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Tell HN: My early access eBook over iOS made $120k in 1 year
316 points by jordanmorgan10 on May 27, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 85 comments
Hey HN -

I mostly stay in the shadows here, but for the one year anniversary of my first (ebook project)[1] I figured I'd write a blurb in case it's interesting to anyone.

I'm terrible at launching things, and take years to ship my own apps. After my last app was acquired, I wanted to fulfill a "moon shot" goal of mine - write a book in any form. I settled on adapting one of my more popular [blog posts][2] that I keep updated through each version of iOS into a five book series (one for each topic of accessibility, design, UX, APIs and a catch all bonus one). So far it has sold 1,534 copies and has made over $124,000. Now that things have settled, it makes about $2k a month on average.

I learned from my own launch history and decide to launch it in "early access", otherwise I'd never finish it. Launching it went great and was a day I'll never forget, as to that point - I had never made close to that much money in one day.

CONS: It's not all rainbows and sunshine though. I used to read posts like this and my heart rate would shoot up, thinking "What the heck - I could do that too!" and make some good money. While it is true that the project has been great for me financially (I have a stay at home wife and three kids), honestly life is not any different. I just save most of it, spend it on the 1,000 school activities my kids have or whatever life throws at me. I didn't make any splurge purchase.

I've also realized the real, grating reality of opportunity cost. At the one year mark, this book series is only half way done. I can't put into words how much I miss making software, because now - all I do is write. That has been my main takeaway through all of this - your time is valuable, and I cosigned a ton of mine away the moment I decided to embark on this.

PROS: On the positive side, I get messages from people starting out on iOS and veterans alike who are really enjoying the books. It's hard to put into words how motivating that is, to fell like you are doing a tiny little thing that somewhat matters to some people. I also love teaching and writing, so the project does appeal to me - but I've learned I need a better balance. When I shipped apps, all I wanted to do was write. Now, the opposite is true.

Anyways, if you are considering launching a digital downloads type of product, I'd say go for it. Tech-wise, it was trivial to get started:

Gumroad for sales Netlify for deploys Made the site from scratch using Tailwind Ulysses to write

I think in a world where there is a lot of "grifting" going on with courses, ebooks, etc - you can actually stand out if you stick to your word and show authenticity. For example, I promised updates every two weeks - and I've stuck to that, a year in.

TL'DR: Launching your own thing and making money is neat, but at the end of the day life doesn't really change at all. Consider your time investments. Try to truly help people.

Happy to answer any questions if you have any.

[1]: https://www.bestinclassiosapp.com [2]: https://www.swiftjectivec.com/a-best-in-class-app/




This is interesting in that it also demonstrates a strong market for really solid, up-to-date iOS developer documentation. The TOC indicates a really deep, modern approach, which I would appreciate if I were in the market. And leading with accessibility is a striking choice.


As a platform, iOS has absolutely incredible accessibility APIs. I thought it was a great place to begin because a lot of developers I’ve met are somewhat intimidated by accessibility programming, but there is a lot of low hanging fruit one can do to make their app accessible. From there, then you can deep dive. Also, thank you for checking it out!


I've scrolled through the site wondering who the author was, I have completely abandoned the iOS/Swift world now, and wondering how you could still make money with iOS books/tutorials considering the huge number of options (where popularity usually inversely correlate with quality) you have.

Then I saw "jordanmorgan10" :). For those who don't know, Jordan has been very active in this space for years, I remember him from the early days of Swift, it has not been an overnight success.


> it has not been an overnight success.

Amen to that! A long road to get to this point, no doubt. I hope to see you back in the iOS/Swift world someday, a lot has changed around here :)


You mention opportunity costs so I’m curious. This seems to have made $100k on release and maybe 24k per year, recurring, assuming no drop off, which is an iffy assumption.

Is this actually competitive with your earnings as a dev? Your post implies it’s more than you may usually have access to.

The answer doesn’t have to be yes for this to be a noteworthy success


At Buffer (my day job) our salaries are open and transparent so I can just say what I make, which is about $155 after bonuses and profit sharing.

