
How I make $400/month with my technical eBook - ksahin
https://twitter.com/SahinKevin/status/1216343661459451906
======
michaelbuckbee
A 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.

~~~
ksahin
Hey thanks a lot for your comment!

For point 2) yes that's something I could have tried, I see a lot of people
doing this so I guess it works.

About point 3) I know that for SF folks making 150-200k / year, $400/month is
like pocket change. Just keep in mind that in other countries, like France
(I'm French) and many other European countries, a Junior dev is making 30-40k€
on average, and Senior around 45-55k€ (1)

[1]
[https://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Software_Developer/...](https://www.payscale.com/research/FR/Job=Software_Developer/Salary)

~~~
michaelbuckbee
You're welcome! Since you seemed to like the suggestions, here are two more:

1\. Try raising prices by 50% for a month, see if your actual unit sales
decrease.

2\. Record a video for each chapter and then offer that at a (much) higher
price point. $250+ - combine all this together and I bet you could crack
$1k/mo.

~~~
stockkid
> Record a video for each chapter and then offer that at a (much) higher price
> point.

Thanks for sharing. For technical topics, I think reading is much faster and
reliable because readers can skim and also copy code. I'm curious why it might
be effective to produce a video and price it higher?

~~~
austhrow743
Some people are almost completely price insensitive for amounts in the low
hundreds. They have a work budget that can be spent on training if they want,
picking the better value $60 option wont gain them anything at all, and
picking the $250 video option _might_ end up being useful _maybe_. Like if
they don't understand a concept the way its written, maybe it's explained
differently in the video. It doesn't really matter. They aren't stopping to
think about it. The cost is irrelevant to them and that package lists the most
things they get.

------
nif2ee
"How I now make 2x/month by posting a thread about how I make x/month"

~~~
stanferder
I 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
That'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.

------
braythwayt
First, 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
what is your book about?

~~~
braythwayt
There are a couple, but this is the one that was somewhat successful in a
monetary sense:

[https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix](https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix)

------
revicon
Reminds 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-...](https://thorstenball.com/blog/2018/09/04/the-tools-i-use-to-write-
books/)

------
shiftpgdn
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.)

Seems fine if I load it in Firefox.

~~~
Strom
Yeah 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.

------
bweber
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:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027026)

------
GarrisonPrime
Nice story. I’m not sure web scraping is a “niche” subject anymore though.

~~~
endothrowho333
That'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.

------
baby
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).

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=...](https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-
cryptography?a_aid=Realworldcrypto&a_bid=ad500e09)

~~~
unlikelymordant
Your conclusion has a misspelled word 'crypotgraphy'

------
Murkin
Always 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

~~~
ksahin
Yep 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.

------
tasogare
@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
Hey 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)

------
batt4good
I'd almost question if $400/mo. warrants the time put into creating the book
and subsequent marketing efforts to continue making $400/mo?

~~~
sciencewolf
This 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.

~~~
ksahin
OP 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)

~~~
nif2ee
>It’s not just about the money as I said in the tweet

probably web scraping, along with SEO, is one of the most shameless niches in
tech and is crammed with people with nearly zero tech skills and are only for
the money. Maybe for your case you just happened to love web scraping, but
this niche itself is the lowest of low. Thankfully Cloudflare and the low
barrier to entry/increase of supply make sure that no one can make much more
than he should (which is $0 imho).

~~~
throwaway55554
For all the people who somehow think HN is a better class than Reddit, I
present to you the above comment (and my own).

