How I Made $6K With My eBook
Published in 2010, this chronicle by @xutopia details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $6K.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 160 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 69 comments
Your approach to the whole thing was very much affiliate/internet marketing oriented: list building via PPC, squeeze page, product sold through ClickBank, generous kickbacks to affiliates, high price for low page count, artificial urgency created through a limited time offer, and so on.
Here is what I admire:
* You managed to do all this without pissing off geeks, who are very sensitive to bullshit and tend to have an holier than thou attitude towards these techniques.
* I didn't buy the book, but I suspect it's rather high quality, compared to most junk sold on ClickBank.
* Your landing/squeeze page is surprisingly classy. It manages to accomplish a good CRT, despite the lack of autoplaying audio/video, exit popups, and the typical centered column look.
In short, good job.
I am impressed with the fact that he made $6k. A few years ago, I took a writing class that was taught by a published author. At the time, she had 4 books published, all Sci-Fi, by a New York publisher. She told the class that she got an advance of $5k for her first book. When that sold well enough to cover costs for the publisher, she started receiving royalties. At the time, she had gotten about another $5k. So for about 1 years worth of work and over 5 years time, she made about $10k.
I know fiction is a different market than programming, but just the number comparison is interesting.
Interesting set of ideas, thanks for the link! I hadn't actually heard of the book before, but I'm intrigued. Maybe they should include a last step of "post about book in popular geek hangouts". I'd also be curious how many sales were generated after the blog post, if they'd consider revealing that data.
Also, "Help Me Promote My Book And Get 50% on Each Sale"
Now THAT'S a good way to sell a book. Hooray pyramid schemes!
Thanks for sharing! One of your questions was about laying out the ebook.
For my own, I started with InDesign but found it too painful to use (I only used it for the cover). I used LaTex (since I had some math equations) but the benefit is that it's all plaintext and easy to modify with quick scripts. It also gives you really nice typography. Again, this is probably most useful if you end up having math equations inside :).
I self-published a PHP programming book (http://www.littlehart.net/book ↗) and I've sold about the same number of copies as he has (~200 between PDF and LuLu) but (a) I didn't charge as much as he did and (b) didn't hook up with any affiliate marketing / promotion until October of 2009. Sold about 150 copies (PDF + Lulu) before I found my current publisher.