Journal: Selling my own ebook

Hansel Han

Hansel Han

New member
Dec 28, 2013
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(I created a fresh Wicked Fire pseudonym so that I could be more open and frank. Unfortunately this account is too new to do much formatting.)

# Background

A long time ago, I read Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek. At the very least, it was inspirational. It introduced me to Rolf Potts' Vagabonding and it's the source of my favorite quote:

Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way.
Click to expand...

I quickly brainstormed an idea for an ebook.

I had a medical condition for the first 20 years of my life that gets almost no coverage. Everyone that has it is left to scavenging information from dying forums.

I thought it would be a good idea to put together an ebook that distills all of this information down into a single purchase. Particularly, I spent the majority of my teen years experimenting with my condition and eventually treated myself, so I'm at a unique position to write about it from an circumstantial place of authority.

Once I finally sat down years later to write the damn thing (without backing it up, naturally), my laptop was soon stolen from the trunk of my car. At which point I developed a serious case of "Someday I'll rewrite it, surely!".

After going to hilariously great lengths procrastinating it all, I'm here today to pick up where I left off. My goal is to fail fast or succeed fast, but either way do *something*.

# Validating my idea with a paragraph, a Submit Email box, and Adwords

When I first came up with my ebook idea years ago, I made a quick website with Ruby and Sinatra. The website had a bare-bones blurb about my hypothetical book as if it was on the cusp of being released.

In a paragraph, I connected with the reader by lamenting the life difficulties that our medical condition brings us. I share a quick blurb about my own journey and how I ended up treating myself. And an in a bulleted list, I explained how my ebook could help the reader today.

Finally, I had a form so the reader could leave me their email address and I would let them know when the ebook was finished.

I then created an Adwords campaign with various ad angles. I had two goals: 1) Get people to my website to see if I could even cajole any interest at all, and 2) test some potential ebook title/subtitles in my ads.

I could only spare $100 at the time so I couldn't gather a substantial amount of Adwords data, but my best-converting ad had 5,000 impressions and 70 clicks (1.4% CTR).

In total, I drove 600 clicks to my website.

I knew my ebook idea was pretty good after scoring every checkmark on Copyblogger's weekly rehash of its "How to choose a niche" article (anyone remember Copyblogger?), but I didn't expect to have 68 emails when my Adwords campaign was over. 600 clicks converting to 68 email submissions is a 11.3% conversion rate!

# Where I am now

This week I finally rewrote the majority of my ebook from scratch. I even learned enough about vector graphics to draw my own diagrams of the human body.

It feels so good to finally have this thing mostly written. I have to wonder how much psychological energy I've pilfered from myself over the past few years by having a to-do item become so stagnant.

At this point, I genuinely am more interested in the action of checking off "Write, publish, and try selling ebook" than I'm concerned with whether it generates a single sale or not. At least I can stop kidding myself.

# Coming up with a title

I had two ideas for coming up with the ebook's title.

1) I wanted a simple brandable title that people could share by name on websites like Reddit.
2) I wanted to hint at what the book was about in the title.

I ended up choosing a unique primary title by merging two words and I used the copy of the best-converting Adwords ad as the subtitle.

# Book-writing tools

I used Evernote to accrete info I found on the internet into one place. I would create a note for general topics and then copy-&-paste info I found online into the note wholesale.

For some reason, it's hard for me to ever linger in the brainstorming phase. I make the most progress when I feel like I'm actually working on the final draft. So after fleshing out a rudimentary table of contents in Evernote, I opened up a fresh draft on Pages.app (OSX word processor) and began writing.

My first goal was to get a draft of my ebook written with just content and images. No fancy things like chapter interlinking or anything since I don't want to couple my book to Pages.app just yet.

I basically will use a tool that compiles my ebook to PDF, EPUB, and HTML. Pages.app can do this, but I'd like to get a feel for other options.

Off the top of my head:

- Home | kramdown
- Pandoc - About pandoc

(Anyone have a recommendation?)

# How I plan to market it

I've written my ebook under a pen-name since it's related to a personal medical topic. I'd prefer to stay pseudonymous like Eben Pagan did when he wrote his dating-advice ebooks under the name David DeAngelo.

I plan on selling the book directly from my website and use Gumroad (https://gumroad.com/) for the payment and ebook fulfillment. I'll consider other channels if I ever get success here.

