My Book's Pre-Sale Just Barely Succeeded

4/1/2025 at 3:19:41 AM

Ok, so you start out wanting to test if there is a market for your book, and use a Kickstarter to gauge interest.

But then you pivot to the Kickstarter being its own goal, and do everything you can think of to make it succeed.

Do you end up learning anything useful about whether there's a market for your book?

by stevage

4/1/2025 at 12:45:48 PM

Author here.

I'm not sure what you mean. How is a successful Kickstarter at odds with gauging customer interest in the book? Isn't the fact that customers paid money to pre-order the book a good indicator that there's a market for this book?

by mtlynch

4/1/2025 at 1:05:01 PM

>Isn't the fact that customers paid money to pre-order the book a good indicator that there's a market for this book?

Not necessarily, depending on where those pre-order customers came from.

Imagine you're launching a book and you reckon if you get 100 pre-orders that means you'll be able to sell 10,000 books down the line. So you convince 100 of your mum's baking club friends to buy your book on SQL. See how you just broke the value of the pre-orders as indicative of future market success?

I'm not saying that's exactly the case here, but the fact that the kickstarter completely plateaued suggests there is limited organic, word-of-mouth growth.

I honestly don't know, I'm just curious and that's why I asked a question.

by stevage

4/1/2025 at 1:19:24 PM

>Imagine you're launching a book and you reckon if you get 100 pre-orders that means you'll be able to sell 10,000 books down the line. So you convince 100 of your mum's baking club friends to buy your book on SQL. See how you just broke the value of the pre-orders as indicative of future market success?

I don't think the comparison works because in the baking club example, presumably these people have no interest in the book and are only buying because they're family friends. It's not predictive because the pre-sale exhausted all of my potential customers.

But in my pre-sale, people mostly aren't buying because they're friends with me. They're buying because they're interested in paying money for the book.

>I'm not saying that's exactly the case here, but the fact that the kickstarter completely plateaued suggests there is limited organic, word-of-mouth growth.

I wasn't expecting a ton of word of mouth organic growth about a book that hasn't been published yet. The thing I thought would attract customers is reaching people who aren't already aware of the book through blog posts, and that was successful. I think it's a good indicator that I can repeat that to find new readers after the book is available.

FWIW, the numbers I'm expecting are way smaller than what you're suggesting. I don't think $X in pre-sale means $100X in regular sale. I'm expecting it to be more like 3-4X. That is, I'll be happy if this book makes $20k by the end of the year.

by mtlynch

4/1/2025 at 12:03:33 PM

I think the quoted Reddit comment is very ironic. People are allergic to self-promotion but hand complain that no one writes blogs anymore (beside the corporate ones).

I am not sure what can be done about strong luck impact on HN submissions or publishing Amazon books. It really feels like you have one attempt and the end result is mostly out of you hands.

by Phui3ferubus

4/1/2025 at 5:05:11 PM

Book author, in reply to your post’s discussion about the effectiveness of submitting posts to Hacker News:

Your final post title to HN was clear, direct, and talked about your book. The prior titles were not necessarily that - and used the Foo Bar Title Caps formatting in their submissions which is a mark against you before I’ve read past word two.

> My Seventh Year as a Bootstrapped Founder

Biographies are interesting to some people but not me, and this offers very little insight into what’s unique about you that’s worth reading. (There is, presumably, something unique to you that’s interesting!)

> No Longer My Favorite Git Commit

This feels like an in-joke that I didn’t get because I’m not a regular reader of your site, and probably overlooked the prior HN post. It also isn’t particularly distinctive: why not? what commit?

> Show HN: …

This title was excellent. I remember the post and I remember having all the information I needed in the title to decide how to respond to it. Lots of people run statistical analyses on HN, so it’s a common enough Show topic.

> How to write blog posts that developers read

This title is also excellent. It’s to the point, helps me understand what the focus is going to be, and either is a topic I care about or not. More like this, please!

As a concluding note, when I see people self-linking, I take a glance through their post and comment tendencies; >90% of your last 20 posts and of your last 90 days of comments are about your own work, rather than those of others. It typically takes me about ten seconds to check someone’s recent posts and make a snap judgment if I see a page full of self-links, no matter if it’s over ten days or ten months, because that’s a very reliable indicator of “promoting” rather than “participating”. I’m perfectly fine with promotion, but only in balance with participation. So, that’s a key factor in why I haven’t engaged with your posts this year to date. I’m glad your book funding went well, but I’ll continue glossing over your submissions as long as that participation ratio remains 9:1 self/other rather than 1:9 self/other.

by altairprime

4/1/2025 at 1:13:08 AM

This is my favorite part about reading developer blogs: the stories.

Really cool to see how you succeeded and failed at gaming Hacker News!

by sadmanca