Jared Tame financed his first startup by writing and self-publishing an ebook about… startups. He shared a lot of great advice on how he did that in his post Startups Open Sourced, 1 Week Later: $10,000+ in Revenue and in his video interview in the startup foundry.
We studied these and took a lot of notes but still had many questions so we decided to reach out to Jared and jump on a quick call to learn more from him. If you’re thinking about publishing a successful ebook, we suggest you read his post and then continue reading the follow-up lessons we learned from him on the call below.
Paid Advertising?
His experience with paid ads wasn’t good – the only ad that broke even for him was on startup foundry. The worst was reddit. Paid advertisement really didn’t help selling his ebook at all.
How should we promote our ebook once launched?
His advice for promoting our ebook was to do a lot of content marketing (mainly blogging), and offering influential bloggers and tweeters exclusive discount codes when we were about to launch.
He also made a point that creating the book is just about 25%-50% of the actual work – the rest is promotion. You need to start with a great book. But a great book won’t be read if you don’t promote it.
What would you do different this time?
If he’d do it all over again, he’d make the book a lot shorter. His book was 500+ pages, and some people found that too much to digest and partly repetitive.
Should we do a Deal-Site Promotion?
They are great for selling a lot of books. The downside is that people can perceive you as cheap and come to expect discount prices from you.
Where can we find a good editor for our ebook?
He recommended finding undergraduate students in journalism or English at English departments.
He also introduced us to Kevin Gao from HyperInk to get even more insights and knowledge on how to publish our ebook. We had an amazing call with Kevin and will post our learnings from that very soon 🙂
(Thanks again Jared for taking time out of your busy day and sharing your insights!)
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