Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author • Hacker News Board

Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author

#51

Post by mfjordvald » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 2:43 AM UTC

peterarmstrong wrote: post #29

teh_klev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious about this: "I've made about $1k on leanpub so far for the unfinished book (ebook buyers will get the full No Starch ebook when it's ready)." What happens if you burn out and decide you can't finish the book? Do people get their money back or did they pay less for a beta/unfinished copy and accept that this is what they're paying for?

[Leanpub cofounder here.] We have an unconditional 45-day refund policy. This is so readers of the in-progress book can judge whether they think it has stalled. If so, they can decide whether they've gotten their money's worth, and if not, get a refund in 2 clicks. In situations where books are abandoned after being dormant for a long time, we can't issue refunds since we literally can't. (We take PayPal and we take…

If we need to issue refunds beyond the 2 months we can contact our PayPal representative and have them take care of it, chances are you can do that too since it sounds like you have a fair amount of volume.

Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author

#52

Post by e12e » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 2:59 AM UTC

thejteam wrote: post #13

Does 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.

While that's not really what they do, perhaps Tor Books[1] employees might have a perspective on this? Personally I think it would be really hard to do a good work of fiction without some help -- it is of course possible to hire an editor by yourself -- but I think the kind of support a "real" publisher is able to give you would be really valuable in this case.

[1] http://www.tor.com/ (For those unfamiliar, Tor was very early with DRM-free e-books as well as offering the first books of series for free download (expecting readers to purchase following books)).

Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author

#53

Post by peterarmstrong » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 3:24 AM UTC

waqf wrote: post #47

peterarmstrong wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Leanpub cofounder here.] We have an unconditional 45-day refund policy. This is so readers of the in-progress book can judge whether they think it has stalled. If so, they can decide whether they've gotten their money's worth, and if not, get a refund in 2 clicks. In situations where books are abandoned after being dormant for a long time, we can't issue refunds since we literally can't. (We take PayPal and we take…

> we literally can't. This is hard to believe. Couldn't you mail them a check or something?

What I meant was that we can do a compensating transaction (say a PayPal payment etc), but that it would not be a "refund" in terms of being a refund onto their credit card.

Re: Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author

#54

Post by sireat » Fri, Jan 10, 2014, 11:09 AM UTC

jonnathanson wrote: post #16

Congratulations! 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 custom…

Only slight problem with e-mail marketing is, how in the world do you build your e-mail list?

It is easy to sell 1000 copies of your book if you have a 5000 e-mail subscribers interested in your topic.

If you write a good book on a useful topic but have no e-mail list, you will not do very well.