Two years I didn’t have any side projects or other income streams. I was doing client work only, building websites for awesome folks. I do well at this, but I wanted to push myself further, flex my creative muscles and try new things. And while I’m still doing client websites full-time, I’ve also written two books and released three WordPress themes.
And in just over a year I’ve made $25k in net sales from them.
Here’s the breakdown (as of July 11, 2013). These numbers don’t include fees to ecommerce providers (I use sellfy and gumroad) or paypal/stripe fees. This is the money I get.
3909 Eat Awesome ebooks sold, $8,958
1261 Be Awesome at Online Business ebooks sold, $14,281
160 WordPress themes sold, $1,769
I’m going to skip talking about the themes since those aren’t selling as well as the books (at least not yet). They’re also much newer than either book. I’ve also put zero time into promoting them or even writing about them, I just haven’t had time.
Before Starting
15 months ago I created my first ebook, Eat Awesome, which is a plant-based cookbook. I’m not a chef and I’ve never even worked in a kitchen. I just love cooking and sharing recipes. The only audience I had for my cooking was a handful of friends that liked my recipes and followers on Instagram that enjoyed photos of my dishes. I didn’t have a mailing or even a website for anything vegan-related (there was one article about quitting the vegan community on my site, but that was it—and I highly doubt that helped).
When I wrote Be Awesome at Online Business, I didn’t have a mailing list and had less 1000 followers on Twitter (I don’t use Facebook, LinkedIn or much else).
So in both cases for my ebooks, I started with a very small audience.
Starting Out
When I knew I was going to write each book, I started telling everyone on Twitter and Instagram. I teased them with bits of content and photos and setup a mailing list for each to let people know when the books were ready. I created simple pages that said approximately when the book was out, what it was about (in 2-3 sentences) and put a signup form front and centre. Then I promoted these pages where my audience was interacting with me (IG for Eat Awesome, Twitter for Be Awesome).
Every few days I’d release a sneak peek of part of the book with a link to those pages. This gave me a few hundred subscribers to each list before launch.
Launch
One of the bonuses to signing up for each mailing was that I released each book a day or so early to my mailing list. So if you wanted a copy before everyone else, you had to be on the list. This seemed to work because sales on the pre-release day were MUCH higher than the public launch day. Probably because all the people keen to get a copy had signed up and then bought it early.
For both books I offered a discount if the purchaser shared the book link on social media (sellfy.com lets you create discounts for this). Around 60% of people shared the links to get the discount, which was awesome because it let more people know about the books.
Direct Promotion
Being honest, I’ve not had a promotion strategy or even spent a good deal of time promoting any of the books or themes. Web design work is still a priority since it brings in the bulk of my income, so that always comes first. I don’t tweet about them every day (or every week). Instead I write articles and link to the books at the bottom of each, if the article applies to the content of the book. This gives context and feels like “selly sell sell”. I’d rather give people a reason to buy what I’ve written than just tell them to buy it.
Past the occasional tweet or Instagram photo, I put the bulk of my efforts into writing similar content and posting it on my own site or as guest blog posts for other sites (with bigger and different audiences). I always see a huge spike in sales when a guest post is published.
Helping Others
My biggest source of sales spikes is when other people talk about what I’ve written. They add links to their websites, mention it on twitter or facebook or tell their mailing lists about the books. I never ask for this, but it organically happens, and I’m always grateful. My guess as to why this happens is because I work hard at serving other people as often as I can and as best as I can. I never expect anything from it, but I think makes people more apt to help me (even if I don’t ask for it). At the surface it seems pretty passive, but I’ve always felt if I work hard (which isn’t passive) at helping others, I don’t need to work hard at sales or promotion. If I do good work and do it often, that takes care of itself. This is how I approach my web work and my book sales so far.
Partnerships + Distribution
I’ve partnered with quite a few “deal” websites, like Mighty Deals, Dealotto and Dealfuel to sell Be Awesome. A full 50% of my sales are from those three sources. Sure, I get a much smaller cut of each sale, but I’ve always cared more about reaching more people than making more money with my books, so it works out great. I’ve doubled the number of sales by taking a cut in revenue and having the books sold through other websites.
I also sell both books on huge book websites, like Amazon’s Kindle Store, iTunes, B&N and lots of others (through distribution on bookbaby.com). I know for a fact these massive sites work great for other people, but I’ve never put much time or effort into directing people to buy from them instead of directly from me. 3% of my Be Awesome sales are from Amazon/iTunes and 7% of Eat Awesome are from those distribution sites. I only get 60% or so of each sale on those websites, whereas I get 90% or more selling directly. It’s a no-brainer for me to never promote those, but have my books there in case that’s where folks are looking.
Crazy Ideas
My marketing plan is basically to come up with a stupid or silly idea and try it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s a total flop. For both books I had contests were I gave away Llamas for promoting each book on social media. The llamas were virtual adoptions at an animal charity in Washington, and it’s sort of a funny contest, “Tweet my book, Win a Llama!”. When I did for Eat Awesome, I had hundreds of entries (I think around 350). When I did the same contest for Be Awesome I barely hit 20. So maybe giving away adopted animals works better for vegan cookbooks than business books. Know your audience and all that!
Another time I gave away Eat Awesome for free, no signup or strings attached, because I was pissed off at the vapid consumerism on Black Friday. So I made the book free for 8 hours. I had 1500 downloads! I didn’t see a penny in sales for those copies, but it did lead to more exposure, a huge spike in sales the following day and lot of guest post requests.
Other times I’ve discounted my books because it’s Friday (see: no real or valid reason, just because). Or offered free copies to the first 20 people that tweeted the link to the sales page—which afterwards I felt sort of slimy doing, it’s not my style.
Really, I hate promoting, so I try to have as much fun with it as I can. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s always fun.
In Closing
A lot of authors see a huge drop off each month in sales. Launch month tends to net the most sales with it tapering out each following month. For both of my books, my sales are fairly consistent. It’s possibly because I didn’t have a huge promotion to start, I keep writing articles that relate to the each and I publish them fairly consistently.
This whole thing has been an experiment from the start, since I wasn’t doing it to make money, I was doing it to see if I could it. Framing it in this way has helped me be a little freer in terms of how I’ve gone about creating and selling each book.
I didn’t stop or even slow down my day job for the first two books (although I have for the book I’m currently writing), so this $25k is basically extra money. I like my day job, and in fact, I like it more now that I have an outlet for pushing my creativity and fears further.
I can’t wait to write more books. I’m currently writing my third now, but you’ll have to get onto my mailing list to learn more at the moment—since I share rough excerpts from it regularly. It’s about creativity, fear and breaking rules.