I'll drive traffic with Adwords.

I've put together a separate content website that has started to rank for terms like "What is <medical condition>?" where I will focus my SEO efforts. The content website will answer ancillary/generic questions and then point to my ebook.

This gives me freedom to generalize, expand, and decouple my content website from my ebook. I also can posture my content website as an unbiased information source.

# Here I go

I'd like to keep this journal updated with my experience across the whole stack.

Hopefully this ends up documenting a crippling failure or an exciting success.

# Plans for this week:

- Finish ebook content and arrive at final draft
- Decide on a ->PDF/->EPUB/->HTML compiler and compose ebook on it
- Set up website, first-draft landing page, and begin selling ebooks
- Set up initial live Adwords campaign

# Questions to audience:

- Any personal recommendations for alternative ebook compilers similar to Pages.app, Kramdown (Home | kramdown), or Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)?
- Gumroad.com (https://gumroad.com/) looks like the easiest way to handle payment and fulfillment. Any other ideas?
 


(It's been a month since I created this thread)

Firstly:

I made another post since my first one, but my posts need to be manually approved. The hidden post focused a bit too much on the software I was using to write my book, so it probably seemed like an advertisement which is suspicious on an account with a few posts. But it was only because I was procrastinating the actual writing of my ebook by masturbating over ancillary things like my editor. I will assume the post is permanently lost, although I wish I could see it just to remind myself of my own game plan before I had to abruptly shift gears.

Secondly:

In my unapproved post, I made some deadlines for myself. I remember I planned to finish the book and get the sales funnel live and working by the following weekend.

Basically, another project that I actually live off right now collapsed and I just spent the past 30 days rebuilding it from scratch. To say the least, my stress levels are elevated.

Finally:

I'm finally done rebuilding my other project and it will take a while for it to get back to a place of revenue that can fund me (Pageviews and Adsense targeting are slowly climbing to what they were before the loss). I'm all the more anxious now to see if I can get this ebook thing to work.

I've given myself a week deadline to find out whether this has any promise at all or if I need to go find a part-time job after all.

It's really hard to jump back into a project. I feel like I have to ramp back up by reading ebook success stories and random articles about my own topic. Like I'm trying to psyche myself up for an imminent horrible event. But I guess that's just how much I fear uncertainty.

I've barely just begun cranking on my ebook and I won't provide another update until the book is at least finished and polished enough to sell.
 
I finally did it...

- I finished the ebook,
- Uploaded ebook.pdf to Gumroad,
- Wrote some poor sales copy,
- Appended it with a green "Buy <Book> for $7" button.
- And started an Adwords campaign.

I find that life is pretty overwhelming unless I just aim for the simplest v1.0 possible and iterate later.

For example, I grabbed the first google result for "David DeAngelo sales letter" (Double Your Dating | Learn About My Attraction eBook) and loosely copied its format.

It's funny to find myself obsessing over the ebook content when the ebook content is the least of my worries if I can't even cajole one soul to buy one copy.

Goal: One sale.

I'm not sure which variable I'll tweak first, but I'll let this roll for 100 clicks to establish a baseline.
 
In other news, this experience reminds me how important it is to fail early and fast or shut the fuck up.

I've wanted to enter this niche for half a decade but kept passing the bag with "I'll write the ebook someday! Surely!".

But the crazy part is that as this idea stagnated in my head over the past 4-5 years, it's like I started living vicariously through the *state* of having this idea. I'd sometimes catch myself making the assumption that I'm going to hit it big -- it's only a matter of actually writing my legendary ebook in this underserved health niche. And I realize I'm no different than the middle-aged taxicab driver that's managed to delude himself into thinking the taxicab gig is temporary until he writes that legendary movie script. And then he wakes up one day and realizes that he's been driving that taxi for 30 years now and has thought the same exact sequence of thoughts every day that whole time. Every day reaffirming the same fantasy that success is imminent, but that affirmation is really just a lullaby that lets you snooze off another day. It's an excuse.

If I can't get a single sale in a week and I run out of money for Adwords, I'll still consider it a success.
 
If you don't already have it, I'd recommend including bait in your book that gets people to sign up to an email address. Something like worksheets or whatever. Back this up with a newsletter that continues their "ascent" into your universe.

