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

hellowebapp.com

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

#31

Post by jacalata »

limedaring wrote: post #11
wernercd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always found that some of my best learning... is teaching someone else. Its amazing how far back into basics I have to go when I start talking to other people about programming. Some of the most fun I've had was helping my brother through his "Intro to C" class. God I hate pointers...

A few chapters in the book I knew nothing about before writing them (Heroku, pieces of others) and the review process also pointed out a few places where my knowledge was actually wrong. As a whole, it's been a huge learning process, and that's pretty much been the best part.

So how did you get to the point of writing a book on topics you didn't know about? I always thought the process was more like "well, I know this shit backwards in my sleep, I should write a book!"

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

#32

Post by limedaring »

hsnewman wrote: post #27

Congrats on your marketing on ycombinator? Did it work?

I've sold 1 ebook package and 1 complete package on Gumroad with about 5,000 page views so far. :P But sharing information is fun too, revenue generation isn't the #1 goal.

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

#33

Post by limedaring »

jacalata wrote: post #31
limedaring wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few chapters in the book I knew nothing about before writing them (Heroku, pieces of others) and the review process also pointed out a few places where my knowledge was actually wrong. As a whole, it's been a huge learning process, and that's pretty much been the best part.

So how did you get to the point of writing a book on topics you didn't know about? I always thought the process was more like "well, I know this shit backwards in my sleep, I should write a book!"

It was more like having 50% of the book already known, and knowing that the book wouldn't be great without another 50% on top of it.

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

#34

Post by limedaring »

TheGRS wrote: post #29

Congrats on the book sales! I did not know about your book beforehand and have been looking for something like this, so I think I will give yours a shot.

Awesome. I also made a forum at discuss.hellowebapp.com for questions if you need any help. :)

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

#35

Post by cardeo »

Thanks for your post. I've also written a few code book but only have sold on gumroad. I'm going to try out amazon and leanpub as other sales channels to.

Question... did you have a large email list when you were selling your pre-orders? How did you get the word out? Just product hunt?

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

#36

Post by limedaring »

panorama wrote: post #25
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?

It's been dropping pretty steadily so I'm leaning towards releasing an intermediate book with more web app exercises. Makes a great upsell, I can bundle it with the beginner book, I can do another kickstarter (maybe). So expanding the empire and trying to get more reach.

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

#37

Post by limedaring »

cardeo wrote: post #35

Thanks for your post. I've also written a few code book but only have sold on gumroad. I'm going to try out amazon and leanpub as other sales channels to. Question... did you have a large email list when you were selling your pre-orders? How did you get the word out? Just product hunt?

Kickstarter helped a ton, promotion of the campaign helped me get to 800 email subscribers by launch day. Not huge, but not tiny either. Reddit (a mentioned in the post) was also almost as big as product hunt.

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

#38

Post by cardeo »

limedaring wrote: post #37
cardeo wrote: post #35

Thanks for your post. I've also written a few code book but only have sold on gumroad. I'm going to try out amazon and leanpub as other sales channels to. Question... did you have a large email list when you were selling your pre-orders? How did you get the word out? Just product hunt?

Kickstarter helped a ton, promotion of the campaign helped me get to 800 email subscribers by launch day. Not huge, but not tiny either. Reddit (a mentioned in the post) was also almost as big as product hunt.

800 is pretty good to have out of the starting gate. The number one hardest thing I've found in self-publishing is to build a good following or email list. I'm around 500 subscribers at this point. That's after about a year of working to build the list. Kickstarter is a good idea I hadn't really considered. Thanks again. oh and if you want to check out my books, head over to mattlambert.ca

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

#39

Post by dmlorenzetti »

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…

Off-topic comment on Leanpub -- Judging from the "best sellers" list, you handle a lot of software-related titles. Yet the categories pulldown in the bookstore has only two obvious software-related topics: the rather specific "Agile", and the rather broad "Software". I wonder whether you might not help browsers discover books of interest, by providing more categories and sub-categories (e.g., distinguish programming from data science, and under programming have separate sub-topics like Javascript, Python, and web).
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