
I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders - limedaring
https://hellowebapp.com/news/how-i-launched-my-learn-to-code-book-and-made-nearly-5000-in-pre-orders
======
peterarmstrong
Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you
enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books
wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work.

Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably
add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that
we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days in store credit,
etc. (Right now we have a 100% "happiness guarantee" where readers can get a
refund with 2 clicks, but this only works for 60 days, so we set our refund
policy to be 45 days.)

~~~
dmlorenzetti
Off-topic comment on Leanpub -- Judging from the "best sellers" list, you
handle a lot of software-related titles. Yet the categories pulldown in the
bookstore has only two obvious software-related topics: the rather specific
"Agile", and the rather broad "Software". I wonder whether you might not help
browsers discover books of interest, by providing more categories and sub-
categories (e.g., distinguish programming from data science, and under
programming have separate sub-topics like Javascript, Python, and web).

~~~
peterarmstrong
That's a very good point. Adding to backlog :)

~~~
jtwebman
It is nice to see people from the tools we use daily watch Hacker News and
actually listen to what we talk about. Thank you and I will be using you guys
for my first book on Functional Programming soon!

~~~
peterarmstrong
Great! Brian Marick's book on Functional Programming ([https://leanpub.com/fp-
oo](https://leanpub.com/fp-oo)) has done really well; looking forward to
seeing more of them!

------
lquist
Congrats on writing a book and launching it!

That said, for me, this is just one more data point that you don't write a
book to make money off of book sales. You do it to establish yourself as an
authority and earn from that new position.

~~~
wernercd
I've always found that some of my best learning... is teaching someone else.

Its amazing how far back into basics I have to go when I start talking to
other people about programming. Some of the most fun I've had was helping my
brother through his "Intro to C" class. God I hate pointers...

~~~
limedaring
A few chapters in the book I knew nothing about before writing them (Heroku,
pieces of others) and the review process also pointed out a few places where
my knowledge was actually wrong. As a whole, it's been a huge learning
process, and that's pretty much been the best part.

~~~
jacalata
So how did you get to the point of writing a book on topics you didn't know
about? I always thought the process was more like "well, I know this shit
backwards in my sleep, I should write a book!"

~~~
limedaring
It was more like having 50% of the book already known, and knowing that the
book wouldn't be great without another 50% on top of it.

~~~
gknoy
How did you find a subject that you felt you knew 50% about? :-) Given how
much I've learned from other people, and the web, I have difficulty feeling
like an _authority_ on any technical subject.

~~~
limedaring
I think beginner books are easier to get to that 50%. The subject I'm teaching
really isn't that hard, it just needs to be explained differently.

So, that said - maybe it's not feeling like an authority, but more feeling
like you have an alternate/interesting/different take on a subject.

------
limedaring
Happy to answer any questions about the process of writing a book! It's been a
surprisingly fun side-project that brings in some money too.

~~~
joshvm
Firstly congrats - as a recent HN submissions showed, half the battle is
simply finishing the damn thing.

A couple of questions, if you don't mind.

How did you support yourself while writing the book? And if you were working
another job, how did you find time?

Did you try any other marketing like giving away the first chapter or
blogging/newsletters?

I've been toying with the idea of writing a book on programming AVR
microcontrollers for a while, since most of the information online is
horrifically fragmented. I'm tempted to go down the website route and then
publish it separately as a cohesive ebook, but it looks like leanpub may be a
good option if you can publish individual chapters as you write them.

~~~
limedaring
> How did you support yourself while writing the book? And if you were working
> another job, how did you find time?

I am lucky that I have no rent, so the income from WeddingLovely (when I was
paying myself $20k/yr) as well as income from the Kickstarter (I raised $13k)
helped a ton. As for time, that's one of the main reasons why it took me a
year — I couldn't work on it full time.

> Did you try any other marketing like giving away the first chapter or
> blogging/newsletters?

I give away a sample to every subscriber to the email list, which includes the
first four chapters, I believe. There has been mentions on podcasts and some
newsletters, but nothing has matched the results from Product Hunt/Reddit yet.
Still working on it.

------
Andaith
I'm sorry to wander off topic, but your website just automatically redirected
me to some squarespace url( [https://tracy-osborn-
ic34.squarespace.com/config?frameUrl=/n...](https://tracy-osborn-
ic34.squarespace.com/config?frameUrl=/news/how-i-launched-my-learn-to-code-
book-and-made-nearly-5000-in-pre-orders) ). I'm assuming this isn't normal?