So for opportunity cost, I’m kinda thinking about the apps I could’ve shipped or have worked towards in that time. In many ways, I was just hitting my stride and figuring out a lot about the business side of app development when I embarked on this project. So, I’m giving up shipping apps to “ship” the book, and that has been the hardest part for me.


Huge shout-out to Buffer for their pay transparency! I know that's a complete aside from your comment, but I really admire their pay transparency and continually evolving formula on pay.

My partner is doing her dissertation on pay transparency as a recruitment tool and Buffer's model was an inspiration for the study.


I would love to know more about this in relation to coops and democratic companies.

In a 60 second spike

https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-case-against-pay-transparency (:face-palm-cringey-emjoi:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan in the eponymous West Virginia pay transparency law. Excellent book.

https://trackbill.com/bill/west-virginia-house-bill-4428-kat...

Buffer ranks high in the search results. They are definitely a leader in SEO on this subject.

Keeping salaries private is a huge arbitrage advantage for the corporation. At work, when discuss compensation, I will openly and freely disclose my total comp. As a senior persion, this has shined a huge light in vast sea of darkness.

The autofaq for this search is interesting.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pay%20transparency


I'm a sheltered child when it comes to the work world since I have been an independent computer service professional since 2009. I read the case against pay transparency and wondered what your thoughts were on that subject. Because you facepalmed (BTW I wonder if there is a way to render emoji's in between colons). I see the problem the author is presenting. Not as an issue of it shouldnt be done, but more along the lines of, is the world really ready for it? BTW I am a big supporter of transparency. I just never thought about in in the aspects of compensation.


It isn't as cringey as I had originally thought. The thing I was recoiling at was basically "the man" HBR, telling folks it was a double edged sword which is true, but it really felt like it was stacking the deck against pay transparency while attempting to sound balanced and nuanced.

I think pay transparency is universally good, and that in orgs where it was introduced that they have other problems that are only brought to light by pay transparency.

I think if folks leave or complain, that is entirely fine. I have done that and see other folks do that when they realized the disparity, this is good. This is the market at work. For anyone that claims to be free-market, but also doesn't believe in pay transparency is a hypocrite and wants to keep employees in the dark while maintaining their window of arbitrage.


Ah so you did your day job too

That makes sense


FYI if you’re in the US you have a legal right to say what you make, regardless of whether your workplace has pay transparency.


Do you mean there exist places in the world where you can't legally tell someone else what you earn?


You having a legal right to discuss pay means your companies can't prevent it, and you could sue for wrongful termination if they fired you for it. This is as opposed to the government having no opinion, and a company could fire you for discussing it, with that act still being legal.


Bingo


I'm not in any way trying to diminish your accomplishments but just writing a note of caution to those trying to replicate your success before they plow a lot of time into writing a book: Jordan is a talented developer who has 27K followers on Twitter, who I imagine largely follow him for some of the same things that are in his book. He had a natural audience to market to (I imagine he had less than that a year ago). If you don't have 27K followers already interested, you may not be as successful with self publishing.


Great point. His twitter bio states how he's been solving bugs since ios4.

The fact that he's advocating how easy this could be, without alluding to his already-pre-existing direct user base -- one could relate this to Tim Ferris, IMO


> The fact that he's advocating how easy this could be

If that is the takeaway, I truly wasn't careful or thoughtful enough with how I worded this post. Definitely not easy, still isn't. To throw myself a bone though, I have never had a HN trend or anything - so I kinda wrote this on a whim instead of doing a blog post on the book's one year anniversary and walked away. Then it picked up on me.


This is important to note, however you can somewhat infer it from the post:

> I settled on adapting one of my more popular [blog posts][2] that I keep updated through each version of iOS into a five book series (one for each topic of accessibility, design, UX, APIs and a catch all bonus one).

They have a blog, around for years, and a post which is popular compared to others, constantly updated and comprehensive enough to be the basis of a book.

Really doesn’t sound like an overnight thing. And not surprising to pass 10K followers when you have such a free offering.


