Comment by amayne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amayne | Hacker News Reader

“Advertising: $15,422.60”

I think I’ve found your problem.

Your reviews are great. The endorsements are fantastic.

I’ve sold over 250,000 self-published books on Amazon and as many traditionally published. However I’ve never paid more than $1,000 to promote a book.

Buying ads is a way to bring readers to a book that is getting ignored, but in my experience it’s not going to drive sales. Every book is different. I’ve serialized them in podcasts, spent day-after-day livestreaming and done everything else I could think of.

If I had to guess why it hasn’t been getting traction it might partially be the page count. 138 pages for an ebook feels steep to me. I’d also keep playing with the description. That is extremely key. I had one novel go from well-reviewed but modest-selling to a 100,000 in sales (and getting me in an Amazon press release as one of the top 10 selling indie authors that year) after I changed my cover and description to better represent the book.

Side note: The title sounds a lot like Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start and may confuse people. I’d hate for what sounds like a wonderful book to get looked over.

Thanks for reading and for the thoughts, Andrew! For sure I have overlooked opportunities to market the book without ads. Unfortunately, I don't know which ones. Maybe I'll try a spending freeze at some point so I can isolate what works.

Have you written about your own marketing tactics? I'd love to read them.

And thanks for the input on the title and description. Someone else on the thread had feedback on the subtitle, which I may experiment with. I didn't know myself what this book was when I put it out there, and now that my readers have helped by describing what the book is, it's time to reflect and revisit.

I've written about some of them in my book How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours'.

Wow! That is insane. About to self-publish a novel about driverless cars. Can you point me to your blog or other resources on this?

His website is http://andrewmayne.com/.

> I’ve sold over 250,000 self-published books

I interpreted this as he wrote and published umpteen-thousand books, but his Amazon lists only 30. I'm guessing he meant copies of the books.

Well, if he wrote and published one book every single day, this would represent more than 680 years of his life ...

That would be the more reasonable assumption ;)

Only 30???

When you see a number that looks unreasonable based on your assumptions (how many books would he publish a day if that were accurate? What percentage of books on Amazon would he have published?), it is often useful to challenge your assumptions and ask if there is another way to frame the statement that makes more sense.

If English is not your native language, this can be subtle and catch you off-guard. I know that.

However, to "sell over 250,000 [...] books", would idiomatically be considered a number of copies, not a number of distinct titles.

Your response comes across - completely unintentionally, I presume - as a little obtuse in the "being slow to understand" sense, and if this is something you find others commenting on you might personally benefit from doing some work on it.

I hop on Periscope a lot and talk. My twitter: @AndrewMayne

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