happy to have been a small part of the inspiration for you.
Thanks for paying it forward by sharing your numbers.

My experience matches yours when it comes to email, Twitter, and other sales
channels.

One thought: If you add a second price tier (a course with videos and add-ons
at $50-100) your revenue will double.

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thejteam
Does anybody have any experience with selling books like this outside of the
software realm? By which I mean publishing beta books as you go or bundling
other resources. and charging a premium. It seems to be something that the
software community finds acceptable, but does this extend to other fields?
Non-fiction or fiction.

~~~
poopsintub
I'm not sure how you would have a beta version of a fiction book. That would
be like selling jumbled ideas. I have a friend whose mother just released her
first book on amazon and I believe Barnes and Noble. It sat up next to Koontz
on the amazon best selling new releases for the first few days in that
category. She put it on sale for $.99 as a new release, then I assume, will
raise the price to $2 or $3 eventually. If you find the right audience, and
know how to promote and market it well, people will buy.

~~~
lenepp
"I'm not sure how you would have a beta version of a fiction book. That would
be like selling jumbled ideas."

I know what you mean, though I'd like to point out that there is a serious and
successful historical precedent for the publication of unfinished fiction:
serial publishing (the way big novels used to be published, cf. Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoy, Dickens, et al). Novelists would publish chapter-by-chapter, before
finishing the whole thing, and would even change their plans for their novels
in response to feedback from the public.

Now, of course for novels published serially, people do expect that at least
each published chapter is finished when it is published, and is not a draft
subject to change. However, as a former academic type, I find reading early
drafts to be fascinating and meaningful; watching the jumble untangle is an
exciting process. I've spent a lot of time reading early drafts of poems, and
comparing how different versions of the same work are published by the author
over time.

(btw I work at Leanpub)

~~~
peterarmstrong
I talk about this at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA#t=935](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozO0kOnqmyA#t=935)
... The serial publishing bit starts at 14:03

------
danso
I also have to second the notion of Leanpub being a great platform for
distribution...being able to go from Markdown to PDF/mobi/etc is wonderful.
I've half finished a book on regular expressions (and shamefully haven't done
updates in awhile) but earned about $1,700 so far, despite the book being free
and not doing much promotion for it besides occasionally tweeting it:
[https://leanpub.com/bastards-regexes](https://leanpub.com/bastards-regexes)

The publish-as-you-write model is similar to Greenlight's Early Access, and
easy to maintain on the author's side.

~~~
pitchups
That is great - but just curious, how do you earn $1700 from a free ebook?

Edit : Never mind - figured out by visiting the link to the book on Epub :)

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carlmcqueen
I find it more refreshing to read success stories of $16,920.12 rather than
$250,000 on my first book success stories.

Perhaps it comes from the fear of the 'I know a guy who...' stories that you
hear as an anecdote why someone who really shouldn't take a huge risk is about
to take one.

Congratulations on your first book, hopefully the lessons learned will lead to
continued success with future endeavors.

~~~
nathanbarry
That actually made a big difference for me as well. When I had heard about
self-published ebooks making money it was 37signals making $400,000+. That
didn't inspire me at all since they had a massive audience.

But when I read Sacha Greif and Jarrod Drysdale share their numbers from small
audiences (an audience size I knew I could achieve) I was inspired. They made
$6500 and $8000 from their ebook launches.

Since I didn't have any kind of an audience at the time I thought if I did
half that I would consider it a success. Turns out I did 2x!

I still share numbers, since I always have, but I agree that it is the smaller
numbers that are truly inspiring.

------
eloff
My brother writes scifi books and publishes them on Kindle. Without getting
too specific his take home has been over $10k per book, with 3 books published
this year. Which is amazing for a new author. Lookup Jasper T Scott on amazon
if you're curious.

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kfk
Maybe I should really start writing that book about pragmatic finance for
SME's. I never started because I always found the task of writing a book
daunting, but writing bit by bit seems a great idea.

------
teh_klev
Well done Josh, this looks like a book I'm going to pony up for on pay day.

How did you manage the editorial, proof reading and technical review aspects
of the book? Do LeanPub provide these services or do you do this yourself, if
so how?

~~~
peterarmstrong
Authors do this themselves on Leanpub. But the thing is, readers of the in-
progress book actually end up providing a lot of that in many cases, by
providing feedback to the author via email, Disqus or Twitter. (Development
and technical editors function as proxies for readers. We've found that
readers also do a good job of that!)

[Leanpub cofounder here]

~~~
teh_klev
Thanks for the clarification.

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gadders
I think LeanPub needs to work on how it categorises its books. Most seem to be
software but are showing up under weird categories like Fitness.

~~~
peterarmstrong
Authors categorize their books themselves. Using the wrong category is
presumably a mistake in autocomplete...

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mattjaynes
Images appear broken in this article. For a version of the article with
working images, see the author's personal site:
[http://joshuaearl.com/selfpublishing/lessons-learned-
from-a-...](http://joshuaearl.com/selfpublishing/lessons-learned-from-a-year-
as-a-self-published-author/)

~~~
spatten
Yes, sorry about that. The images are fixed now.

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Cyph0n
Very nice post. The most interesting part for me was your pricing - brash, yet
smart at the same time. Good for you, man. You'll hit $50k in not time. Keep
it up.

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SDMattG
Thank you so much for sharing :-) Great inspiration for my own little project!

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kimonos
This is inspiring! This is very useful for me as I want to venture on
something this month.