I really like how transparent you're being with the sales per platform, that's
rather interesting information to be sharing. I've also never heard of gumroad
before, so I'm really surprised by how it stacks up against amazon.

~~~
limedaring
Oh squarespace. That's my "actual" url, guess the custom domain stopped
working. Looking into it, thanks!

Gumroad is great, except that they don't market your book like Amazon does, so
they're kind of apples and oranges. Most people don't do both platforms and
it's been an interesting experiment trying both the hands-off let-Amazon-take-
care-of-it vs. more money yet I have to do all fulfillment Gumroad side. I'm
actually traveling right now and had to hire someone off of craigslist to ship
books for me while I'm gone, it's been kind of a PITA.

------
plicense
You can actually add videos to your Kindle book and sell it for a higher
price. Note however that the video version is supported only for Fire devices.
Checkout - Kindle Textbook Creator -
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002998671](https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002998671)

~~~
limedaring
Huh, had no idea. Thanks for the tip!

~~~
limedaring
FYI I just chatted with Amazon and unfortunately I can only do one version of
a Kindle book, so I'd have to get rid of my natural Kindle book in order to
sell an eTextbook version with videos. They said they're looking into allowing
creators to sell both though so fingers crossed that happens soon. I would
love to be able to sell a version of my video package through Amazon.

------
erikano
Judging by the title, this book seems targeted at beginners. Nonetheless, I
decided to buy it since I'm using Django in my current side project.

I have a question (not related to my side project). I maintain a list of my
eBook library where I put the following information about the eBooks I have
(data for this book in parentheses): Publisher (Leanpub), Title (Hello Web
App), Authors (Tracy Osborn), Published (), Purchased (2015-07-08), Last known
update (2015-05-08), Catalog Page
([http://leanpub.com/hellowebapp](http://leanpub.com/hellowebapp)), Read
duration (). As you can see, I was unable to determine what to put in the
Published field. I would like to have information for this on the form _Month
Year_. Could someone -- preferably Tracy or a Leanpub employee -- tell me what
to put there?

PS: If you'd like to see my eBook library list, you can find it at
[http://www.erikano.net/eBooks/purchased.htm](http://www.erikano.net/eBooks/purchased.htm).
Note that some of the books at the bottom of the list are ones I am not so
interested in reading any longer.

~~~
kfk
So you have books that are - Not started reading, not finished reading,
recommended. You are missing the "finished reading, but not recommended",
don't you think? Or maybe I am reading things wrong.

~~~
erikano
I have now made a new label for eBooks I discourage and I also wrote a
clarification about neutral books -- those without any legend. Thanks for
pointing out this element of confusion.

------
danso
Cool, congrats, and thanks for the writeup! I just bought your book on Amazon
though I'm a fellow Leanpub publisher...organizing non-Amazon documents on the
Kindle is just a pain. I'm assuming publishing to Amazon was pretty
straightforward since Leanpub generates a mobi version? The paperback
fees/revenues don't seem too promising...I'm going to take that as another
excuse to never publish on paper.

Another datapoint...a few years ago I published a draft manual on how to use
regular expressions. I've never finished it, but to date, I've accumulated
$1,200 from Leanpub revenues...even though I set the book's price to $0. Once
I have more time I'll finish it up...I was pleased to see that Leanpub made
the publishing workflow even easier by hooking into Github...I've been trying
to set up a system that simultaneously publishes via Leanpub while publishing
a free web version using the same files via Jekyll.

tldr: Leanpub is great...I haven't used other self-publishing platforms but I
can't imagine how much better something could be than Leanpub for those who
like hacking/writing in Markdown and in their own text editors.

~~~
limedaring
Yup - Leanpub made Amazon publishing super simple. I'm not a fan of their PDF
designs though so I still needed to do that on my own for the rest of my
digital files on Gumroad. :)

------
alex_g
'Learn by doing' \- did you go to Cal Poly?

~~~
limedaring
Yup!

~~~
alex_g
Nice! I'm a current student :)

------
philfrasty
Jeeeeeeez that conversion rate is almost criminal....from someone selling
physical products online :-) (732 views / 102 sales) Huge congrats on the
launch!

~~~
limedaring
To be fair, that was Product Hunt, where people are primed to buy. My
conversion rate is normally ~1-3%, and right now is a fraction of that since
most people are visiting for the article only.

------
hsnewman
Congrats on your marketing on ycombinator? Did it work?

~~~
limedaring
I've sold 1 ebook package and 1 complete package on Gumroad with about 5,000
page views so far. :P But sharing information is fun too, revenue generation
isn't the #1 goal.

------
arikrak
Very informative post! I just finished creating an online course on Ruby on
Rails and I'm thinking of creating an ebook from it.

I'm also looking for authors who would want to publish their programming books
or posts on my site [1], where they could include programming challenges and
other exercises.

[1] [https://www.learneroo.com](https://www.learneroo.com).

------
JustOneQ2
OT

This article prompts a thought:

I want to sell a price study we did as a startup (in Germany) to businesses.
Study is in PDF and price is around $300. Primary targets would be businesses.

Any suggestions on where to sell?

