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I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

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Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#21

Post by peterarmstrong »

Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work.

Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days in store credit, etc. (Right now we have a 100% "happiness guarantee" where readers can get a refund with 2 clicks, but this only works for 60 days, so we set our refund policy to be 45 days.)

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#22

Post by Andaith »

I'm sorry to wander off topic, but your website just automatically redirected me to some squarespace url( https://tracy-osborn-ic34.squarespace.com/config?frameUrl=/n... ). I'm assuming this isn't normal?

I really like how transparent you're being with the sales per platform, that's rather interesting information to be sharing. I've also never heard of gumroad before, so I'm really surprised by how it stacks up against amazon.

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#23

Post by limedaring »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #21

Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work. Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days…

Yay! Leanpub is my top recommendation for anyone self publishing a book, the platform is really great. Hope it gets even bigger!

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#24

Post by limedaring »

Andaith wrote: post #22

I'm sorry to wander off topic, but your website just automatically redirected me to some squarespace url( https://tracy-osborn-ic34.squarespace.com/config?frameUrl=/n... ). I'm assuming this isn't normal? I really like how transparent you're being with the sales per platform, that's rather interesting information to be sharing. I've also never heard of gumroad before, so I'm really surprised by how it stacks up again…

Oh squarespace. That's my "actual" url, guess the custom domain stopped working. Looking into it, thanks!

Gumroad is great, except that they don't market your book like Amazon does, so they're kind of apples and oranges. Most people don't do both platforms and it's been an interesting experiment trying both the hands-off let-Amazon-take-care-of-it vs. more money yet I have to do all fulfillment Gumroad side. I'm actually traveling right now and had to hire someone off of craigslist to ship books for me while I'm gone, it's been kind of a PITA.

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#25

Post by panorama »

limedaring wrote: post #2

Happy to answer any questions about the process of writing a book! It's been a surprisingly fun side-project that brings in some money too.

Thanks for the writeup! I have a book coming out shortly as well.

What are your plans for keeping up book revenue moving forward?

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#28

Post by danso »

Cool, congrats, and thanks for the writeup! I just bought your book on Amazon though I'm a fellow Leanpub publisher...organizing non-Amazon documents on the Kindle is just a pain. I'm assuming publishing to Amazon was pretty straightforward since Leanpub generates a mobi version? The paperback fees/revenues don't seem too promising...I'm going to take that as another excuse to never publish on paper.

Another datapoint...a few years ago I published a draft manual on how to use regular expressions. I've never finished it, but to date, I've accumulated $1,200 from Leanpub revenues...even though I set the book's price to $0. Once I have more time I'll finish it up...I was pleased to see that Leanpub made the publishing workflow even easier by hooking into Github...I've been trying to set up a system that simultaneously publishes via Leanpub while publishing a free web version using the same files via Jekyll.

tldr: Leanpub is great...I haven't used other self-publishing platforms but I can't imagine how much better something could be than Leanpub for those who like hacking/writing in Markdown and in their own text editors.

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#30

Post by limedaring »

danso wrote: post #28

Cool, congrats, and thanks for the writeup! I just bought your book on Amazon though I'm a fellow Leanpub publisher...organizing non-Amazon documents on the Kindle is just a pain. I'm assuming publishing to Amazon was pretty straightforward since Leanpub generates a mobi version? The paperback fees/revenues don't seem too promising...I'm going to take that as another excuse to never publish on paper. Another datapoin…

Yup - Leanpub made Amazon publishing super simple. I'm not a fan of their PDF designs though so I still needed to do that on my own for the rest of my digital files on Gumroad. :)
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