Introduction
In September 2022, I released my very first paid product: an ebook called "Battle Ready Laravel".
It's something that I spent a lot of time and effort creating, and I'm super proud of it. But there were some things that I think I did wrong or could have been done better.
So in this article, I'm going to use it as a bit of a brain dump to share some of the things I learned along the way, what went well, what didn't go too well, what I'd do differently next time, and what's in store for the future.
What is Battle Ready Laravel?
First off, a little about Battle Ready Laravel, for those of you who might not have heard about it.
Battle Ready Laravel is a 220+ page ebook that I wrote that teaches you how to audit, test, fix, and improve your Laravel applications.
Over the last 4 or 5 years, as a freelancer, I've had the chance to work on many projects and see how different teams approach problems. This is something I've found extremely useful because I've managed to keep improving my skills as a developer.
But there were a lot of common issues or problems that I saw popping up time after time in the applications I worked on. So I decided to write an ebook covering these common issues in the hope that it would help people avoid these issues and make their applications better.
I started writing it in 26th June 2022, and I finally released it on 6th September 2022.
How Did I Create Battle Ready Laravel?
When I first started thinking about Battle Ready Laravel, I had no idea how I was going to write the content. I knew the general gist of what I wanted to write, but I wasn't sure of the best way of putting it all together.
In the past, I had written a free 70-page ebook called "The Clean Coder's Guide to Laravel" as a lead magnet to help people learn a few skills in Laravel and encourage them to sign up for my newsletter. When I wrote this I did it in Google Docs. Wow, what a mistake that was! I chose Google Docs because, in my mind, I'd be able to work on it from my phone, computer, or laptop without much fuss. But in reality, I never actually did that. I worked completely from my laptop.
It was great being able to use all the nice formatting features that Google Docs offers, and it was really easy to export it all as a PDF when I finished. But I didn't have the functionality to add things like code blocks or code highlighting that looked half decent. So to tackle this, I ended up using a tool called Carbon to create images of my code blocks, and then I'd insert them into my document. It was a bit of a pain and extremely tedious to do, but it worked and got the job done.
But I learned not to use Google Docs again.
So when I started writing Battle Ready Laravel, I knew I wanted to use a different tool. I've been writing articles for my blog now for a few years, and I've been doing all of these in Markdown. So I knew that using Markdown would probably be the best approach for me.
I decided to use a tool by Mohamed Said called "Ibis". It's a PHP command line tool that allows you to write your content in Markdown, specify a few styles, and a cover image, and then it converts it all to a PDF for you. I downloaded it to give it a quick try and I was really impressed with it. It comes pre-packaged with some default styles and I could also use Aaron Francis' "Torchlight" syntax highlighting tool so I could have really nice-looking code blocks.
But one huge bonus that people seemed to love was that I was able to offer the book in light mode and dark mode. I'm regularly getting comments that the dark mode version is really helpful for people who like to read in the dark in bed at night.
So there's definitely a huge thanks to Mohamed and Aaron for making these tools. They made my life a lot easier and helped me focus on the content rather than worrying about any tooling.
I also had a huge amount of support from people around me who helped make the book possible. My fiancee, Jess, designed the book cover for me and all the graphics that were (and still are) on the website's landing page. She also kept me motivated when I was getting stressed or worried about the book. I'm super grateful for all her help because she helped make the book look great!
I also had a lot of support from JD Lien who proofread and edited my book. He picked up on so many little errors that I would have never noticed. I'm really grateful for his help!
How Did I Know What to Write About?
When I first started planning the content for the book, it all looked really different to what was in the finished product. I had a huge list of topics that I wanted to cover, but it was in a bit of a jumble. There wasn't really much order to what I'd planned and it was more of a brain dump of all the things I wanted to write about.
I got the ideas for the topics by thinking about the common pain points that I'd hit when working on different projects. I also thought about the things that I'd seen other people struggle with, and the things that I'd seen other people do wrong.
I kept trying to find some type of order to the ideas but couldn't think of one. But then I thought about it in the process of how I'd work if I was brought on board to help a team with their project. I'd start by auditing the codebase to look for any issues, and then I'd write some tests to prove to the team that these issues existed. I'd then fix the issues and write some more tests to prove that the issues were fixed. I'd then move on to improving parts of the codebase that weren't necessarily broken, but that could be written to improve the testability and maintainability of the code.
That was it! I knew at that stage that I had my order. I could split the book into 4 distinct sections covering auditing, testing, fixing, and improving.
