First Year Book Sales

I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been a year since The Motivation Hacker came out, so here's an updated graph of first year ebook sales by platform:

Last time I posted six months in, right after that spike in August, and I was sure it was some temporary press thing and figured my book could head into quiet retirement shortly. But the last six months have sold more than the first, which was quite surprising to me. People must be continuing to recommend it to their other people.

As I've gone from 40 total reviews to 124, the book's rating went from 4.9 to 4.5 on Amazon and 4.29 to 3.90 on Goodreads. This is much more in line with the actual quality of the book (although still a little high on Amazon); perhaps it regressed to the mean, or perhaps friends of friends of friends are more critical of my stuff.

So yeah, 2412 sales in the first year at ~$2.21 profit per sale, which given ~$620 in direct costs and 195 hours of work means I've made $24.16 per hour so far, up from the gorgeous $8.36 per hour I'd calculated from the first six months. That's not bad at all, given my expectations.

The money, of course, is not the point. More surprising and satisfying is that 2412 at least intended to read 44,000 words I wrote–and dozens now have let me know that it was a huge help to them. That's cool.

Thanks for reading, y'all!

For more info about what writing the book was like, the previous post had the good stuff. Updates: Second Year Book Sales, Fourth Year Book Sales

Nick

Hacking on CodeCombat, a multiplayer programming game for learning to code. Mastermind behind Skritter, the most powerful Chinese character learning app.

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