Smdh, people always forget to mention their existing following in these case studies.


I totally hear what you're saying - but to be honest, I didn't mention it because I feel weird about it in a way. When you make posts like these, you inherently draw attention to yourself - so I kinda try to be cognizant of that and not try to puff out my chest, so to speak. Hope that makes sense.


At that scale your audience is a legitimate marketing asset, not a humble brag.


A noble instinct but misplaced in this case. Regardless, thank you for sharing, and congrats on your accomplishments!


It is such a powerful factor, it cannot be left out.


Yes - it’s absolutely true that an existing audience is super helpful. No doubt about it. But I also like to tell people, it takes a long to get there too. But hey, there is never a perfect time to launch - so if someone is reading this and wanting to take a crack at it, I’d definitely encourage that!


Yea but it’s like you said there’s an opportunity cost. And if you don’t have a strong following, so therefore a lower probability of success, that calculation is even worse.


Well….they had a following and an asset they transformed.

Step one is build the asset and the following. The book is almost the easy part relative to that.

But some don’t realize they can just….provide something useful and people will follow them. And others do have an audience and don’t realize they can make a product for them.


Why not actually follow up on this, and find an example of someone with success [that you're advocating], that goes beyond or similar success without the twitter following.

Sounds like a simple, control experiment. It's just -- will you do it?


I can't find the link right on hand, but I believe it was on HN - but there is a guy who does Ruby courses if memory serves. When I looked, he had around 9k followers on Twitter, and his courses have made over 1,000,000 to date. If someone is reading this is and it past of the Ruby community, they may know who Im talking to.

While no books related but apps, I know 3 or 4 Indies who are a wonderful living (close to 1mil) with their apps and their social following isn't huge - but they are great of marketing outside of it. Not the same thing, but kinda the same thing.


Given the simplicity, perhaps you could do it instead?


Yes. Launch you must. There is never a perfect time to launch. Rome was not built in a day :)


Yes. With high follower numbers you can write ebook, fart in jars, sell bath water or tshirts and still make good money.


Looks like I should stop the book series then and go pick up some Ts from WalMart


But is it really? This is very counter intuitive as I hear stories about people with a lot of followers on insta that tried to sell smh and it did not translate to anything.


Thank you for that. Good point.


That’s the only key thing in the whole post.

Take away that, and no matter how good that book was, sales would be closer to 0.

Actually getting this success is more likely like this:

- spend last 5 years getting followers on Twitter by writing engaging content, reply to others.

- spend also many years in your website and include a mailing list

- email your email list regularly with very interesting things

- spend 1 year to write a book

- send a blast email and tweet about your new book: Most likely people will buy whatever you say at this point because they trust you already.

This is the secret formula, which is hard work and 99.99% can’t do this consistently. (In addition, but not really required, also be smart and bring something new to the table)

From the author:

- I wrote on my blog for nearly a decade before I could launch a book that I sold.

- Announce it, ask for email sign ups if they are interested, keep them in the loop, and then launch. The mailing list had about 1,000 people on it once I launched (about two months from announcing it to doing the early access launch)

- I settled on adapting one of my more popular [blog posts][2] that I keep updated through each version of iOS into a five book series

Actually full details are here

https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-best-in-class-book-beta-la...


Would you mind talking about how you launched your book with early access? I would love to know the details of that process (e.g. what platform/who you promoted it to/what you offered them/how that converts to becoming someone who owns the "full book")

I run an interview website called Taaalk, I'd be very interested to interview you about all of the above if you're interested. You can join here: https://www.taaalk.co/t/invite/publishing-a-book-with-early-..., invite code: 134563712


Sure, happy to! Thanks for reading.


For anyone want to follow along, we are Taaalking here: https://www.taaalk.co/t/publishing-a-book-with-early-access


> So far it has sold 1,534 copies and has made over $124,000.

So $80 per copy sold?


For the most part - yes. There have been team copies in there as well, which go for $400.