So I moved all the topics into these sections and started to write the content.
I would regularly look at the content that I'd written in the book and check that what I was writing wasn't overlapping elsewhere. I realised that some of the topics I'd planned to cover later in the book, I'd already covered in the earlier sections. To keep on top of this, I kept moving sections around to make sure that I wasn't repeating myself but that the content I was writing still made sense in the sections that I'd moved it to.
There was a certain point when I thought to myself "I have to stop adding more chapters". I kept adding more and more chapters because I was worried that people would be disappointed with the book (I'll talk about this a bit further down), so I was trying to fill it out as much as possible. But I realised that I was just adding more content that wasn't necessarily needed and would be better suited as a blog post, or maybe as content for a future book. Deciding to stop adding more chapters was a huge relief, but it was also quite a difficult decision to make at the time. But I'm glad I did it, because I think the book is better for it. Plus, if I didn't draw the line somewhere, I'd probably still be writing it now!
Why Did I Create Battle Ready Laravel?
Ever since being a kid, I've enjoyed reading and writing. I'll admit, as I've got older, I don't read as much as I used to, but I still enjoy writing.
I've always wanted to write a book, but I never really knew what I wanted to write about. As a child, I wanted to write a storybook, in the hope that people would enjoy it. But as I've got older, I've realised I just don't have the imagination (or patience) to write a book like that.
When I first started working as a web developer, I started writing blog posts. It was partly to try and help me get a job, and partly because I genuinely enjoyed writing. I love the fulfilling feeling of writing something that people enjoy reading, and that helps them in their day-to-day life as a developer. I get a huge sense of satisfaction from that. So I've carried on with my blog ever since.
I'd seen people like Matt Stauffer, Adam Wathan, Povilas Korop, and Martin Joo had written books. I was really inspired by them, and I wanted to give it a shot myself. In particular, I was really motivated after watching Adam's "Nailing Your First Launch" talk and reading Martin's "The $35,000 Book Launch With 5,000 Followers" article. Seeing as I have a small, but growing, audience for my blog, I thought it might be worth trying my hand at creating a paid product that I could use to help support the blog so I can create more free content.
How Did I Market Battle Ready Laravel?
Landing Page & Social Media
I largely marketed the book through my blog and social media.
I first started by announcing that I was thinking of writing a book so that I could get an idea of if there was any interest in the topic. After noticing there was some interest, I took it a step further and created a landing page.
I created the landing page using "Tails" by Dev Dojo and managed to put it together in a couple of hours. I was actually really impressed with how easy it was to make a page! I then added a ConvertKit form to the page so that people could drop their email and be notified when the book was released. To encourage people to sign up, I offered a 25% discount to everyone who subscribed to the waiting list. I also wrote all the copy for the landing page myself and didn't worry about the overall design too much. I just wanted to get something up and running as quickly as possible, with the intention that I could tweak it later if (and when) it started to get some traffic.
I used the Twitter posts and the landing page to validate my idea before I started.
After I realised people would be interested in reading it, I started to tweet more about the book. I'd tweet every so often to give a bit of an update on the progress and talk about the section that I'd been working on that day.
I also added a banner to my blog posts so that each time someone read a blog post they'd see the banners mentioning the 25% discount for anyone who signs up.
As well as this, I got really lucky and was able to get a mention on the Laravel News podcast. This was a huge boost to the book and helped me get a lot of sales in the first few days. Huge thanks to Michael and Jake for this!
Another factor that played a huge part in the marketing was my newsletter. I've been running a newsletter for a while now, and I've been able to build a decent-sized audience of around 5.5k subscribers. So I made sure to mention the book in my newsletter a few times and this led to quite a lot of sign-ups for the waiting list.
However, I think the factor that played the biggest part in the marketing was my code tip tweets. I like to put out code snippets and tips in tweets every so often because I find that they get quite a good reach. I've done it for a while purely because I like to help people and I enjoy writing. Admittedly, I don't do it as much as I used to because I find it quite hard to come up with ideas for tips that I can squeeze into a tweet. But I did notice that whenever one of these tweets went out and did particularly well, it led to a lot of sign-ups for the waiting list.
Marketing Isn't Like Web Development
Marketing the book is one thing I struggled with doing, in all honesty. I've read a lot of content on marketing, and I find the whole area of marketing really interesting in the way that it kind of taps into human psychology.
But, when it came to putting everything that I'd learned into practice, I realised how hard it really was!
