Pathless Path Book

Around the end up 2022, the book started taking off and selling much faster. I sold about 10k books in the first year and have already hit 15k in the first four months of the second year of sales. Total royalties from book sales are around $130k which is still hard to believe.

Having another strong run in May and June. Had some nice shoutouts by Venkatesh Rao, Ali Abdaal, Chris Williamson, and a few others.

Totals:
Kindle: 1516
Amazon Print: 916
Other Print: 96
Other ebook (itunes, google, ingram): 170
India Publisher: 26

Just received shoutouts from Om Malik and Ali Abdaal which seems to have driven a big bump in book sales. Pretty wild to see this book still selling so well. People also seem to be recommending it to friends and purchasing multiple copies. So cool!

Close to hitting 1000 on amazon (944 total in <2 months). Also sold 204 on gumroad, 50 via Ingram spark distribution, and 12 via ibooks. Sales have slowed down a bit but still have had a sale almost every day. Will be interesting to see how things do in March!

Sold 921 books across all distribution channels. Made $6,563 so far in total royalties. Highest revenue per book via Gumroad ($9.31) and lowers via IngramSpark ($2.60 for hardcovers). Should be able to break 1000 books on Amazon in first 45 days. Pretty Cool!

I didn't do much of a bold launch outside of a number of tweets, newsletter promotions, social media posts, and then some updates when I got feedback or reviews from people. The book did okay in the careers section, hanging out around #30-40 the entire week and spending some time as the #1 new release in the careers category and business autobiographies. Overall made about $2,000 from the initial sales - but it was never about the money. Just excited to share with the world!

After 100+ pre-sales, finalizing the covers, and doing 3-4 full readthroughs, I finally shipped the book. I used the Reedsy editor to edit the book into epub, mobi, pdf and printable format and with the help of my cover designer, I was able to size the images correctly for Amazon and IngramSpark

I didn't push this too aggressively but mentioned it off and on in my newsletter throughout the year and had links on twitter. I also had a thread going of ongoing #buildinpublic updates throughout the year.

While pre-sales on Gumroad were great, there is some cost if you are trying to maximize Amazon rankings in that first week. But I appreciate Gumroad and how they are building their business.

I reached out to someone who had been reading my newsletter and offered to edit my work several months back. This was a great decision because she was incredibly excited about my project and got really in the weeds. Based on her feedback, we spent a lot more time than I expected reshaping the book.

Lesson learned: sometimes you don't know what you need until you find it.