Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

#21

Post by boyter »

wingerlang wrote: post #19
boyter wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book itself took about 10 hours or so and was mostly just a collection of writings I already had and email responses.

I just checked it on Amazon, and there's not a whole lot of concrete information of what I will find in the book. I guess it is a niche indeed and people who are looking for it will know already. Maybe image algorithms? If you had to take a picture of the most interesting / telling page of the book (to try to sell the rest of it) which page would it be? And do you mind doing it.

I actually get almost no sales through Amazon. Most come through either Leanpub followed by Gumroad.

http://www.boyter.org/decoding-captchas/

That's the link that generates 99% of sales. It gives you a fair idea of what is contained. Email me via my profile if you need more information.

Re: How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

#22

Post by wingerlang »

boyter wrote: post #21
wingerlang wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked it on Amazon, and there's not a whole lot of concrete information of what I will find in the book. I guess it is a niche indeed and people who are looking for it will know already. Maybe image algorithms? If you had to take a picture of the most interesting / telling page of the book (to try to sell the rest of it) which page would it be? And do you mind doing it.

I actually get almost no sales through Amazon. Most come through either Leanpub followed by Gumroad. http://www.boyter.org/decoding-captchas/ That's the link that generates 99% of sales. It gives you a fair idea of what is contained. Email me via my profile if you need more information.

That seems to be what I was asking for, thanks. Seems interesting.

Re: How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

#24

Post by patrickyeon »

A little off-topic, but I found this interesting:

> "Specifically, a lot of the traditional guys price e-books at $20–30, often times more than the paperback/hardcover, which is so stupid."

It catches my eye when people get stuck on an e-book version costing more than a hard copy. It's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery, easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience) to somebody, but still seem like it should cost less. Personally, I'll gladly pay an extra dollar to get an e-book version for anything I'm only expecting to read once or twice.

Re: How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

#25

Post by umurkontaci »

patrickyeon wrote: post #24

A little off-topic, but I found this interesting: > "Specifically, a lot of the traditional guys price e-books at $20–30, often times more than the paperback/hardcover, which is so stupid." It catches my eye when people get stuck on an e-book version costing more than a hard copy. It's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery, easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience)…

Sure, it's about supply and demand, but the cost of distributing and ebook compared to a hard copy is close to zero. Plenty of products are artificially priced, but when this is very obvious, it feels like a rip-off.

Re: How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

#26

Post by Fannon »

patrickyeon wrote: post #24

A little off-topic, but I found this interesting: > "Specifically, a lot of the traditional guys price e-books at $20–30, often times more than the paperback/hardcover, which is so stupid." It catches my eye when people get stuck on an e-book version costing more than a hard copy. It's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery, easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience)…

If it's an DRM free ebook I'd understand your argument. But almost all ebooks you can buy have DRM and therefore you don't really own it, you can't lend it to friends etc. It's not just about the marginal cost and the distribution cost.

Re: How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

#27

Post by mherrmann »

SN76477 wrote: post #8
boyter wrote: post #4

Its quite amazing how much money you can make with self-published books. For example I wrote a book about Decoding CAPTCHA's. I have the top ranking post on most search engines for this which is the only marketing channel. I collect about $35 a month from it without spending any additional time marketing. Not very much but such a small niche it really surprised me. Oddly enough the main reason for writing the book wa…

I work in digital marketing. There is a whole scene of guys that do nothing but create simple digitally published ebooks. They will research the market for the niche. Research the topic in depth (something like frying chicken can be deciphered and recipe and method variations can be collected in 20 hours) Then create content on the niche and sell it. Even a $3 ebook can make several thousand dollars a year.

A friend of mine does exactly this with self-help books (NLP, hypnosis, dating, how to quit smoking etc.). He makes in the low five figures a month with this business. He identifies niches, by now using his existing audience. For example, he once had a blog post on a subject that received surprisingly many views. So he hired a writer to write a book about it, and then marketed it through his channels. It's surprisingly lucrative.

Re: How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

#28

Post by agumonkey »

umurkontaci wrote: post #25
patrickyeon wrote: post #24

A little off-topic, but I found this interesting: > "Specifically, a lot of the traditional guys price e-books at $20–30, often times more than the paperback/hardcover, which is so stupid." It catches my eye when people get stuck on an e-book version costing more than a hard copy. It's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery, easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience)…

Sure, it's about supply and demand, but the cost of distributing and ebook compared to a hard copy is close to zero. Plenty of products are artificially priced, but when this is very obvious, it feels like a rip-off.

Anything digital artefact seems to cost less because a electronic copy seems almost free (in time, space and energy).

Re: How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

#29

Post by giancarlostoro »

boyter wrote: post #16
neilsharma wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they get traffic to it? I'd imagine the vast majority of time is spent on marketing and not on content creation.

I just checked then. Say you write a book with the title "Cooking with Buttermilk" and built a unique book page you are likely to rank on the first page pretty easily for the search "cooking with buttermilk book". With a book you can always pull out excerpts for SEO value too. I would image if you could churn reasonable content for a low price this might be a sustainable business model, assuming you can pick the righ…

I wonder how many hits HN will get because of these key words, and a few others here.

Re: How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

#30

Post by IIAOPSW »

Mark my words this won't last.

It has happened to Itunes, Play Store, Steam, New Grounds and basically every website that let's users upload content for sale / ad money. I call it the fundamental problem of user generated content.

At the current expected payoff, soon every schmuck will be uploading his book. Quality won't matter. Eventually the torrent of content for consumers will be more than consumers can hope to consume, and the expected passive income for a given creative person will go to zero.

The thing all these sites have in common is that they promised to be a meritocracy for creative types. You simply make your work and then reviews come in and its judged fairly. Better content gets more money. No need to revert to tricks like paying a PR firm to market it. The reality is that when there is money to be made, people will rush in until there is no longer money to be made. Our mechanisms to separate the wheat from the chaff don't scale nearly as well as the economics of digital content distribution networks.

Don't believe me? Go to Steam Greenlight. Tell me how many games look interesting. Tell me how many uploads are happening per day. Can you keep up with it? Go to the app store. How much stuff is in the new section? How much looks good.

Post reply on HN