As a developer, I write code for a living. Quite often the work that I'm doing largely has a very binary outcome: it either works, or it doesn't. For example, if I have to create a new feature for a project, it either works or it doesn't. The tests pass, or they don't. Of course, it's not always this black and white, but you probably get the point I'm trying to make.
Whereas with marketing, it's so much harder to measure whether something you've done has worked or not. You can't just always look at a number and say "this exact thing that I did yesterday is what caused an increase in sales". Of course, there are clues and hints that you can use to give you a good guess at this, but for someone like me, this isn't something I have any experience with.
How Did I Sell Battle Ready Laravel?
As I got closer to the release date, I started to look for the best way to sell Battle Ready Laravel. I couldn't decide between using a managed platform like Lemon Squeezy or Gumroad, or whether to write the sales functionality myself using Stripe.
The pros of using a managed platform were that they take care of pretty much everything for me. The cons were that I would need to pay a percentage of the sales to the platform (and quite rightly too).
The pros for writing the sales functionality myself would be that I'd have smaller fees to pay (to Stripe) and that I'd have more control to make the checkout experience bespoke. The cons would be that I'd need to write the sales functionality myself (taking time away from writing the actual book), and I'd need to make sure that it was secure and that everything worked as planned.
I decided to use a managed platform, specifically Lemon Squeezy.
I chose Lemon Squeezy because I'd heard good things about them on social media, and loved the fact that they interacted with the community quite a lot. I also saw that they acted as the "merchant of record" and took care of the huge burden of sorting taxes. Their fees also seemed pretty fair. So I signed up to give it a spin and really liked the entire experience. The dashboard and experience as a seller were great and gave me everything (and more) that I needed. In particular, I like the discounts feature because discounts have played a huge part in driving sales, such as the 25% discount for people who signed up for the waiting list or doing giveaways.
The team also answered all my questions and was super helpful.
If any of you are reading this and considering selling your own digital products online, I'd highly recommend checking out Lemon Squeezy. If I create another book in the future, I'll be selling it through Lemon Squeezy again.
How Many Copies Have I Sold?
I really didn't know what to expect when I launched the book, in terms of sales.
But I definitely didn't expect to sell as many copies as I've sold.
At the time of writing this article (on the 18th January 2022), I've sold 530 copies.
This works out at $17,321.87 (before taxes and transaction fees).
But in exactly 3 months (6th September 2022 - 6th December 2022), I did $16,204.21 in sales by selling 490 copies.
For some people, this might not seem like a lot. But for me, this is huge! It's my first time ever selling a product and I genuinely didn't expect to sell this many copies. So I'm really happy with how many I've sold.
It's also really nice to see that my readers enjoy my free content enough to want to pay for the book. I really appreciate everyone who has bought a copy of the book and I hope no one regretted their decision.
As you'd expect, the sales spiked when the book was first released. They also had a small spike on Black Friday when I ran a promotion. Apart from that, the sales have been pretty steady.
To be exact, in the first week of the book being released, I sold 253 copies. During the week that I ran the Black Friday promotion (21st November 2022 - 27th November 2022), I sold 71 copies.
Since the book has been released, I've sold an average of 26 copies a week. However, this figure is heavily skewed by the launch and Black Friday. So, if I was to exclude those two spikes in sales, I've sold an average of 9 copies a week.
What Went Well?
I'm super pleased with how everything turned out as a whole. I think the content creation process, the launch, and the sales have gone well.
On the first day of the book being launched, I got 1,568 visitors to the site, with 65% of those visitors coming from Twitter. Of those visitors, I sold 146 copies of the book. This works out at $5,078.37 in sales (before transaction fees and taxes) with a conversion rate of 9.31% (meaning that nearly 1 in 10 people that visited the site ended up buying the book). To say I was excited is an understatement. My phone kept buzzing with notifications during the day and I kept seeing the email from Lemon Squeezy saying "You made a sale!". I have to admit, it was a nice feeling of relief knowing that it was all worth it and that people were actually buying the book.
I think a large part of the success of the launch was down to the waiting list. At the time of launching, I had 513 people on my waiting list, and out of those, 144 people used the code to get the 25% discount in the first month or so. Of course, this number could have been higher, but I think it's still a pretty good amount of people.
There were also some huge accounts on Twitter (such as Taylor Otwell) that retweeted my announcement which helped drive traffic to the site. So I need to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped spread the word about the book because you really helped me out.
