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Marketing Your Website Sucks (the book)

This page is a chronological record of my efforts to sell my first book, Your Website Sucks. My intention is to market the book actively until it’s sold 1,000 copies.

Current sales: 60 copies. (37 on Gumroad, 23 on Amazon)

Here’s what I’ve done:

Pre-publication (2021-2022)

I spent a ton of time and energy on ad platforms—Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and a bit of Instagram. I made short videos about the concepts and topics from my book.

Reception was … somewhere between warm and tepid. I reached a nonzero number of people who found the content useful, and a handful who expressed interest in the book, but the effort didn’t seem worth the benefit. I’m not convinced that an appreciable number of humans buy a book based on a TikTok. And there’s the whole thing about social media making people miserable, so I gave up on this approach more or less at the moment I published the book. No regrets :)

YouTube

I’ve made a bunch of videos on my book topic. Extremely low viewership, and I got tired of talking about it. But I’m still on YouTube, because I like it there—I just stopped focusing on a single topic. I don’t consider this to be a key part of my marketing strategy.

Niche List 2021

I published a book on niches and sold a few hundred copies!

After declaring that I’d never write newsletters again, I started writing a newsletter again. I imported folks who bought Niche List 2021 or subscribed to my previous newsletters, and I personally invited people in my network to subscribe. By the time I published, the list was at about 300 subscribers.

Publication

Publication on Gumroad (December 2022)

While still fiddling with the paperback cover of my book, I uploaded a PDF to Gumroad and announced it to my newsletter (and a few people on Slack). It sold 16 copies that week.

Publication on Amazon (February 2022)

I finally got the book listed on Amazon and announced this to my email list. I sold 15 copies that week.

Post-publication

Guest podcast appearance (March 2023)

I appeared on the Freelance Podclass to talk about websites for freelancers. (In general, I’m focusing on framing the general lessons of the book for specific audiences.)

I offered listeners a free course and a few have signed up. Maybe some will buy the book at some point. Overall, though, I found the coordination and pressure of recording an interview to be pretty draining, so I decided to focus on writing guest blog posts instead.

Listing ebook on non-Kindle marketplaces (March 2023)

I used Draft2Digital to list my book on Apple Books and Barnes and Noble, plus a few places I’ve never even heard of: Rakuten Kobo, Smashwords, Tolino, Borrow Box.

Flesh out book website (April 2023)

I made some updates to yourwebsitesucks.fyi to make it more conversion-friendly, so I can link to it in guest blog posts.

Guest blog post (April 2023)

I published a post on Accounting Today. The book website saw about 15 visits in the two weeks after publication.