

How I Made $6,000 in 7 Days with my Ebook - kroger
http://pedrokroger.net/how-made-6000-7-days-with-ebook/

======
SanderMak
Nice to see the results of your previous post!

> I was so afraid that PayPal would freeze my account that I called to let
> them know that I was going to sell a book and that I might have a few sales.

You know something's wrong when your customers are fearing you. Seriously, how
did PayPal end up like this?

~~~
josefresco
I'm no fan of PayPal, but this customer was aware that a sudden onslaught of
sales (where before there was none) might set off some sort of alarm with his
payment processor. Seems like a legitimate concern for both the processor and
a pro-active measure by the customer.

We all know the horror stories of frozen PayPal accounts but I can't say I can
blame PP given the scope of what they have to deal with when transferring
money and dealing with regulators/government.

~~~
mhurron
Informing them in this instance does seem more like the situation where you
tell your bank your traveling overseas between X and Y.

It's reasonable to assume a flood of cash would be enough to set off various
alarms.

It is a shame you have to be so wary of PayPal, but in this case it did lead
them to do what would be the right thing no matter what you were using to
cover payment processing.

~~~
kroger
Calling them it's not a big deal, but they could make it clear. If you email
their support you'll get these long and vague emails. I've learned my lesson:
if I need anything from PayPal I'll call them presto. Once I was accessing
PayPal while using a VPN (I was on a public wifi) and they blocked my account.
I called them and the matter was solved very efficiently in seconds. But, how
on earth would I know that my account would be blocked if I used a VPN?

~~~
mhurron
I don't think anyone would say the way PayPal handles things is the right way,
including the clarity of their communications. I just saw the story
highlighting that you probably should have a better relationship with your
financial institutions in general.

In this case the fear of dealing with PayPal lead the author of the link to do
what would have been the right thing no matter who they were dealing with.

------
mathattack
Great success! I suspect that it was A LOT more than 7 days of effort to put
it all together. It was 7 days harvesting a lot of prior effort. (And I hope
the harvesting turns into a lot more than $6K!)

------
tessierashpool
just want to say that I've read this book and it's quite good. I've
recommended it to people both in the context of an ebook I wrote on a similar
topic (music hacks) and in person.

its introduction to reading music is especially good. it describes musical
notation as a graph DSL with lots of legacy terminology. a very clear and
sensible intro to that subject, and it made me think about it in a new way (as
someone already familiar with the topic).

~~~
kroger
Thanks! What's the link to your ebook?

~~~
tessierashpool
[http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2013/11/new-ebook-
hacking-m...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2013/11/new-ebook-hacking-
music-and-midi-and.html)

~~~
kroger
Very nice!

------
arthurjohn
An interesting topic for a book turns into profit, I am wholly unsurprised.
Congrats on your success :)

I've been curious about trying something similar, but I don't want to put my
home address in emails to a mailing list. Did you end up using your address or
doing something like a PO box?

------
doseofreality
Hacker News promotion does not seem like a repeatable marketing strategy.

~~~
ivan_ah
It is a bit of hit and miss, yes. But if the post makes it to the homepage it
immediately gets a "HN seal of approval" which carries a lot of weight.

With my book stuff, I've had about a 50% success rate of "making the
homepage." If you're offering something interesting, they will click ;)

------
qeorge
Can anyone comment on the conversion rate of PayPal vs Gumroad? Are customers
more comfortable with PayPal vs inputting their card directly on Gumroad, or
vice versa?

~~~
meryl
I can't talk to gumroad specifically but I run a shopify store that offers
both shopify's built in payment CC processor and paypal as payment options.
56% of people checkout with paypal vs pulling out their credit card.

My guess is if you have a paypal account with your credit card on file it's
much easier to just checkout with paypal than manually type in your card info.

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sotirisk
Honestly the posts with the format "How I made this much money in a
ridiculously small time-frame with my low-price-product/service" CAN be a bit
off-putting to the reader who is not familiar with this kind of posts. I have
already read quite a lot of those and still whenever one of them pops up on my
news feed I still get the feeling that the writer comes out as a cheater
rather than a marketing genius.

~~~
graeme
I don't follow. How does selling a product to a willing niche count as
"cheating"?

$6000/$15 = 400 customers. That's not a gigantic amount.

------
Aloisius
There are times that posts on HN really read like blog comment spam (e.g. My
mom made $6,000 last week at home).

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zrail
Congrats! That's really great.

~~~
kroger
Thanks!

------
geolisto
Well done.

