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Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

I just finished my first book, and I went a little bit different of a route than the author here.

I know this isn't very DIY, but it's probably worth knowing it's an option: I simply hired someone who works at a book publishing company to edit and typeset the book for me on the side. The person I hired does it for a living and is incredibly good at it. Let's just say it's not the most lucrative career choice, so I had the entire book (198 pages) edited and typeset by a professional for about $400.

This also had the added benefit of letting me write and get feedback from early readers using google docs, which was incredibly important.

I ended up paying her a pretty big bonus on top of that (as we pre-sold $110,000 worth and since publishing a couple days ago have brought in another $2,000 - all straight profit since we're ebook only so far and not on Amazon) but for my time and sanity it was very, very worth it.

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Congratulations! May I ask how you managed to presell that well with your first book? Did you apply any specific marketing techniques?

Haha, well it's a book about Internet marketing (we wanted to create a practical step-by-step guide that read like a programming tutorial), so we've tried hundreds of things over the years and know what works. We made a promise to use only the things in the book to sell it.

We ended up changing the marketing messaging to "the ultimate growth hacking guide" from "a step-by-step guide to user acquisition" because that performed 200% better in our A/B tests, and I'm still a little bitter about that, but the money soothes my bitterness. So that was important.

Our biggest winners tactics-wise were sharing the first couple chapters on Medium and cheating a little bit, doing the same on Reddit, with a link that said "if you want more like this pre-order the book," and we worked Twitter pretty well and did a few guest speaking engagements, but no silver bullets, just a lot of lead ones.

Link to a chapter on Medium: https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-s...

(Link to pre-sales page, for reference: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-ultimate-growth-hacki...)

FWIW, we sell it direct-only to not deal with fees at https://secretsaucenow.com

> we're ebook only so far

Any insight on "piracy" rates? I recently published something print-only, and was considering offering a PDF (layout matters). It's a completely different "vertical," so the rest of your experience isn't too relevant.

It's not really a concern that I have; I haven't seen any evidence of it popping up.

If you're really concerned you can use gumroad, which will allow you to stamp each .pdf with the user's email when they bought

A good take on this from a writer friend of mine: the people that "pirate" the book were likely never going to pay for it. But they could very well recommend it to people who might prefer buying it. The more it gets "pirated" the better as that means it's likely to be a decent book. I kind of agree with this and my gut says avid readers (which are always your #1 target due to word of mouth etc.) are generally fairly likely to pay for books.

I also once saw an author online who had a similar sentiment and offered a "did you download this book somewhere" button where you could donate a freely chosen amount of money to "ease your mind" and support future releases that worked rather well (to his own surprise). Trying to think of the name but can't I'll edit if it pops into my head.

Thanks for the feedback.

My book is neither tech nor mass-market, and I've heard from another author in the area that "piracy" doesn't seem to be a major factor. It's also a large enough file to be a pain to email or put on a free blog, and unlikely to turn into a reliable torrent, so accidental or casual mass distribution is unlikely. Hm...

Awesome! I didn't realize you resulted in those numbers. I was one of your first backers for this project & really enjoyed my read through. Keep up the great work.

Thanks! Always good to hear from happy readers :) Thanks for the support!

I'd love to know who you used.

Email me, and I'll introduce you. Email in bio.

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