Released an ebook: $17K sales in the first 2 days

For me it was all Twitter. I spent the last 10 months documenting what I'm doing as I'm doing it. This helped be build a following of 13K, which when I launched this, some became customers, and some helped spread the word of mouth.

If I didn't have yet access to an audience, it's likely I wouldn't have sold any. So obviously I think the order is very important: first share to build an audience; then ask. Perhaps, if I had written this right after I left my job, I might have released it for free, and let this be the first thing that gets me some attention, and then maybe attempt to sell something after 6 months or a year. I think it's hard to be an independent creator when there's no one seeing what you're creating.

Thank you!

The total time spent on the book was about 20 full-time days for 2 people. We started in October, and we were meeting once a week to work on the draft. Then we did one big push over the last 10 days to wrap it up.

And yes, the inspiration for the book came after hearing from various people that they're daunted by the almost infinite number of options with AWS, and they're confused by the way Amazon describes its own products. And then I started to notice that my explanations were resonating with people, so this became a candidate topic when I started brainstorming for topics.

In terms of sub-topics, we wanted to cover only things with which we had a lot of experience with, so that acted as a filter. If we felt there was topic that required us to research something, we felt almost obligated to take it out. So it was a process of elimination. Obviously, this approach might not work for all types of books, but this was a bit the premise of ours: just the important things.

Good question. I asked myself what I would feel like a fair price for the content I had, and went with that. I tried to err on minimizing the chance that people feel overcharged after reading the book.

I went with $24 for the pre-orders, and got >100 sales in the first day. So that confirmed that at least some people are willing to get out their wallet and fork $24 of their hard earned money for it. Then after I looked at the final book, I thought that $24 seemed a bit low for all the content there was, so I set the price to $38, but I put a $10 discount when I announced it (I didn't want to risk the launch if it turned out people felt that $38 was too steep.)

Turns out, I got quite a few orders at the full price too, so it seems like that price is viable too. This is the total sales so far, broken down by price:

Price  |  Copies Sold
$24    |          228
$28    |          460
$38    |           39
-------+-------------
Total  |          727

Definitely.

Thank you! Very happy to hear this.

Give people a reason to follow you. Share something interesting, and put a call for action to follow you for more. Then put that something interesting on hacker news, reddit, etc, and let it get some attention. The blog post in my pinned tweet got me 3000 followers in a week, and it only made it to the HN frontpage for a few minutes. Then I kept sharing things, almost everyday. You don’t necessarily need to create anything. You can just document: describe what you’re doing, what’s happening to you, how you’re choosing between options, etc. People like to follow a story as it happens. Obviously, if you do create something, that’s a better opportunity to get attention, but creation generally takes more energy than just documenting. I’ve formed a habit now that at the end of every day, before I close my laptop, I look at the events of the day and see if any lessons/insights/code/etc is worth sharing. And if it is, I default to share. Following someone is free and easy. If you give people a reason to follow, they will follow.

Wow, what a coincidence. And thank you!

he first part is very high level. It's our opinionated perspective of the most important AWS products and how we think about them (which is not exactly how Amazon describes them). The target audience of this part is anyone wanting to see a different no-nonsense perspective of AWS.

The second part is more technical, and written for developers who want to set up an AWS environment from scratch and understand what’s going on.

PS. If you get the book and you find that it's not what you're expecting, just reply to the download email and you'll get a full refund. No questions asked.

Oh, thank you Matt!

Would you consider making the first version of your course free? If you release something for free that people don't typically expect to be free, you're almost guaranteed some attention. Share it on Hacker News, Reddit, etc. If people like it, they'll also help you spread the word. Then try to give people a reason for people to follow you. Let them know you'd be sharing more stuff, etc.