$74K From a Self-Published eBook in 1 Year

Sandro VolpicellaCo-author of AWS Fundamentals $74,792 first year revenue Published January 25, 2024 by Fardeen KhanReviewed and edited by Niall Doherty

Sandro Volpicella and Tobias Schmidt self published their book, AWS Fundamentals, which is…

A Book & Newsletter That Teaches You How to Use AWS in the Real World.

AWS = Amazon Web Services, a bunch of cloud computing services offered by Amazon. 

And AWS Fundamentals is a digital book, no physical copies available

A recent article by Sandro…

1 year after self-publishing my AWS Book – $74.792 and 1.712 orders later

There he shares some secrets to the book’s success…

Our approach was based on doing everything in public. We talked about writing an AWS book very early on…

We created a very simple landing page on carrd with an initial thought of the table of contents.

We started out with 500 subscribers but grew very quickly up to 2,000 subscribers!

… This validated [the idea] and we decided to write a book

Looks like these were their announcement tweets in mid-2022…

SandroTobias

Today, they have a combined following of 24K on X but it looks like they only had a combined 10K back then

Sandro adds…

One amazing benefit we got through writing in public is a shout-out from Jeff Barr! 

Jeff is a VP at AWS and he is the OG in creating technical content about AWS. He authored over 1,000 blog posts. Getting a shout-out from him gave us the biggest boost + credibility boost ever.

That shout-out post on LinkedIn has ~2K likes

Unclear how that came about, but I’m guessing Sandro and Tobias’ do-everything-in-public approach had a lot to do with it.

More from Sandro…

Via Twitter we shared a lot of progress of the book. We always included CTAs to our landing page which had a waiting list form on it. This channel works out quite well.

(See their tweets about the book here and here.)

Email marketing has been key…

Having a direct connection to the inbox of interested people is the best way… it is still the best-converting tool if you create great content.

Sandro also lists “the three best resources that helped us”

– Adam Wathan’s talk and blog post about Nailing your first launch…
– Nathan Barry’s book Authority
– Rob Fitzpatrick’s book: Write Useful Books

Main thing I love about this story: they validated the idea of the book before writing it.

Most people first write a book and then try to figure out a way to market it. But clearly the approach Sandro and Tobias took is far superior

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