How I Made $248 From My First Book in 12 Hours

On August 24th, 2020, I self-published my book, Buddha to Bezos. I had no audience, and I expected about 10 sales (best case) on launch day. I ended up with 4X my expectations within 12 hours.

Five Steps to Self Publish an Ebook Without an Audience

1. Get help to improve your book, and credit the helpers in your book.
2. Craft the right positioning and a likable personality of the book, keeping in mind who your readers are.
3. Sell on Gumroad and Amazon Kindle. Offer a free sample.
4. Launch on ProductHunt. Credit the helpers from step 1 in the first comment. They might join the discussion, or share the post.
5. Tweet the launch with mentions of people who helped in step 1 to gain engagement without followers.

I Have Seen Many People Share Overnight Success Stories.

Their success is inspiring, but it is not overnight. Typically, they have been working at something for a long time, probably years, and their “overnight success” was a sum total of everything. It is great. But not replicable for most people.

What if you are just starting and you do not have an audience? Can you sell something without going through the long process of building an audience for a year? I was in the same dilemma.

My Backstory

I am an entrepreneur. I have built four businesses and sold one. At no point in time did I ever bother to build an audience for me. Trying to focus my energy on building my own brand sounded selfish. I was young and stupid. Now I am not even young.

The audiences I worked with were limited to my products’ social media profiles and newsletters. So when I started to write a book I had no audience to bank upon.

How Others Have Done It.

I looked at people who had self-published in the recent past.

Daniel Vassallo: Author of “The Best Parts of AWS.” He famously made $40,000 in 16 days from his first book. His twitter account had about 13k followers.

Arvid Kahl: Author of Zero To Sold. Amazing guy, amazing author. He wrote his book in public for six months. Arvid had about 5800 followers on twitter.

Zeno Rocha: Author of 14Habits. Zeno’s book is for developers, and on Github, he has 7.4k followers.

Hassan Osman: Author of “Fun Virtual Team Building Activities.” In this blog post, Hassan shares that his greatest source of sales is an email list.

I can keep going, but you get the gist.

I Started at Zero

Now here’s what I had when I decided to write the book: 295 Twitter followers. That’s it. No newsletter, no Github followers, essentially no audience at all. I went ahead nevertheless.

Part 1: Repeated Failures

In this part of my journey, I tried many things. Nothing worked.

Failure 1: Hacker News. I shared the Gumroad link on Hacker News. I got a grand total of one visit and zero sales.

Failure 2: Reddit. I posted in a Reddit sub here to get some feedback on the book cover design. The feedback was great (it’s a great subreddit) but zero sales.

Failures 3, 4, and 5: Other Social Media. I posted about the book in multiple groups on Whatsapp and Facebook. Zero sales.

Part 2: Course Corrections

With the rejections, I became aware that my message was not getting across. People are unwilling to click on the link that contains the name of the book.

I tested the following changes:

1. The Positioning: the name and subtitle of the book. This signals “what value” they can derive out of the book.
2. The Personality: the cover image and the illustrations. People literally judge a book by its covers.
3. “Free Trial:” I added a downloadable sample to the Gumroad page so that people can read it before buying.

My First Sale

One fine day I got an email from Gumroad. It was sweet, someone had just pre-ordered my ebook.

Strangely enough, the source of traffic was Twitter, a channel I never expected to monetize. This was just one order and just five dollars, but it told me that if one person was willing to give my book a try, there may be more.

Part 3: Resurrection

The only remaining channel that had not rejected me yet was ProductHunt. I decided to give it an honest shot.

1. I got strangers (and friends) to help me

I decided to reach out to friends and acquaintances. I wanted to have at least 10–15 people aligned with my success, meaning, if the book succeeds, they should also gain something, no matter how little.

2. I made them a part of my story

When I reached out to people, I asked them if they would like to read a sample and share feedback with me. In turn, I would add them to the Acknowledgements section of the book.

This worked. Many people came forward, mostly to help. The acknowledgment was just a cherry on the top for them. But my offer made it clear that I was serious, and I really cared for my work.

3. I took their advice and let them know it

The people who decided to help me read my book, offered criticism and, and helped me do a better job. I took everything I could and implemented it. I wrote back to sharing how their feedback helped. They were a part of the journey. A part of them was now in the book.

On the launch day on ProductHunt, they provided the initial seeding upvotes, comments, and shared in their networks.

Final Results

With ProductHunt, I was able to sell 45 books in two days. This was four and a half times my initial estimate of ten sales. Interestingly, I even got sales from the 250 odd emails that I had sent to the subscribers too. I got nine sales at a good 4% conversion rate. You can notice below that the overall conversion rate is around 5%.

Conclusion

It is absolutely important to build an audience before launching a product of any kind. This is not a cardinal rule, it is a best practice. Break it if you want. If an introverted geek like me can sell something without an audience, anyone can.