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Made $3,954.32 in 48 hours with my first e-book

I recently launched an e-book called 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers which made $3,954.32 in 48 hours.

Here are all the numbers and behind the scenes...

1. Amazon 🌎

Amazon was the best performing platform so far.

$2,945.33 was made in royalties.

The top three regions are:

  1. 🇧🇷 Brazil: $1,012.10
  2. 🇺🇸 United States: $803.06
  3. 🇮🇳 India: $596.56

2. Gumroad 📈

The other platform I used is Gumroad, which made $1,008.99 in sales.

I decided to put the book over there for two reasons:

  1. I personally love the platform, it's an amazing place for creators
  2. It's an alternative for those who dislike Kindle or want an ePub version

3. Twitter 🐦

The launch tweet is what started everything.

Received 27,882 organic impressions and 1,583 organic engagements from there.

Yesterday I decided to experiment with something new and I paid Twitter to promote it for 3 days. Let's see how it goes.

4. Email 📫

I sent two emails to the pre-sales list.

One segment for 187 recipients in English, and another for 105 recipients in Portuguese.

The result was 58.8% open rate and 29.4% click rate.

5. Product Hunt 😔

I also launched on Product Hunt but unfortunately didn't get much traction over there.

Only got 17 upvotes and didn't reach the top rankings.

6. Hacker News

On the other hand, Hacker News went super well. It reached the first page and the #5 position there.

This is an image of the live Google Analytics traffic.

7. Google Analytics 👨‍👨‍👧‍👦

Speaking of traffic...

6,852 users accessed the site. 5,411 coming from social media.

The top three acquisition channels were:

  1. Hacker News: 4,984
  2. Twitter: 362
  3. Instagram: 55

8. Conclusion 💜

Writing a book is not easy. Launching a book is even harder.

Those metrics are super nice to see, but what really matters is people.

If I can impact the life of just 1 person - not thousands, just 1 - it will all be worth it.

  1. 2

    What are you at now?

  2. 2

    That's a great launch. wish you the best for the rest.
    You have to mention though that you have 27.2K Followers on twitter :p
    which btw how did you manage to build that amount of followers ?

    1. 2

      Sure! My social media channels look like this today:

      • Twitter: 27.2k followers
      • Linkedin: 7.2k contacts
      • Facebook: 4.0k friends
      • Instagram: 2.1k followers

      I posted on all of my personal accounts in order to get maximum visibility.

      There was no secret formula to build those followers. Just trying to provide as much value as I can for a long period of time.

  3. 1

    Sound like a well executed launch! Congrats!

  4. 1

    Never launched a book, but I think your numbers look solid! If you end up writing more books, I'm sure they'll grow as well now that you're building an audience.

    1. 1

      Yeah, hopefully, this will continue to grow an audience for future products :)

  5. 2

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      Ohhh that's amazing @harriskenny, I had a lot of fun on that podcast, glad you liked it :)

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