The most important thing you can do to increase your odds of success when releasing a technical book is to have multiple pricing tiers, adding additional content so you give people the option to pay you more than $30 or whatever you are charging for just the book.
I released a book in May 2016 teaching PHP programmers how to refactor code with lots of loops and conditionals into collection pipelines.
So far it's made about $180,000 CAD.
~$30,000 of that came from the "just the book" tier, at $29-$39 (depending on if the customer bought at the discounted launch price)
~$75,000 came from a "book + screencasts" tier, at $59-$79
~$75,000 came from a book/screencasts/example application tier, at $135-$179
If I had only given people the option of the cheapest tier, I would've made less than half of what I made by adding additional tiers.
The absolute bulk of the value is all in the cheapest tier, in fact the screencasts are the same examples from the book + just two bonus examples, and the example application is a project I already had that happened to use a lot of the principles in the book.
You can take a look at the landing page here if you're interested: https://adamwathan.me/refactoring-to-collections/
I think this sort of success is pretty achievable, I just followed the strategy outlined by Nathan Barry in his "Authority" book: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/
Nobody is going to make a lot of money selling a $40 book through a traditional publisher. If you really want to produce content like this and be able to earn a living from it, you need to be a bit more strategic about it, which includes things like tiered pricing.
I don't think it's deceptive to call it a "book" just because the author put in the extra effort to give people the option to pay a premium price for some bonus material; that's the right way to self-publish a book if you actually want to earn a decent income from it.
Really nice landing page!
Curious, how many of these buyers have some sort of corporate backing, ie businesses buying it for their employees?
I was very sceptical at first to see people paying $100+ to learn how refactor their PHP code into functional style.
Then again it sounds realistic enough:
1000 book buyers 1000 "screencast" buyers 500 full package buyers
So there is a market for 2500 PHP developers willing to improve themselves.
It just seems like a $100+ would a be lot to spend to progress beyond something like this article: https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/refactoring-pipelines....
EDIT: I mean writing functional map. reduce. filter. style code will be "nicer" looking in many cases, but is there really a financial payoff to refactoring loops?
Curious as well how much are corporate sales vs "personal" sales.
Yeah honestly I was surprised at the success as well, because you're right, it's sort of a niche topic that's hard to tie to some measurable pay off.
I can't say for sure what the split was between personal sales and business sales, but based on the customers I've spoken to, I would guess the vast majority were personal sales. If you include folks who purchased it themselves and then asked for reimbursement through their company, I think that would cover every customer save a handful.
I'm just a random programmer but if this was in my wheelhouse I would absolutely buy the full package. I may even buy it to see if it's something that could be applied to my C# brethren :)
Well done. How much did you invest putting everything together? i.e. the website, proofreading, etc? Or did you do everything yourself?
Also, how long did you spend on writing the book?
Thanks. I did everything myself; started working on the book during evenings/weekends in February, released in May.
I was interviewed about the launch on the Product People podcast a while back if you enjoy these sorts of stories:
http://www.productpeople.tv/81
Aka price discrimination. Another method is to add a small hurdle to get the lower price; people's willingness to pay to avoid it correlates pretty well with their ability to pay more.
Once you learn about it, it's pretty fun trying to identify the products/companies doing it. Like those coffee capsules that just happen to go on sale every couple of months.
Is putting those capsules on sale every few months an example of price discrimination? I thought price discrimination was charging different people different amounts for the same product at the same time. E.g. if someone's User-Agent implies they're on an Apple computer, charge them 10% more (the argument being they can afford it), that kind of thing.
And so it is: some more price-sensitive people will wait for the sale and buy a whole lot to last them to the next sale, while others don't care and just buy every week regardless. So you've managed to sell the exact same product at two different prices, using the "small hurdle" method I described before (forcing buyers to plan their coffee capsule purchasing).
Granted, this is not exactly at the "same time", but for a consumable product like coffee, sales aren't measured in such short scales anyway. They're still two effective parallel prices if you measure by quarter.
did you sign up for nathan barrys course - or just use the book?
I actually sort of pieced together everything I could from Nathan through his (now discontinued) podcast, blog posts, and interviews.
I purchased Authority (just the book) afterwards, in case there were any other useful pieces of info in there and to say thanks for all of the free content that helped me so much, and just buying the book up front would've saved me a lot of hunting around, all the good stuff is in there :)
That being said, the podcasts and interviews are still well worth a listen, if only to really reinforce some of the more important ideas and build confidence in the approach by hearing about other folks' success stories.