We earned $50 000 on programming books in 2015 and so can you.
In 2012, Arkency was a web development company making money only on consulting. We had no idea how to earn a dime in a different way than by selling our time. We charge our customers per hour. That’s our standard model.
Our CEO tried selling his first online product. A screencast about writing Single Page Applications using hexagonal.js architecture. For $3 if I recall correctly. Nobody bought it. Not a single customer.
Today we are selling 6 books with a standard price of $49 (if out of beta and no discounts apply). People buy from us more or less every day. In 2015, we earned $50 000 on our books. Certainly there are better authors and more selling companies. But considering the fact that 3 years ago we couldn’t sell a screencast for $3, I think this is a good progress. I am proud of where we are.
What happened in between 2012 and 2015? A lot.
We started our own newsletter
In June 2012 we started asking our friends and followers to join our Arkency newsletter. We sent out our first campaign on Fri, Jun 15, 2012 to 40 people. Now we have over 2100 subscribers to our Ruby/Rails newsletter and additional 900 to our React Kung-Fu newsletter.
Since that time we sent more than 150 email campaigns. The open rate is usually between 40–50%. But sometimes when we are marketing a lot, for example during a new book launch, it gets a bit lower. Or when you go with a mailing title which sucks. Like my last one In-Memory Fake Adapters. I believe it is a very useful programming technique. But it doesn’t matter when you don’t know how to sell it to your own readers. Our core audience and our best customers. If they don’t open the email who else would?
Our mailing list is the primary marketing channel for us. We use to inform our readers about new blog-posts, new e-books, promotions, videos. I find it a way better medium to show code compared to the social media. And you are much less constrained on emails. You write very long ones, link to multiple articles, add many images. It is a very rich medium. Check out, for example, this campaign. It has photos, graphs, tweets, our previous articles. Emails can be a great showcase of what you are doing on other channels.
The hard thing about newsletters? Unsubs. At the beginning, you tend to take them personally. It feels like a slap in the face. I spent 3 hours writing this post and telling you about it and you unsubscribe. It’s really demotivating. My advice? Don’t look at the unsubs, don’t care about them. Not everyone will stay with you during the whole journey. Don’t focus on those who don’t want to learn from you anymore. Focus on those who are with you at the moment. Give them your best and hope for the best.
We started our blog
It surprised me, but our blog was born after our mailing list. The first article Filepicker and Aviary — Image uploading on steroids was created on September 21, 2012. Now we have 160 blogpost on blog.arkency.com and 20 on reactkungfu.com. Not every post is a success. But sometimes things get much bigger than you could expect.
The blog-post 3 ways to do eager loading (preloading) in Rails 3 & 4 is read by 5000 Rails developers every month since it was published. React.js and Dynamic Children — Why the Keys are Important is read by 6000 people every month. And I wrote it as total React.js noob because I wanted to share my first important React.js lesson. Now people still keep linking to them over the Internet and the SEO traffic is great.
The important lesson for me is that you can’t predict your blog-post success. Sometimes I was very confident that the content was great, the title was good and the marketing was done properly. And still the effects were not satisfactory. Other times I was very skeptical about the content, sure that I couldn’t explain my idea properly and people won’t get it. And the blog-post landed on Ruby Weekly and even more people could enjoy it.
I certainly couldn’t predict that the most popular article will be about React.js keys. When I was writing it, there were multiple people in Arkency way more experienced in regards to React. And yet it was me writing that post. So sometimes even your non-unique beginner point of view can be beneficial to thousands of other beginner readers. Keep that in mind. Not every article needs to be pro.
My first post took me about 10 hours to write. I was disappointed by my speed of writing, inability to focus. I am pretty sure it didn’t pay off. But every next post is easier. You learn how to structure them. You know when to stop fixing it. You apply the Pareto rule. It just needs to be good enough. And you begin to understand that writing is just one thing. Getting people to read is a different beast.
We started selling books. One by one.
