How I make $400/month with my technical eBook
Published in 2020, this chronicle by @ksahin details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $400/month.
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 Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE 302 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 56 comments
First, good job!
Second, I also made what I consider very good money (for a side-project) from an ebook using a markdown-based approach. All I will say is that I broke six figures in USD and/or Euros.
Third, I happened to use LeanPub to publish incrementally, and that worked very well for me.
Fourth, yes you can charge real money for a technical e-book. I think I have consistently asked for around $30.00, although the interface allowed people to pay less.
I always allowed people to read the book online for free, and people still paid. Did they pay out of a sense of fairness? Did they pay for the convenience of reading an offline copy in iBooks, Kindle, and/or PDF? You be the judge.
Many, many people paid more than the minimum. I have now dropped the minimum to zero, and I still get people paying me more than $20.00.
Lastly, I didn’t get into writing for the money, but I started charging because:
1. People take words more seriously when they cost money. It’s true. It shouldn’t be true, but it’s true.
2. I take writing my words more seriously when I set a goal of asking people for money.
Combining 1 and 2, I felt that whenI set out to charge money for writing a book, I would write a better book. Whether people paid me or not, writing a better book would be better for me, so I couldn’t lose.
Those of you seeking to write for money may have different goals. But those two things drove my decision to charge and to change a non-trivial amount of money.
If you had told me that by charging less, I would make more revenue, I still might not have charged less, because I wanted to force myself psychologically to write a book worth $30.
A few thoughts:
1. OP isn't as bad a designer as he thinks. The goal isn't a beautiful page so much as "no trust destroying indicators" like weird fonts, bad formatting etc. Good Job!
2. OP could probably double their sales by offering the first chapter for free with email signup on the landing page and then offering a time-limited discount as part of an email sequence.
3. We (in the dev space) have a weird view of these sorts of things as we make relatively so much in salary. But $400/mo is a decent car payment, another way to thinking about this is that OP wrote himself a free car.
4. OP could have taken all this knowledge applied it in his job, etc. but by making this very public and consumable objective proof of his knowledge he's put a solid milestone in his career path. I've friends that have done similar and then picked up six figure consulting gigs, lucrative job offers, etc.
All around, I just want to say nicely done and that I would love to see more developers do similar.
@ksahin: En lisant le titre je me suis dis que vous deviez en vendre des tas par mois, puis en voyant le funnel... auto-édition bien sûr ! C'est impressionnant qu'avec une petite/moyenne audience on peut se 40% du revenu minimal si on ne passe pas par le circuit traditionnel.
En tout cas merci pour les chiffres et les plateformes utilisées, c'est motivant. J'ai en effet un projet à moyen terme (non technique) qui avance pas à pas mais des fois je me dis que ça ne fonctionnera pas...
Always wondered about the pricing, I wrote an eBook as well (https://redux-book.com/ ↗)
But our pricing is WAY lower ($0-$16).
Do people really pay $29-$69 for an ebook? Wonder if author tried other pricing to see if it can increase sales.
Our biggest jump was once we moved to "pay as you like".
PS. Made ~$20K over 3 years. PSS. If anyone has any suggestions on how to promote eBooks, would love to know
A few questions: I have been writing a book (about cryptography[1]) and have done very light advertising for now (even though the book is available in early access).
Is there something that I should really be doing while I’m writing the book? And not after?
[1]: https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=Realworldcrypto&a_bid=ad500e09 ↗