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Make twice, sell twice
In November 2020, I independently published my first book at Gumroad. I had spent four months or so full-time deliberately researching, writing, editing, proofreading, and designing a PDF of ~18,000 words. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but you could say I spent most of the 2010s researching it (starting with this piece and the Prologue interviews).
The original book was a practical guide to creative endeavors, featuring 46 propositions, for anyone who considered themselves non-creative, but were interested in pursuing creativity either for their full-time job, side projects, or next career moves. I talk more about it with Chris Do at The Futur here, and you’ll find an excerpt at Fast Company here.
There were a lot of reasons I went with Gumroad at that time. The main reason I chose it over Amazon: I wanted to keep my customer data, a lesson I’d learned from working with Ryan Leslie. I worked hard to promote my book; if they bought a copy, I wanted to be able to keep in touch with them and reach out to see how they were liking it, if I could support their learning experience, and with more of my work in the future.
One of the main drawbacks to it was the reading experience: a PDF has all of the limitations of paper without any of the advantages of software. I was catching up with my friend Peter, who asked if there was a better way to take…