Another thing that I really enjoyed was the fact that I got to use some of the money from the book to sponsor Laracon Online. I've never really been able to do anything like that before, so it was really nice to be able to do that to help out the community. As an added bonus, I offered a Laracon-specific 30% discount code that people could use to get the book for cheaper. I actually ended up selling just enough copies (using that discount code) to cover the cost of sponsoring Laracon, so I was quite pleased with that, as it was a win-win situation.
What Didn't Go Well?
Although I'm generally happy with how everything went, there are a few things that I think could have gone better and that I've learned from.
Not Tracking the Conversion Funnel
When I first set up the website's landing page, I added Fathom Analytics so that I could get an idea of how many people were visiting the site. This was great because I could see where my traffic was coming from and how long they were sticking around on the site. But I didn't set up any event tracking, so I was missing out on some vital statistics, such as how many people were clicking through to the checkout page.
The general user journey for the site followed something like this:
Newsletter/Social media -> Landing page -> Checkout page -> Purchased!
I had analytics for the number of people that were making it from the "Newsletter/Social media" stage to the "Landing Page" stage. But I didn't have any visibility on how many people were making it past this stage. This was a huge oversight on my behalf and something that I hadn't considered. So I wasn't sure where I was losing people and stopping them from being converted to paying customers.
I've since added event tracking to the site and I've found that most people aren't clicking through to the checkout page. This suggests to me that some of the visitors are just browsing and don't have any intention of buying, or that the site doesn't excite the visitors enough to want to buy. I guess if someone isn't looking to buy and is just browsing, there's not a huge amount I can do to change that. But for the visitors that aren't excited enough, I've since added a free chapter (which I'll discuss next) and got some new, updated content written for the landing page by a professional copywriter, Dan Flower.
Not Adding a Free Chapter Sooner
I considered adding a free chapter to the landing page when I launched the book. The idea behind it was that it would give potential buyers a chance to see the style of content and get a glimpse at what would be covered. I hoped that it would help increase sales.
But I decided against doing it at the time of the launch because I thought it would have taken too long to prepare and I wanted to get the book released as soon as possible.
Looking back now, I think this was a bit of a mistake. I had quite a few people on the day of the launch message me or comment on Twitter asking if there was a free sample available. Understandably, they wanted to check out the free chapter before taking the plunge and buying the full book. I think this was a missed opportunity to get some more sales.
I've since added a ConvertKit form to my site that allows people to get the free chapter. Each person is added to an automated email flow that sends the free chapter and then a day later is emailed with a discount code for the book.
At the time of writing this, 274 people have downloaded the free chapter, and of these people, 21 have gone on to buy the book. So I'd guess that this has helped increase sales, even if only 7.6% of the people that download the free chapter buy the full book. But I'll definitely be trialling offering a different free chapter to see if I can increase the conversion rate even more. I'd like to try and hit a 10% conversion rate for people that download the sample and go on to buy the full product. I have a feeling that the chapter I currently have isn't exciting enough to get people to buy the book. But I find it difficult to choose a chapter that excites people the most because different people will find different topics more interesting.
Problems with Chrome
One issue that was reported quite a lot for the book's website was that Chrome kept flagging the site as being potentially malicious.
This was because the site's URL, "https://battle-ready-laravel.com", was apparently too similar to the URL of the Laravel website, "https://laravel.com". This meant that Chrome was flagging the site as possibly being a phishing site. I tried reporting this to Google several times using their form for fixing these types of issues, but nothing really happened. But it did eventually get fixed and stopped displaying.
I don't really have any proof or statistics that this affected the sales of the book. But I do think it's something that could have put people off buying the book and could have made the site seem less trustworthy, especially because the site was new and asking to take customers' money. I'm not sure if there's anything I could have done to prevent this from happening, but I'll definitely be more careful in the future when choosing a domain name.
Setting a Deadline and Getting Stressed
In some ways, I'm really glad that I publicly announced I was writing the book and set a deadline. If I hadn't announced a deadline, I think I'd still be writing the book now because I'd have kept delaying it and trying to reach perfection.
I think it held me accountable and made me work harder to make sure I got the book released in time. But this did make things quite stressful at times during the writing process and did make me think to myself "is this really going to be worth it?". I was struggling to juggle client work, blog content, writing the book, and having a personal life. So there were times when I was snowed under with a huge amount of work and was falling behind on the progress of the book.
