By Poornima Vijayashanker
The book took me nearly 6 months to write, edit, and print. Many folks have written in asking me what it was like to produce a book, and I most recently sat down with Sarah Barbour, an editor, to share my experience writing and self-publishing the book.
I was pretty green to book publishing. But I was eager to get the book out the door, so I did a fair amount of research and prep work. In this video interview with Sarah, I share much of what I learned as a first-time self-publisher and answer the following questions:
What was your motivation for writing the book?
How did you get started?
How did you build an audience for the course?
Why did you decide to self-publish?
How did you meet your editor?
What other factors influenced your decision to choose your editor?
What are some advantages to self-publishing?
What are some strategies that have helped market the book?
How did you find a designer to do the print layout for the book?
During the interview I mention a number of resources, and below are links to all of them:
Self-Publishing Resources
Nathan Barry’s book on self-publishing: Authority. I highly recommend reading this. It provides motivation to get started writing and to write consistently. It also showcases a number of authors who have successfully self-published. Finally, it provides strategies for building an audience and steps to launch your book.
Nathan Barry’s course on self-publishing: ConvertKit Academy. I attended this course earlier this year. The support from the group helped me kickstart my book. I also learned how to attract my initial audience.
Nathan Barry’s Mastering the Art of Product Launches (currently unavailable). I purchased the video course + consulting package. The video course introduced me to techniques like selling in multiple packages, creating a launch sequence email campaign, and attracting an audience through epic blog posts and online ads.
Editor
- Nathalie Arbel is my editor. She previously worked for Google and YouTube, marketing B2C and B2B products for web, iOS, Android, and TV.
Printer
Edition One Books is located in Berkeley, CA. The folks there are pretty friendly, very knowledgeable, and the quality of their print materials is phenomenal.
Selling Online
Gumroad helps creators sell digital good. I used them to complete pre-orders, and fulfill e-book orders.
Marketing Strategies
Landing Page. A clear and compelling landing page that provides enough detail for visitors to understand what the book is about and how they will benefit from it. I also took the time to study additional landing pages, like this one by Sean Fioritto author of Sketching with CSS and this one by Samuel Hulick author of The Elements of User Onboarding.
Guest posts examples. These are a great way to build awareness. I scheduled the first guest post to come out around the week that I was launching and the second one a few weeks after to continue to drive traffic to book.
Product Hunt. I was really pleased with sharing my book on Product Hunt. I even wrote post outlining the success of it.
Speaking at Conferences. I launched the book at Women 2.0’s Fall 2014 conference and had a dedicated booth, which drove some great initial interest and sales. I continued to speak at a number of conferences this fall.
Excerpts from the book. I initially launched to my email list, and had quite a while to educate them. But I also figured that people who were not on my email list wouldn’t just come to the landing page and purchase the book. So I shared 7 excerpts from the book.
Webinar with experts in the field. I recently teamed up with David Kadavy the author or Design for Hackers to do a webinar called Maked Money from Day 1. The webinar continued to build awareness and droves sales to the book.
Additional packages. Lean Product Development Course and Ease Your Inner Critic to Innovate Freely
Initial Investment
I initially invested $15,500 into the project. Here is the breakdown:
Consulting + Mastering the Art of Product Launches Course $2500
Editing $7000
Conference Sponsorship $2000
Online Ads $2000
Design $2000
I also received a $7500 in sponsorship to help offset the cost of printing.
Altogether I invested close to $23,000 in producing the book. I know folks who have spent much less, by choosing to not produce a print version and going with an outsourced editor who will just do line edits. However, given this was my first book, I wanted it to be the highest quality possibly, so I was happy to make such a sizable investment.
Sales Stats
Since launching on September 30, 2014 to today the following has been my progress:
300+ sales: pretty even split between softcover and e-book
1 5-figure speaking engagement from the book
In total I’ve made $27,000 in sales from all the packages plus speaking engagements. Not bad for the first 2 months!
Launch Kit
I’ve shared the launch kit that contains my exact 90-day launch plan, the email script I sent out to receive peer reviews, and the entire series of sales emails that I sent out the week I launched the book.
