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Comment by adamwathan | Hacker News Reader

Just speaking from my own experience, if you execute very well on audience building and marketing you can do much better than this. I have released 2 books and 2 courses for developers and together they have done close to $4m USD in revenue.

I wrote in detail about the process of writing, marketing, and releasing my first book here:

https://adamwathan.me/the-book-launch-that-let-me-quit-my-jo...

And was interviewed on IndieHackers to talk about the most recent one here:

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/098-adam-wathan-of-refa...

If the work is a good match for your skills and personality it’s a really great way to make a fantastic living.

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Hi Adam, I'm a fan of your writing, but your experience in riding and monetizing Tailwind's explosive growth is obviously a massive outlier.

Hey thank you! 3 of 4 of my educational products actually predate Tailwind — I was a millionaire from that business before even releasing Tailwind v0.1.0. Refactoring UI came after but we had built a huge audience for that well before Tailwind as well.

I’m an outlier for sure but $20k is low. If you do a great job at everything that goes into running a business like this you can definitely do much better than that. Josh Comeau did an incredible job building his audience and reputation before releasing his CSS course a few months ago for example and he has done over $500k if I remember right.

You make a good point in here. Being a financially successful author isn't just about being a successful writer - it's being a successful business person.

This.

Writing is half the battle—it is a significant hurdle and not everyone can write a great technical book.

But the other half (and I struggle with this mightily) is sales/marketing (and the whole 'business' side). Making it look pretty, getting people to know it exists, promoting it.

Many of the best technical writers I know are not great at the latter, and for them, self-publishing might not be the best approach.

This may not be the forum for saying this, but in case you need encouragement, I always follow your links when they make it to the front page of HN, and I’m always happy when I see your name in the comments. I’m a sample size of one, but I suspect you’re on a good trajectory in term of notoriety. If you struggle with self branding and promotion, you still seem to be doing something right.

Thanks for sharing this, but when I read stories like it, and look at the content sold, the concept is completely foreign to me.

I would prefer to read reference content from the vendors themselves and not third-parties, so I don’t understand what draws people to this sort of content I the first place.

That is, I couldn’t create any of this, because I would never buy it myself.

Your story is nonetheless very interesting.

I don’t think anyone can argue with the results, but arguing with reproducible results is a bit more difficult.

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