June 2023 update: 3,000 sales! (~$29,000)
October 2021 update: 2,000 sales! ($18,256.75)
December 2020 update: 1,000 sales! ($9,555.26)
September 2020 Update: 750 sales! (~$7,000) Somewhere along the way somebody pointed out that I could let people “pay what they want” on top of the base price of $7.99, which has resulted in quite a few people choosing to $10, $12, $15, and even the occasional $20. Which currently puts me at just under $7,000 in sales.
February 2020: So I recently crossed US$1,000 in pre-orders for my first ebook, and I thought it might be worth taking a moment to talk about the marketing thinking that goes into it.
Time spent preparing = years. First of all, while I’m spending a relatively short amount of time on the book itself (I decided in early February that I was going to write and ship it on March 1st 2020), I’ve been thinking about this for a very, very long time. I’ve spent years writing the tweets and threads and essays that are going into it, which I will be subsequently editing, modifying and updating.
Time spent building audience = years. I’ve also spent many years building my Twitter audience. My Twitter friends make up the bulk of the buyers of my book – 83 out of 138 at the time of writing. But I’m not too fussy about attribution. People follow me on multiple platforms – I’m growing a YouTube account and audience now, and so far 4 people have bought preordered through YouTube. Here are the numbers:
I don’t really care about “channel optimization” past the first 1-2 steps. I always love looking at these sort of statistics, because they tell you quite a bit about how other people are using the Internet. You can never 100% sure though, because it’s always possible that someone might first see something on one channel, and then end up looking it up + buying it via another channel. So I’m not too worried about “channel optimization”. That’s way too premature, and really… it’s not something I ever really care to think about. There are some things to notice, like “Oh, the conversion rate on my Tinyletter is way higher, I should send that out more.” But I wouldn’t bother much more than that.
My priority right now is keeping the main thing the main thing. Really, the most important thing right now is that I spend the rest of the week making sure the book is as good as I can possibly make it, and then encourage people to talk about the book online, and share it with their friends. That’s going to be the bulk of the thrust behind the book sales once it’s launched, and I’ll update this post when I’m done.
Here’s a quick laundry list of all the ways I’m promoting the book:
- I’m selling the book on Gumroad (I finally bit the bullet and decided to do this after I saw that dril sells his ebook on Gumroad too – and I’ve been following @shl (the Gumroad CEO) for some time on Twitter and I like his style.)
- I link to this in my pinned tweet, which I also mention in my Twitter name.
- I made a page for it on visakanv.com. I also link to it from the top of the main site, so anybody Googling me will see it.
- I also made a page on visakanv.com/blog for it, and I mention it in the description so anybody visiting my blog will see it.
- I made YouTube videos titled FRIENDS, AMBITION and NERD, and I link to the Gumroad page in a lot of my video descriptions.
- I’ve mentioned it in my TinyLetter, and will do it again repeatedly.
- I did a post on Instagram and I periodically do updates on Instagram stories when I cross milestones. I also drop the Gumroad link in my Instagram bio.
- I did youtube videos with other people about it: here’s a conversation with Andrea, and here’s one with Prakhar.
Conception
Alright, so let’s talk a bit about the idea behind FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD, which I think is the really important thing.
I have a lot of material. I’ve been sitting on a lot of this material for years now. I have lots of material that can be carved up in many different ways. I have the draft of a set of memoirs I’ve titled NAUGHTY BOY, which I’m thinking might be the next ebook I release after FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD. I’ve been procrastinating on that one because I feel like it’s not the right “debut” piece.
I don’t want to ask too much of the reader. I similarly have been sitting on a draft of a novel titled MAKE SOME NOISE, which I wrote all the way back in 2017. I feel like a novel is a bit too big of an ask – I want to be mindful of my readers’ attention spans and existing reading lists. As a reader myself, I know that I’m not likely to read a friend’s novel unless I’ve really enjoyed some of their existing writing already. It’s not personal, it’s just… attention economics.
I don’t want the book to be only about me. I have had a couple of other project outlines that I could reasonably turn into published ebooks in about a month – one that’s tied to an alt Twitter account I have, and another that’s about ADHD. But I didn’t feel too good about prioritizing either of them as a debut either, because they feel too niche. The memoirs, on the other hand, feel too personal. It’s not that I mind publishing something personal; it’s that it feels premature to release something that’s basically all about me and my life. It doesn’t have much relevance to anybody who doesn’t already know me.
I want the book to represent the best conversations I’ve had with others. I started thinking about all the podcasts I’ve been on and all the conversations I’ve had with friends from around the world. I realized that my debut work should be something that draws from those conversations. After all, these are conversations I’ve had with a diverse group of people, they’re representative of who I am, and most importantly, they’re conversations that I believe will be interesting to people who don’t know who I am.
Who cares? I do! I know some people will think that all of this seems like, well, not really a big deal. 138 ebook preorders at US$7.99 is a nice amount of change to make – lots of people who want to become writers never make it this far. But while it’s further than lots of people go, it’s also not particularly stratospheric. It barely covers my living expenses for a month. I can make more money by doing a bunch of consulting. But I write this anyway because I want to be able to look back on it in the future, once I’ve sold $10,000 and then $100,000 worth of books online. It’s fairly obvious to me that these are outcomes on the horizon for me. How do I know this? I suppose mainly it’s derived from my experience working in software marketing in the past, and from studying how other people have sold their work online. I can sell multiple books, I can continue to grow my audience.
The book is a starting point, not a finish line. The book isn’t even out yet. As I mentioned earlier, the important thing is that the book has to be good. It has to scratch an itch that people don’t entirely realize that they have, and scratch it really well. And I’m pretty confident that it will, based on the conversations that I’ve had with people over the years. My Twitter following is as large as it is (currently 18,800) because this message resonates with people. And so far, this message has been rather fragmented and inaccessible.
What matters is how people talk about it. As I mentioned earlier, the bulk of the marketing for the book is really going to happen after the book has been released. People who were on the fence about buying beforehand will be persuaded once they see their friends quoting and talking about it. I’ll likely go on a couple of podcasts and do a couple of more videos talking to people about it. Over the next few days I’ll also write some blogposts that do some broad explorations of the themes and ideas in the book. Pretty excited to see how it all plays out.
PS: Buy FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD now! It’s optimistic, constructive and you’re bound to find a few ideas that will make your life better. 🤓💪🏾❤️🔥