In my opinion, I don't think the quality of the book suffered for it, but it did make the writing process a bit unenjoyable at the times (although I enjoyed the process as a whole). Looking back, I probably should have set a slightly more relaxed deadline and given myself a bit more time to write the book so that I'd have less pressure and enjoy the process more.
Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome is something I struggled with a lot, especially as I got closer to the launch.
I like to contribute to open-source projects. In fact, in 2022, I made 174 pull requests to open-source projects. All this is done for completely free and I don't ask for any money to do it. I do it because I enjoy it and I like knowing that the code I write could make another developer's life easier. I also write blog posts and I've written around 90 blog posts since I first started. Again, all these blog posts are free and I write them purely because I enjoy writing and want to help other developers.
So the thought of making something and selling it made me feel quite uncomfortable. I got huge imposter syndrome and felt like a sleazy salesman. If someone doesn't like my free content, they can just leave my site and move on to the next result in the Google search results. But if someone bought the book and didn't enjoy it, I was worried they might start asking for refunds or trying to publicly shame me for writing a bad book. I was worried that I'd be seen as a fraud and that I'd be a failure.
I also didn't want people to view me as a "sell-out" writing a book and trying to sell it. I didn't want people to think I was only writing the book purely to make money. Of course, that definitely one of the main goals of writing the book, but I would never have released it if I didn't think it gave any value to the readers.
Although this might have caused quite a lot of mental strain for me during the writing process, I think it might have actually been motivating me without me realising it. I sometimes went back and rewrote some paragraphs, or added a bit more to sections to try and improve the quality and make it as good as possible.
Worrying About Pricing
When I first announced the book, I think I made a bit of a mistake with the pricing.
I was originally going to sell two different packages:
- The auditing chapter for $29
- The entire book for $59
In my mind, I thought this was a good idea at the time. I thought that people would be more likely to buy the auditing chapter because it was cheaper and they could see if they liked the style of content. If they did like it, they could then pay the difference ($30) to buy the full book.
But I had quite a few people comment on this pricing structure and tell me they didn't think it was a good idea. They thought that $29 for one chapter was too expensive and that $59 was too expensive for the book.
I thought that $59 was a reasonable price because I genuinely believe that there's a huge amount of information in the book that could help people. There are some sections in there that can stop you from making huge mistakes in your projects that could cost your business thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees. But I also understand that in some parts of the world, $59 is a lot of money. And I didn't want to put people off buying the book because of the price. After all, I wanted as many people to read it as possible.
I worried quite a lot about this, and it tied into my imposter syndrome. I was worried that people would think I was being greedy and trying to rip them off and that I was just trying to make money. But I was also aware that if I sold the book for too cheap, I'd be selling myself short and not getting the value I deserved for the work I put into it.
So I decided to look at how similar books were priced and copy their pricing structure. I scrapped the tiered system and added a flat fee of $39 for the entire book.
I guess I'll never know whether I made the right decision by dropping the price from $59 to $39. It may have just been a few people being vocal about the price, or it may have been the general consensus that the price was too high.
But I know that next time I do something like this, I'll definitely pay more attention to other similar products and base my pricing on that so that it's priced fairly.
Not Optimising the Mobile Site
When I first built the website's landing page for the book, I used Tails to quickly put together a nice design. I then tweaked the styling a little bit to get it how I wanted it to look.
But the problem was that I didn't spend enough time working on the mobile version of the site. This was a complete oversight on my behalf and it probably cost me sales, but I guess I'll never actually know.
Almost all the traffic to my blog and to the landing page (before releasing) was on desktop devices. So I expected the majority of the traffic would be on a desktop when I released the book, and spent more time optimising the desktop version. But I was so wrong! 64% of the traffic was on mobile devices, mainly because they'd come from the Twitter mobile app.
The mobile version of the site wasn't exactly horrible, but it definitely could have been better. I've since made some improvements to the mobile version (and it still needs more). But looking back, I wish I'd taken an extra hour or two before launching to make sure the mobile version of the site was as good as the desktop version.
Not Sending the Discount Codes in Time
When I listed my product on Lemon Squeezy, I hit the "publish" button on 6th September 2022 at midnight (UK time). So this meant the product was live and could be bought. The site was also automatically updated so that visitors could buy the book instead of subscribing to the waiting list.
There was also a scheduled tweet to go out too on Twitter to let people know it was available to buy.
But it was late at night for me, so I decided to go to bed. I genuinely didn't expect that anyone would have bought the book overnight. But I woke up at around 9am and saw that I'd already sold about 20 copies, which was a lot more than I expected. I also got a lot of Twitter comments, messages, and emails from people saying they're ready to buy the book but want to use their waiting list discount code.
