
How I made $3,300 on a short niche philosophy book - exolymph
https://theotherlifenow.com/how-i-made-3300-on-a-short-niche-philosophy-book/
======
DVassallo
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
Do you spend a lot of time on marketing/sales?

~~~
symplee
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
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.

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

~~~
xmprt
You can't say this and not include a link

~~~
centimeter
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502507)

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Well, that is indeed a link.

~~~
fsckboy
the old hacker news switcheroo, hold my sliderule, I'm going in...

------
orf
[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=e...](https://twitter.com/jmrphy/status/1176703990056267777?lang=en)

~~~
devwastaken
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.

~~~
bondarchuk
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.

~~~
orf
Describing the personal pilosophy of an author of a philosophy book is clearly
relevant. It's not an argument, it's a statement of fact: "The author of this
book holds these views".

Like most people I feel a certain way about his views but in the original
comment I don't share those. If you find it uncomfortable to see those views
discussed then I would humbly suggest that it may be your problem to deal with
and not mine.

~~~
nyolfen
the author plays a game on twitter that many people do, which is ‘find an
apparent contradiction in the prevailing morality and make a
reprehensible/funny argument with it’; robin hanson for example is the master
of this game. this may not be obvious without context but it is literally just
negative attention bait to gain an audience

------
sokoloff
> 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
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
Out of curiosity, what was the book? Seems pretty impressive to write a book
in a few plane rides, good for you!

~~~
awillen
[https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Small-Apartment-Buildings-
Succ...](https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Small-Apartment-Buildings-
Successful/dp/1520291337)

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
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
> 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
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-...](https://www.amazon.com/Product-Management-Interview-Manager-
Process/dp/1075470986) 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
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
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.

------
ArthurRainbow
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
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
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.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> 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.

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

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

------
jfb_20
I made 3x more 10 years ago on also super short and on point
[http://jailfreebook.com/](http://jailfreebook.com/)

------
kebman
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. :)

