Maybe I should really start writing that book about pragmatic finance for SME's. I never started because I always found the task of writing a book daunting, but writing bit by bit seems a great idea.
Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
11–20 of 54 posts
Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
#12[deleted]
Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
#13Does anybody have any experience with selling books like this outside of the software realm? By which I mean publishing beta books as you go or bundling other resources. and charging a premium. It seems to be something that the software community finds acceptable, but does this extend to other fields? Non-fiction or fiction.
Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
#14Congratulations on the success! Leanpub is the best platform I have ever bought a book on hands down. They just send you an email with a link to the downloadable pdf or you can log in and see your purchases with simple Download links. No DRM, not third party software downloaders, just a simple File > Save As. Really transparent and makes you feel safe buying things.
Are you not afraid that people may send each other the .pdf file without paying ?
Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
#15Congratulations on the success! Leanpub is the best platform I have ever bought a book on hands down. They just send you an email with a link to the downloadable pdf or you can log in and see your purchases with simple Download links. No DRM, not third party software downloaders, just a simple File > Save As. Really transparent and makes you feel safe buying things.
Are you not afraid that people may send each other the .pdf file without paying ?
Cheaters will always cheat, and let me tell ya: I've spent more money on Leanpub than I have anywhere else with "proper drm". :) I guess developers have an honor code towards their fellow software developers.
Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
#16Congratulations! Leanpub seems really interesting, and to a greater and greater extent, I'm itching to try it out for my next book. I love reading stories like these.
A consistent theme that comes up in many of these success stories is the importance -- if not quite the all-importance, then perhaps the primary importance -- of email marketing.
Your list is your launchpad. It's also your church: it's where your customers and followers are inspired, and from which they go out into the world to evangelize. It's your customer support lifeline. It's a compelling data set, to be analyzed frequently. It's all of these things. By and large, the most successful self-pub, blogging, and Kickstarter projects I've seen have been those with well-cadenced, legitimately interesting email updates. (As a very successful blogger once put it: 'I'm not writing a blog; I'm writing a mailing list. The blog is lead-gen.')
Email marketing sometimes gets a bad rap because of its vague associations with spam. Good emails are not spam. They're not auto-blasts. They are important communications to a base you have been cultivating and nurturing by hand. If you've got a modest, but high-quality list, and you're sending high-quality emails, you're in a better position than someone shotgunning crap at a larger, lower-quality list. Good emailing is non-scalable, hard work.
Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
#17Congratulations on the success! Leanpub is the best platform I have ever bought a book on hands down. They just send you an email with a link to the downloadable pdf or you can log in and see your purchases with simple Download links. No DRM, not third party software downloaders, just a simple File > Save As. Really transparent and makes you feel safe buying things.
Are you not afraid that people may send each other the .pdf file without paying ?
As an author on Leanpub (http://www.leanpub.com/php) and one who's book has made it onto at least one torrent tracker site, I can say that if your book is worth pirating, it will be, and by trying to protect it with DRM you are only going to lose readers. It's only my first book, but it doesn't seem to have hurt my sales figures, and I've had plenty of complimentary feedback about the leanpub experience.
Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
#18Images appear broken in this article. For a version of the article with working images, see the author's personal site: http://joshuaearl.com/selfpublishing/lessons-learned-from-a-...
Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
#19Congrats Josh! Happy to have been a small part of the inspiration for you. Thanks for paying it forward by sharing your numbers.
My experience matches yours when it comes to email, Twitter, and other sales channels.
One thought: If you add a second price tier (a course with videos and add-ons at $50-100) your revenue will double.
Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
#20Images appear broken in this article. For a version of the article with working images, see the author's personal site: http://joshuaearl.com/selfpublishing/lessons-learned-from-a-...
Yes, sorry about that. The images are fixed now.