Probably best if the website offers also invoice payment and knows how to sell
to businesses? Some kind of personalization of the PDF (Buyer name etc.) would
be nice for 'copy protection'. Not sure about mobile? DIY?

Thanks :-)

~~~
limedaring
Gumroad does PDF personalization. You'd still have to do your own marketing
though!

------
aladine
Great article. Congrats on your successful ebook and how you analyse sales
through out different channels. I guess your next hacker news article will be
like: "I published an article on hacker news of how I get nearly $5k in pre-
orderes. And I got another $1k pre-order after the 10k visitors to my site. "

------
cardeo
Thanks for your post. I've also written a few code book but only have sold on
gumroad. I'm going to try out amazon and leanpub as other sales channels to.

Question... did you have a large email list when you were selling your pre-
orders? How did you get the word out? Just product hunt?

~~~
limedaring
Kickstarter helped a ton, promotion of the campaign helped me get to 800 email
subscribers by launch day. Not huge, but not tiny either. Reddit (a mentioned
in the post) was also almost as big as product hunt.

~~~
cardeo
800 is pretty good to have out of the starting gate. The number one hardest
thing I've found in self-publishing is to build a good following or email
list. I'm around 500 subscribers at this point. That's after about a year of
working to build the list. Kickstarter is a good idea I hadn't really
considered. Thanks again. oh and if you want to check out my books, head over
to mattlambert.ca

~~~
limedaring
Yeah, Kickstarter is a LOT of work but it's great at both building up an email
list as well as getting an "advance" for your work before it's released (of
course, only if the KS is successful.)

------
walterbell
Congrats on shipping! How did you decide which code/commands to include in the
book and which ones to publish online? This works well for ebooks (avoids
errata), but is less convenient for readers of the paperback edition.

~~~
limedaring
Do you mean the code that's on Github (like the installation instructions) and
not in the paperback? The install stuff is online because I highly suspect
it'll need to be updated often, and I didn't want the book to go out of date
quickly. Let me know if I misunderstood the question!

~~~
walterbell
Yes, I was referring to the code on GitHub.

~~~
limedaring
I'm assuming/hoping that most paperback readers will still have a computer in
front of them when going through the book since it's a tutorial, so hopefully
opening up the GitHub code isn't that much of an inconvenience. If they're
ideally reading without a computer, then missing that chapter shouldn't be a
problem.

------
ingend88
I bought your book on Kickstarter! I love it and would recommend anyone
starting out.

~~~
limedaring
Awesome! Apologies again for the delay in fulfillment. :)

------
capex
Congratulations! The inside pages of the book seem to have a custom design,
not what leanpub gives you by default. Its great and adds to the appeal of the
book. Have you applied that to your leanpub edition as well?

~~~
limedaring
It's offered in the 2nd package on Leanpub for an extra $5. :)

------
misslinda
I must be the only one who can't load the web page.

ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH A secure connection cannot be established
because this site uses an unsupported protocol.

~~~
limedaring
Try again now? Looks like Cloudflare was having issues for a bit.

------
TheGRS
Congrats on the book sales! I did not know about your book beforehand and have
been looking for something like this, so I think I will give yours a shot.

~~~
limedaring
Awesome. I also made a forum at discuss.hellowebapp.com for questions if you
need any help. :)

------
whitenoice
Congrats! How do you manage the inventory for hard copies? Like how many
copies do you pre-order for printing? (Sorry I have no knowledge in this
space)

~~~
limedaring
I ended up ordering 1,000 because I needed to fulfill the Kickstarter orders
(~300). I probably have about 400-500 left at this moment from my order in
May. 1,000 was a nice round number that also gave me a good bulk discount on
PrintNinja.com.

When I'm home, I do all the fulfillment myself, which took a lot of trial and
error to find the best packaging solution. Now I use sheet of bubble wrap
around each book, then put that in a cardboard mailer and tape it up, then I
use a custom script that uses EasyPost to generate labels (I really need to
write a post about that script, it's pretty awesome and has made my life _so_
much easier. Before I was using USPS.com and Paypal and both services are
terrible.) At the moment though I'm traveling abroad, so I hired someone off
of Craigslist to fulfill books, paying $1.50 per book.

No need to apologize! It took me a long time to figure out the above process.
Happy to answer more questions.

------
yitchelle
The cover design is always an interesting part of a book. Did you got through
a A/B testing phase before settling on this design?

Congrats on the launch!

~~~
limedaring
LOL I wish. I never feel like I have time to do A/B testing. I just went with
my instincts.

------
staticelf
Nice book, I will recommend it to my gf that I've been trying to introduce
programming for. Your book seems like a good starting point.

~~~
limedaring
Thanks!

------
alajarvela
The cover looks like it was formatted in CSS. Just kidding, congrats on the
book :)

~~~
limedaring
You wouldn't believe how many hours I spent on cover design. >_<