I'd forgotten to send out the discount codes!
I rushed on to ConvertKit and sent out an email to everyone on the waiting list with discount codes. Almost immediately after sending that email, I got around another 20 sales.
I was so annoyed with myself for forgetting to send out the discount codes. I'd spent so much time building up the waiting list and getting people excited about the book, and then I'd forgotten to send out the email with everyone's codes. I have no concrete proof of whether it affected the number of sales, but I do have a feeling that it did. I think if I'd have sent out the discount codes at the time of launching, I would have sold a lot more copies.
So this is something that I'll definitely be making sure to do next time.
What I'd Do Differently Next Time
Based on what I've learned from selling Battle Ready Laravel, if I was to do it again, there are a few things I'd probably do a bit differently.
I'd make sure to add a free chapter to the landing page straight away. I'd potentially even consider adding the free chapter before the book was released so that people could get a feel for the style of content and increase the number of people on the waiting list.
I would also spend more time working on the mobile version of the site so that it was optimised for making sales.
I'd also make sure to send out the waiting list emails straight away so that people could use their discount codes.
As I mentioned earlier, I missed out on a lot of useful metrics by not setting up event tracking in my analytics. So I'd definitely make sure I had this set up as early as possible so that I could have a clearer picture of how the site was performing and where people were dropping off the conversion funnel.
Something else that I'd like to experiment with would be to create a video course or git repository to go alongside the book. I feel most comfortable writing about a topic, but I understand that some people prefer to learn using videos. I also know that some people learn better by seeing something done in a real-world project. So I think having these extra options to go alongside the book would really help target a wider audience and improve the overall learning experience. This is something that I'll definitely consider in the future.
What's Next?
Even though I've released the book, there are still some things that I'm working on.
First off, I've got some amazing new content written by Dan Flower that I'll be adding to the landing page. Depending on when you read this, it may already be live on the site. Although the content that I wrote myself did the job for the initial launch, I know that getting someone who writes day-in-day-out will be able to do a much better job of writing something that will help excite and convert visitors. So this will hopefully increase my sales in the future. I'll likely also use Dan to write some more content for landing pages for future books.
I'm currently in the process of investigating creating EPUB and MOBI versions of the book so that it can be read on Amazon Kindles and other e-readers. I've never done this before, so I'm going to have to do some research and see what the best way to do this is. I'm hoping to get this done within the next month or so.
I'm also looking into getting physical copies of the book published. This is something that I've never done either so I'm doing a lot of research into the best way of approaching it. But I'm hoping to get this done within the next couple of months.
One thing that I'm quite excited about is that Lemon Squeezy (the platform I'm selling the book through) is launching an affiliate program feature. This means I'll be able to enable affiliate sales for the book so that people can help sell the book for me and get a bit of a kickback. I'm hoping that this will help drive sales. Lemon Squeezy is hoping to release this feature in February 2023, so, depending on when you're reading this, it may already be live.
I'm also considering writing another book in the future. As I mentioned earlier, although the process got stressful at times, I enjoyed writing Battle Ready Laravel in general. I definitely learned a huge amount from it, and I'll try and use this newly-learned knowledge to improve my next product. I have an idea for a book, but I want to make sure the concept is solid before I start any writing or make any announcements. I want to make sure that I only sell content that I'm passionate about and that I feel is a genuine product with value. I don't want to just churn out paid content for the sake of it. So this is a fine line that I need to tread. If all goes well with the next launch, I may start to explore the idea of creating a little bit more paid content in the future, because it will enable me to spend more creating free content for my blog to keep helping people.
Conclusion
If you've made it this far, thanks! I know this was a pretty big blog post and it's just a bombardment of information.
If any of you are considering releasing your own ebooks, I hope this post has been helpful. I've tried to be transparent about the whole process and include as much detail as possible. But if there's anything you think I missed that you'd like to know, feel free to drop me a comment or a message and I'll try and answer it.
Keep on building awesome stuff! 🚀
Top comments (4)
I love this post, I want write a book for Laravel in Spanish.
Thanks, I really appreciate it! I reckon you should do it 😄
Excellent post.
You next book, "Workflows For Successfully Selling Your Own Book Online".
Then a website for people who don't know squat about websites or the difference between building a desktop vs mobile web site that is reactive.
Good job!
Best of luck to ya.
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