Your first eBook - How it went?

I launched my first book as a pre-release PDF about seven years ago. Got 100 orders via my blog at $30 each, and then basically just ignored it. Now it does $10,000+ each month, growing mainly via reader recommendations.

The main thing I think I did differently from other authors is that I treated the book as a problem-solving product and spent a lot of time testing it with readers. That included both the content itself (via teaching conversations) and the manuscript (via beta readers).

The first six years' growth looked like this:

If anyone is interested, I wrote a little guide about my process which is at: https://helpthisbook.com/robfitz/recommendable-nonfiction/

Also, I moderate a little community with about 15 nonfiction authors working on their books together. I'll soon be adding some more structured education and support to it, but for now it's just a slack group of authors. My email is in my profile if joining might be relevant for anyone here.

I released my first paid ebook a year or so ago but didn't promote or push it much yet, so it's doing about $5/month.

A resource I recommend is the free ebook Let's get Digital: How To Self-Publish And Why You Should by David Gaughran. It's a great intorductory guide that goes through the full self-publishing process.

Not sure if it counts, but I have an ebook as part of ChromeExtensionKit. The kit itself is doing fairly well and I've heard some good initial feedback on the ebook.