Also, what works really well in my books to reduce refunds is to have a "congratulations" page that resells the sale. You're probably not marketing it aggressively enough if you don't get a 10% refund rate, and having a page or two that resells the purchase is magical for maintaining a rate like that.

Another cool thing I've seen great success with in addition to the invitation to sign-up to an exclusive newsletter is on the very next page have a 3 question survey. If they write in with their answers, they get a free gift valued at $14 dollars (in my case it's another PDF book + the audiobook).

When these people write in, they are more or less in my cult, or at least highly primed for long term entry. They've not only bought something from me, but they've taken it to the level of emailing me personally to answer detailed questions about what they intend to do with the powerful knowledge they've just acquired from me. These people become the most valuable assets when you need testimonials and reviews.

As an aside, my personal project right now is to move from relying on reviews and price to sell my books to testimonials and value as the selling point. It's a tough switch, but it sounds like you're in a position to get started off right in the first place.

Next level:

You can also have a back-end product which is essentially part of your ascension model, i.e.

Book graduates to exclusive email list graduates to higher-priced product (audio training or video training or seminar or high-priced personal coaching - which you then record and sell as part of another audio product).

That's if'n you wanna put in the effort, of course. But I've heard tell that this is where the real riches lie and I've been getting a taste of it myself, which is why I'm glad to pass this info on. And I'm constantly developing my chops in order to get better and better at these kinds of things.

I'm subscribed to your thread and look forward to hearing what happens. Assuming you found any value in what I've just said and I can help you further in any way, feel free to get in touch. I love masterminding about selling books.
 
ard555 said:
You're probably not marketing it aggressively enough if you don't get a 10% refund rate, and having a page or two that resells the purchase is magical for maintaining a rate like that.
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This line is pure gold.

I've been selling an ebook for almost three years now and I used to brag that I didn't have a single refund request in the first two years until one of my mates slapped me upside the head and said this exact thing:

"If you're not getting refund requests, you're not marketing it aggressively enough."

It made so much sense to me. What's the worst thing that can happen? 30% of people who buy the book found out that it's not for them? In my experience, only 15% - 20% of them are going to ask for a refund and the other 80% are going to write it off as their mistake.

Make bigger claims, add more extravagant testimonials, blow it up. The worst thing that's going to happen is that you're going to make more money.

In my humble opinion...
 
Louey37 said:
This line is pure gold.

Make bigger claims, add more extravagant testimonials, blow it up. The worst thing that's going to happen is that you're going to make more money.
Click to expand...

Another way to state this is to add "theater" to your marketing. Let people follow an adventure, deliberately polarize them, create a superhero origin story for yourself and carefully identify an enemy. Help your audience stand against that thing with you so that you can motivate them to act against the enemy.

You know, kind of like America does by releasing Transformer movies to help young people decide to sign up as soldiers and go to war. ;)

Except in this case you just want them to pull out their wallets and have it at the ready the next time you say "available now."

Here are some signs that you're on the right track:

* A certain percentage of people buy all your stuff
* People send you detailed descriptions of how they're using your stuff
* People ask detailed questions to show that you've helped them confuse activity with accomplishment so that you can help them confuse these things a bit more and continue "training" with you
* People tell you about information products they wish you would create
* People happily answer surveys you send them
* People happily provide reviews and testimonials when you ask them too, even if you have to include a virtuous bribe

I don't want to give you the impression that I've got it made by telling you these things because I still struggle everyday to keep my revenue machine running with good months and stressful months, but since I first started seeing these results in my operation, I've known that I've got a business for life with my books, audiobooks and video courses so long as I can get traffic.

The downside that really isn't a downside to this is that I've used my real name and essentially set myself up as a muse (as opposed to a guru). That's okay, but I think you can probably set yourself up to experience the benefits of all that I've mentioned without being as personally tied to it as I've become in my niche.

But it all works out in the end because I'm (mostly) fearless in the theater I put into my marketing and some powerfully polarizing things have happened that have led to crushing reviews and soaring praise, often on the same day!

Ah, but it's all adventure on the high sees. And thank god I don't have to have a "job" in order to navigate my way beneath the stars. My smallest hope is that it all continues and my biggest dreams ...

Billions.

These things have been known to happen when someone puts their mind to it.

Damn, I've got to set myself up with a progress journal of my own sometime ...
 
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