On 13th of September 2013, we launched our first book. We called it Anarchy/Async/Remote (later renamed to Developers Oriented Project Management). At that time, we had about 160 people on our mailing list. We were selling the beta version for $7. This time, people came to buy. They already knew us. We already delivered more than 20 email campaigns. We weren’t nobody. We were Arkency, with our own voice and unique proposition. I celebrated every sale. To not sell your time, but to offer a product and have it purchased. It felt great. The book is of course no longer in beta. It has now 140 pages and can be purchased for $39.
We had to learn that. Learn to rise the prices. To value our work. Our time. To be certain that our knowledge and books are helpful and worth reading. Squash the self-doubt and ship it. Just fuckin’ ship it. That’s all that matters in the end.
Fearless Refactoring
Our second book Fearless Refactoring: Rails controllers started selling Feb 18, 2014. The beta version was available for $28. Up to this day, the book was sold 724 times and earned us $24500. Of course, now we are selling it for $49. We had 800 people on our mailing list when we launched.
The conversion rates were much better this time. The book targets laser-focused pain. And apparently it is much easier to sell programming books to programmers. No shit, Sherlock.
Also, Andrzej Krzywda did much better job advertising the book, explaining its value, providing free advice and building community around it. We still remind our readers about it and continue marketing it from time to time.
Rails meets React.js
Our third book Rails meets React.js has a very long story. We started working on it on Oct 11, 2014. It was part of an experiment. Could we write and ship a book in 7 days? Marcin Grzywaczewski did a great job writing this book. But we were very critical and we didn’t go with this idea.
We should have just shipped it. I know that today. But in our mind, it wasn’t good enough. We left it untouched for 4 months. We started improving it on February and March 2015. I spent a lot of weekends committed to shipping it.
At the end of March, we initiated what I still consider our best launch sequence. Three deep personal stories. Two right hooks. The effect? $5000 in 3 days. In total, the book made — $23600.
But the problem with this book was that the examples were in CoffeeScript and it was targeted strictly to Rails developers. It probably also what made it successful. But it meant we could not monetize our React.js knowledge fully. We could not offer this book in JavaScript community.
React.js by example.
So we decided to write another one. Using EcmaScript 2015, JSX and targeted to Javascript Community. Nothing in this book touches backend. The examples use webpack and integrate with existing npm modules.
The book made $9400 in total and was sold 300 times so far. But additionally, it was a part of React Indie Bundle. A bundle which made itself $31000 in a week by selling 272 copies. Out of which, $4250 went to our pockets.
React.js by example has an interesting structure. Every chapter is a separate component and a separate example. It wasn’t written by one person, but rather our entire team. Whoever wanted could participate by writing. This allowed us to scale the effort much better and finish the book quickly. Every author is presenting a unique point of view and showing different aspects of working with React.js.
In beta
Right now we have two books in beta version.
- Responsible Rails. 75 sales and $2300 in revenue. This book is about how to handle fuckups, avoid them and learn from those that already happened. We initially wanted to call the book Fuckups on Rails 😉
- Blogging for busy programmers. 43 sales and $1250 in revenue. As you could see previously we are blogging a lot. But we still wish many more programmers were blogging and sharing their knowledge with the rest of the community. We want that. So we offer this little guideline to help people start.
Bold future
It was a great year for our products division in Arkency. So far, we’ve been only selling books as products. But we have much more ideas. In 2016, we would like to successfully launch a new SaaS. Will it happen? Will it work? I don’t know.
What’s the lesson for you
Three years ago we had nothing. No blog, no email list, no profit. We couldn’t sell a product for 3 dollars. But we’ve been steadily writing, tweeting, posting, mailing. And this year it brought us $50000.
If you think about writing a book or starting a blog or recording a podcast. Just start. And continue doing. After these three years, I think that 90% of the success is to show up.
Don’t give up. Be there for your readers and customer every week or two. Be persistent. Have a product to sell. Ask them to buy. Build a long-term relationship.
P.S.
We are just launching Smart Income for Developers bundle. It contains a lot of books and videos that will teach you how to earn more as a developer/consultant.