This is an awesome post! Thank you for sharing your journey. I tend to forget to give back by letting people know where I am at. For me this is a give back post by letting others know what its like for you. This post got me thinking about where I would want to be in the future with my endeavors. Right now, I am running [my own business](https://scottrlarson.com) full time repairing computers and offering technical solutions, but eventually I want to explorer making my [philosophical writings](https://www.scottrlarson.com/reflections/) more accessible and maybe support my family with my writings. As I get older and maybe cant provide the same level of service I provide now because of memory and physical issues.. I didn't think that I could compile my blog and other writings I have done into a book.


Articles like these is what keeps me coming back to HN. Highly inspiring.


That's why I wrote it, I was very hesitant at first because these kinds of posts are intrinsically "Look at me!"-ish, but at the end of the day I thought it was somewhat interesting, so I'm glad some folks are enjoying reading about it!


Extremely interesting! I'm really curious to see your process. Congrats mate, you're a selfmade man/woman!


Thank you! I wrote a lot about the nitty gritty in terms of process here if you’re interested in that: https://www.swiftjectivec.com/the-best-in-class-book-beta-la...


Kudos and props to @Jordanmorgan10. To write book on Swift which is an extremely competitive niche is hard enough, but to come out with a tome on the Swift API(Apple doc sucks donkeys) is even harder.As someone who is just started dabbling into SwiftUI, I started with the official docs and hackingwithswift series by Paul Hudson. But I will be sure to check your books out too. cheers


Thanks so much! Yeah, there’s a lot of information in this space but I think it’s a good thing. Lots of different options for people to learn!


That is absolutely amazing. Congratulations. I remember the day when I launched online video conferencing service HeyHello.video. I broke my server the day it was launched.

There were times the load on server was so much I would spin off new servers in real time and paid business users used to see difference right away.

The trick is to launch, get feedback and iterate. And above all listen to your customers.


Big +1 to all of that! Congrats on your gig - the launch day is always so much fun. I have a journal entry in Day One that reminded me that today was one year ago when it launched. I had screenshots of all the emails that came in for each sale, I couldn’t believe it at the time.


Congratulations. Does this actually make financial sense, for you? If you can write those books you could be consulting for a lot more than $2,000 a week, couldn’t you? How have you been marketing it? If you’re doing a lot less programming how are you making sure your advice is the latest and greatest?


Well financially speaking - it’s just icing on the cake, because I have a full time at job as an iOS developer at Buffer. We have four day work weeks, which has been huge in making any of this possible.

Marketing it mainly just through Twitter. I have written about iOS development for a long time, so I had somewhat of a small but established presence in that community. I’ve also done paid ads, sponsored podcasts and newsletters. Podcast sponsorships seem to have performed the best.

In terms of keeping fresh, that’s a great thought - but I because I spend so much time researching, reading docs, watching WWDC sessions, I feel more sharp than ever. I’m just aching a bit inside not being able to apply those lessons to my own apps. Once I finish the first version of all five books, I should be able to restore some balance there…I hope!


If everyone was like you and used that extra day off to be this productive (and/or help people) the world would be better off.

To be honest, I would probably use it to catch up on chores, appointments, maintenance, etc. But perhaps with some time I would create more useful things than I do now too.


Thanks! And yeah, I mean it’s a balance - to be honest my wife is very supportive of the whole thing and gives me time to write each week so that’s another big part of it.


Congrats! I think there's a big market for books that are more like docs.

Edit: I made a post to discuss continually updated books that could exist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31536185


Definitely! I’ve thought of so many different ways you could slice it too - I’d love to do a web site companion where you could bookmark stuff, links to Xcode Playgrounds files and other similar things.


Congratulations on your successful ebook project!

Super minor nitpick: instead of “My early access eBook over iOS made $120k in 1 year” shouldn’t the title be “My early access iOS eBook made over $120k in 1 year”?


I think he means "covering/about iOS" with the use of the word "over".


Inspiring. Do you agree with the saying "build it and they will come?"


…kiiiiiind of?

The thing is, I’ve made a lot of things that didn’t jack crap. I launched four apps before I made one that mattered. I wrote on my blog for nearly a decade before I could launch a book that I sold.

