My first e-book made $7,500 in 7 days

[thaonguyen225]

A few months back, I published my first (paid) e-book.

In total, it made +$7,500 in just 7 days.
It still makes +$2,000 every month today.

Let me break down the strategy, the expenses, and the effort spent on this product.

Finances​

First, let's get a financial overview.

Expenses​

E-book creation:
- Book cover: $47,-
- Proofreading: $52,-

Marketing:
- Promoted post on IG: $182,-
- Paid ads: $250,-

Revenue​

Sales: $7,985,-

Net Profit: ~$7.450,-

Time spent​

Secondly, let's get an overview of the time spent.

Writing the e-book:​

16 hours.

Website + Stripe integration​

10 hours.

Creating email drips:​

4 hours.

Creating promotional content:​

6 hours.

Additional marketing efforts:​

4 hours.

Total time spent:
40 hours.

As you may have noticed, I ended up spending more time on marketing and distribution than I did writing the actual e-book.

Why?

Because every successful product launch requires a solid marketing effort.
This is where most e-book authors I've seen get it wrong!

When you're done creating your e-book, you need to do more than just tweeting about it.

Make a sales strategy.

• What are your acquisition channel(s)
• How will you use it to generate sales?
• How much do you expect to convert from each? (make reasonable assumptions).

Some strategies include creating initial hype around the product (doing a pre-launch), and some include re-targeting qualified leads.

The channel I used which turned out most effective: emails!
I launched a free e-book 3 months earlier.

It resulted in +300 reviews and +10,000 downloads!

Not only did this establish additional trust and authority - it also provided me with 10K emails to retarget with the second e-book

It was a lot of fun creating this e-book.
Furthermore, it has gotten a lot of positive feedback, and despite me offering a full 30-day money-back guarantee - not a single person has used it yet.

If you want to learn more about my approach, I created a video on YouTube where I go into much more details and reveal a couple of interesting facts

I hope you got something out of this post.
Cheers!

 

[baruch7777777]

@thaonguyen225 Hey, could you please let me know your follower count at the beginning of creation of your ebook?

 

[thaonguyen225]

@baruch7777777 It was around 60K - 65K followers

 

[hoops122712]

@thaonguyen225 so the main lesson here is to get 60k followers, then you can sell books, courses, t-shirts, whatever.

 

[wrangler]

@thaonguyen225 How long did it take for you to learn how to write industry level Javascript?

 

[vettesfan]

@wrangler 10 years

 

[porven]

@thaonguyen225 Can you elaborate on 16 hours to write the book?

16 to produce the final draft, after planning an prepping topics?

Or did you sit down one day and 16 hours later you wrote a tech JS book?

 

[thaonguyen225]

@porven 16 hours included topics, creating illustrations, and writing the material.

It did not include proofreading and book cover (I hired freelancers on Fiverr to do this).

An advice I give in the YouTube video:

Pick a topic where you could write the e-book in your sleep.

I've been working with JavaScript for the past 10 years, and the book doesn't go into deep technical stuff - it's an opinionated guide to good habits and best practices.

It was a very deliberate choice in topic, that allowed me to write it all in 16 hours

 

[porven]

@thaonguyen225 the fact you wrote it in 16 hours is what is peaking my curiosity I am really interested in what you said now... good marketing pitch if you want to target developers:

"Hey JS developers, I wrote a book in 16 hours, come at me bro"

 

[annodynamic]

@thaonguyen225 Similar interesting read: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/launched-my-first-course-earned-over-us-500-000-ama-4382405cd5

This person is building a more lengthy, high-quality, interactive course, and made 500k in the first week. He had 28k audience when he launches pre-sale.

 

[thaonguyen225]

@annodynamic If you look closely, I got a screenshot of this post in the YouTube video while emphasizing an "insane" example

Josh did exceptionally well with this course!

 

[ddkobaso]

@thaonguyen225 Really helpful post

 

[thaonguyen225]

@ddkobaso I'm happy to hear that

 

[fullcircle]

@thaonguyen225 Thanks for the post.

Also, beautiful landing page.

One question, Has ig being your main acquisition channel?

 

[thaonguyen225]

@fullcircle THanks a lot!

No, actually emails accounted for 2/3 of all sales.

The last 1/3 was somewhat equally split between IG, my own channels on Twitter and paid ads.

I also posted on LinkedIn (I have around 15K connections there), but it yielded close to no sales at all.

 

[613jono]

@thaonguyen225 Nice post, a lot of relevant info. I wish however that you had elaborated better on how you wrote the ebook in 16 hours. The planing of what to write was also included in theses 16 hours?

 

[wrangler]

@613jono Or how about the time it took to learn javascript?

 

[613jono]

@wrangler Good point. Still, even if you know a lot about something, to write a book about it in 16 hours feels weird.

 

[613jono]

@thaonguyen225 Why did you not publish it on Amazon?

 

[thaonguyen225]

@613jono I think it takes a lot of reviews / approvals and stuff to get accepted there