"Ten++ Ways to Make Money as a Developer" eBook

One week after launching my first ebook it reached over $10,000 revenue (including pre-sales) selling 747 copies.

I promoted it to my audience on Twitter and YouTube and I had other influencers promote it a bit too.

Below you can see the graph with a spike at the beginning (21st August) when I announced the pre-sales and the big spike on launch day (14th December).

I also announced today that the launch promo will end which brought in more sales and I'm expecting a big creator to publish a video soon about the eBook. 👀

Even though overall I'm really happy about the progress, I have made a few mistakes which might have cost me quite a lot:

• Not having 2-3 tiers, offering something on top of the eBook
• Not having an email list of potential buyers
• Not having an in-depth launch plan

Nevertheless, I'll continue to learn and experiment. 😊

Yesterday I finally launched my first eBook after announcing the pre-sales 4 months ago.

Here are all the sales stats (as of now):

Pre-sales (since August 21st):

• 461 copies sold
• $4,610 revenue

Biggest source is (as expected) Twitter with:

• 339 copies sold
• $4,120 revenue
• 3.8% conversion rate

Total sales: 606 copies
Total revenue: $7,750

Gumroad screenshots:

Sales:

Sources:

After 4 months of planning and writing my first eBook, I finally got to the day of launching it!

I prepared a Live Stream and did the entire launch during this stream.

I leveraged my Twitter and YouTube audience to build up hype for the launch.

After Quincy (the Founder of freeCodeCamp) mentioned the eBook, it got a lot of traction. Had 40+ sales during the night and managed to get to 200 total sales before the 48 hour mark hit.

I also noticed that sharing the updates is bringing in a lot of impressions and a few sales, every time.

Also, I had an AMA last night on Twitter where people could ask me anything about my journey. I'm thinking that it also helped get a few sales.

My hope with this eBook was to help me sustain my family (me and my wife) while continuing to create YouTube videos and do Live Coding on Twitch. I really enjoyed doing them but I haven't reached yet the stage where I could do it "worry free" as the income from Ads, Subs and Donations weren't yet enough.

My monetary goal for the eBook were low (according to the people I've shared it with). I was thinking that if this eBook does $5k, I'll be happy! Everyone said it'll do way more. I didn't know what to believe.

Fast forward to 24 hours after I opened the Pre-Sales, I had 114 sales totaling $1140. That's more than 20% of what I expected, IN THE FIRST DAY! 😄

Sales update after 24 (roughly) hours:

• 2,068 views
• 114 sales

Sources (by sales):

• Twitter - 74
• Direct - 26
• Gumroad - 5
• Facebook - 5
• YouTube - 3
• Linkedin - 1

As expected, Twitter was the biggest source as I have the biggest audience there (53k).

I also wrote an email to my 1700+ newsletter subscribers and shared the link on Discord (2.2k), Facebook, YouTube and Linkedin and made a story on Instagram.

I also shared a few times the stats of the sales which eventually got some more 👀 and landed a few more sales.

Overall, I'm very happy of how this turned out! 💜

I've been planning this day for a while now and I did my research by looking what other eBook writers did. Even tho' I initially planned to open the pre-sales next week, I had everything ready and decided to publish it.

I hired someone to create the Cover design (which I really love how it turned out), then I created the Gumroad Pre-Sales page and wrote the description.

After a while of going back and forth with my friends about what I should have on the sales page, I had it done and was very eager to hit Publish and then write some posts on Social Media to announce my audience that it's Live!

Within the first 30 mins I got 25 sales.

It slowed a bit down and then it picked it up back and within 2 hours I had 50 sales.

Went to sleep having 69 sales, after a full day of editing, planning and juggling with my emotions. 😅

For a while now I've been planning to write an eBook, but didn't really know if I should go with this topic or not.

Then one day I decided to go with it and started planning the contents of the eBook.

I shared the idea with some of my closest friends too see their reaction and... it was good! This gave me motivation to pursue this idea.

I started talking about the fact that I'm going to write an eBook to get people's reaction and it worked. They seemed interested. At this point I haven't yet revealed the topic publicly.

But then I did it: https://twitter.com/florinpop1705/status/1295685221141094401?s=20

I wrote a special announcement and it went VERY well! Got over 1100 likes and over 150k impressions. People seemed very interested about the topic.

I even got a couple of DMs asking for the pre-sales page. I told them that it will be ready in a week and... I started working on it! 😊