I had the day off on Black Friday, and on a whim, I decided to set up a pre-order page for a book I’ve been thinking about writing (the book is called “Mental Models for Effective Managers” and it’s listed on pre-order here).
I also decided to live-tweet the process I followed.
One reason was to show people how easy anyone can do that using Gumroad, which launched a new website and brand on that day (disclosure: I’m an investor).
Another reason was to validate if this was a feasible idea.
The results were as follows.
I started at 11:10 am on Friday, and the first pre-order came in at 1:24 pm. That was 2 hrs and 14 minutes between coming up with the idea and getting the first sale.
In the next few days, I got 16 more orders. So that’s a total of 17 orders at a special pre-order price of $10 (i.e., I made a total of $170 in revenue).
That’s not a lot of money, but it’s way more than enough for me to know that there’s an existing interest in the topic.
Here’s the full Twitter thread that I published on that day.
Note: The embedded tweets below can be confusing because some of them repeat. This is an issue with how Twitter embeds threads on blogs. Simply skip over each repeated tweet. If you prefer to read the thread on Twitter, click here for the first tweet.
You can check out the book’s pre-order page by clicking here.
I hope you found this insightful and encouraged you to write your own book. If you have any questions, feel free to follow me on Twitter and ask away.