Congrats! I wish more authors try out self-publishing and hope that they find success.
>Putting it in perspective, $200,000 over five years averages $40,000 per year. It's definitely something, but that revenue would not be enough to replace my salary, nor do I think my other book projects will match its success (though I'd love to be surprised!).
That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you in top 1% richest in my country. My case is an extreme corner case, but my yearly expense is around $1500-$1800 (which looks likely to be earned with my ebooks this year).
>You can buy Ansible for DevOps, 2nd Edition on Amazon, LeanPub, or iBooks.
Any reason you aren't using https://gumroad.com/ as well? That is much better than leanpub with fees being
My guess would be that leanpub is more "full stack" (formatting, layout, website, etc) whereas gumroad is just a storefront. I use gumroad and like it, but you need a bunch of other tools in your pipeline.
> That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you in top 1% richest in my country.
Exactly. It only scales up to a point, but that point can still be meanintful.I live in Spain with fairly low cost of living and my (self-published) books have been generating >10k/month profit for several years now, which is several times more than I can spend.
Plus, books are completely zero-maintenance, pure passive income, which is a massive relief compared to any sort of tech product. Would recommend it to anyone who has the interest in writing. (And if you are one of those people, feel free to email me -- I'm happy to help.)
But as OP mentioned, it needs to be a good book. There are a million titles self-published per year and most of them sell approximately zero copies.
I just edited my comment to make it clearer. I wanted to convey why not use gumroad as well, not instead of leanpub. Sorry for the confusion.
Personally I use pandoc [0] to generate pdf/epub from GitHub style markdown. I use both leanpub and gumroad, with leanpub giving me paying customers more than double the share of gumroad.
>books are completely zero-maintenance
That depends on the type of the book I suppose. I just spent about 4 months to update all my books recently - and I expect to update them again to add new content, changes due to new software version, feedback from readers, etc.
And I agree, for success you need a good book. I'll add that it will depend upon how many users would need the material, able to reach said users in the first place, etc.
>Putting it in perspective, $200,000 over five years averages $40,000 per year. It's definitely something, but that revenue would not be enough to replace my salary, nor do I think my other book projects will match its success (though I'd love to be surprised!).
That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you in top 1% richest in my country. My case is an extreme corner case, but my yearly expense is around $1500-$1800 (which looks likely to be earned with my ebooks this year).
>You can buy Ansible for DevOps, 2nd Edition on Amazon, LeanPub, or iBooks.
Any reason you aren't using https://gumroad.com/ as well? That is much better than leanpub with fees being
* 5% + charge fee (3.5% + 30¢)
* or, 3.5% + 30¢ per charge only with different tiers (https://gumroad.com/settings/tiers)
And payment withheld is maximum 2 weeks instead of possible 75 days with leanpub