But on the other hand, I know several indies who hit it right out of the park. It’s so hard to say. It’s part marketing, knowing where your audience is, making something actually good and then luck. I think that there is an art to all of this, but having been on both side of the fence, I think dumb luck does factor in.

Also, quick story - an app I made in 2012ish, I thought for sure was gonna do great! It was a Christmas list app, and I launched it in November. I woke up the next day and I saw…one sale. Later that day, I found out it was my boss’ daughter who bought it. Haha, so, you never know!


What was your blogs following prior to launch? How did you market the book? Congratulations btw


I don’t have a social account for my blog, but on Twitter I have 27k followers which no doubt helps a lot.

In terms of marketing, it sounds so simple but it’s the first I’ve actually done this process:

Announce it, ask for email sign ups if they are interested, keep them in the loop, and then launch. The mailing list had about 1,000 people on it once I launched (about two months from announcing it to doing the early access launch).


Sounds like they came first:

> I settled on adapting one of my more popular [blog posts][2] that I keep updated through each version of iOS into a five book series


Thanks for sharing this, it's super interesting. I've been on the fence for a while about writing a book.

Would you mind sharing how you built up a twitter following? Just consistently posting useful tweets?


For sure - the thing with Twitter is it takes forever. At least it did for me. Like if there was a chart of my followers, it would show a little growth for a long time and then you kinda just “break through”. I write a lot, so that’s helped, I got connected with the indie scene so a lot of good friends and community there and of course, I try to tweet helpful stuff. I ran ads for the past years for my book, podcast spots and newsletter sponsorships and all of those things coalesce together to help with social stuff.

One thing that might help is I wondered - who do I love to follow? Why do I like following them? And for me, it was people who would teach me something, inspire me with their work or were just simply nice people to be around.


Congratulations and thank you for sharing, reading posts like this motivates me to take a second look at some of my back burner projects.

(Remember also to thank that spouse of yours at home!)


Absolutely, the spouse at home is honestly one the biggest reasons for any success I have - no doubt!


Well you haven’t quite sold me on writing my own book but I’m looking forward to reading yours!


Thanks! Happy to answer any questions about self publishing too - if you ever have any


@jordanmorgan10 awesome .. great work.. The website looks real nice .


:D :D


Is it possible to get sales details of hardcopy books from Amazon ?


Right now the books are only available via Gumroad. I'd love to do hard copies someday, but that's just a world I know nothing about at this point.


As far as I know, at this stage this book is available only in electronic form and is not sold on Amazon.


> honestly life is not any different. I just save most of it

Honestly, it feels like you don't know what it's like to not have money? That kind of financial security makes a huge difference.


Of course, it wouldn't make sense to spill my whole history on these things - but I would say that's not true.

I grew up with a single mom who provided for us on food stamps. She had about 6 jobs while I was in high school. My dad was not around for all of my adulthood, and my grandma provided a lot for us financially.

Because of these things, I learned the value of saving for a rainy day, and the value of money. So, when I stumbled into tech, and then I woke up one day and had money - I have always held on to it.


And yet you don't express any of that recognising the value in having that financial security in your post.


Love the domain name: swiftjectivec.com


Honestly, I love it too haha. The only thing is, it's a pain to spell it for folks especially outside of tech who can't relate to the wordsmithing behind it.


Have you got a link to tailwind Ulysses?

Is this even a human being writing this article or a machine learning experiment?


I’m very much human and also don’t quite know how to format HN posts very well.

Ulysses: https://ulysses.app/

It’s been a great place to write, rock solid sync and it formats code samples the best out of the software I’ve tried.


Fuck me. This guy has it made.


Not gonna lie reading this made me laugh, my wife asked me what was funny, and I tried to explain to her what Hacker News was and she then proceeded to drift off :p


[flagged]


That seems unnecessarily negative. While this book is moderately successful, pretty much the only reason to publish a technically-adjacent book is self-branding/marketing.


Well, I’ll reply even to burner accounts - so thanks for reading!




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