Yeah. I was going to echo this sentiment but it looks like you pre emptively followed me.

The article has the air of a hack done just for the fun of it because the author can. This was popular once upon a time but these days, it's mostly stuff written to promote certain things or as marketing copy.

This is marketing, don’t kid yourself.

Author here: I'd like to think it's a little bit of both, but mostly "here's a silly hack." I tried to separate the marketing from the content as cleanly and honestly as possible.

I'll give you a peek inside my head, and you can decide if you trust me to be telling the truth.

I did this silly hack because I wanted to hold a copy of my book. I knew it was crazy when I was doing it, and that there were simpler/better ways of accomplishing the same goal. But I was surprised that (1) it worked at all, and (2) it came out as well as it did – though you can certainly find people in the comments here who can identify the flaws.

I did not do this silly hack because I wanted to use it to write a marketing post. That would be an extraordinarily convoluted way of going about things, even for me.

Anyhow, I like writing, and I like sharing my writing, so I put together this post about something I did that I found interesting. I don't expect everyone to enjoy it, but it seems like some people found it entertaining and/or learned a little bit about CSS.

And yes, I included two links to my book. Given that the existence of the book is central to my motivation to pursue the project, it would be silly not to at least mention it. So I did, one link at the top where I think it's relevant context, and an actual "pitch" at the bottom, separated from the other content/called out explicitly so anyone allergic to marketing could bail. I'm not being snarky; I personally dislike marketing and hate most of the ways it's done.

And even still, I do feel conflicted. I grew up in the 90s, and I miss that old, pre-commerce internet populated by hobbyists. Maybe I should have left the pitch out.

I'm not condemning your actions, just pointing out naivety. Some of those most influenced by marketing are those who think they are above it all.

Yeah. I've been on the net long enough to develop a sixth sense for when a post or article is just a lead in to a book. Either the OP did a good job hiding that intention if it was there or if no such intention was there, all the better.

My evaluation was based on my own subjective feeling so it could be wrong but I still don't feel any different even after reading the counters to my initial post.

yeah, it seems a bit weird to be marketing your techno thriller book with a post about css. I mean I guess there is some overlap between the two subjects, as there is likely be overlap between anything in a world with complicated people.

It. Is. Marketing. The very first sentence is just a link to Amazon to buy the thing.

Yup. Well written enough for me to forget that part. Just enjoyed the post .

The question then is, is it effective marketing? How many sales resulted from this blog post? Zero? A handful? Tens? Hundreds?

I would guess a handful at most.

And I am not saying that to criticise the author. Marketing is genuinely difficult. Hell I even did a marketing campaign with paid ads on Reddit to get more people to use one of my pieces of open source, free of charge, pieces of software and even with a bunch of ad impressions and clicks I can still count the amount of new stars on just a few hands

I'll answer the question: a handful at most

7 ebooks ordered as of 10:15 PST, and 10 subscribers for the free novella.

I have no idea how many people read the post, I assume lots? I'm hosting on Github pages and haven't added any tracking. It seems like anecdotally a front-page post gets ~20k views, so some tiny fraction of a percent of readers went on to purchase.

Honestly, this small number of sales is still far more than I was expecting. I wrote a longer response on my motivations higher in the thread, but my primary impulse was sharing, not marketing. I tacked a marketing pitch at the end, figuring I might as well, but I did not expect the post to spend any time at all on the front page of HN.

It is also probably true that this "marketing" was worse than ineffective, it was likely detrimental. I'm guessing that substantially more people clicked through to Amazon to see what the book was, despite being a poorly targeted audience that is unlikely to convert. From Amazon's point of view, the book just got a ton of traffic and very few sales, which is probably treated as the signal "this book is not a good seller, don't show it to people."

Similarly, the members of this poorly targeted audience that did buy the book are unlikely to be typical readers in the genre. This will degrade the "also bought" signal for the book, and to the extent that Amazon does organically show my book to other readers, it will likely show it to the wrong readers, further hurting organic performance.

>Similarly, the members of this poorly targeted audience that did buy the book are unlikely to be typical readers in the genre.

I would assume they were typical readers in the genre, which obviously some percentage of readers from HN would have to be.

A post of mine on criticism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32392070 went to front page for a bit and got 4.7K hits according to medium.

I would think if Amazon has any sort of decent traffic analysis ranking it would have the understanding of unknown/random spikes and discount negative data from that as noise (unless it led to a bunch of negative reviews etc. in that spike) but maybe I'm just too hopeful about stuff.

Wish I could sell some books though but as I don't ever it seems unlikely I know what I'm talking about anyway. :)

It's possible the only people who bought were technothriller enthusiasts, but I think it's likely that at least some of them are not.

Traffic spikes are actually a common occurrence in book sales. My understanding is that some of the most effective marketing is through paid newsletter inclusion – sites like BookBub/Freebooksy/Fussy Librarian. These newsletters absolutely drive big spikes in traffic, and the conversion rate is going to correlate well with how well the book will sell overall. It's possible Amazon does something with the referrer to try to segment these kinds of traffic, but impossible to know from the outside.

If you just want to move copies, you should look at the Facebook group 20BooksTo50k. It has lots of informative posts by self-published authors doing six figures in annual sales. I can distill it down for you though. The people finding "quit your job" levels of success generally:

- write to market

- in a consistent genre

- for several years

- and publish five or more books per year, mostly in a series.

Some people reach that level of success faster, though they tend to be in the largest genres (mainly romance), or publishing at truly breakneck speed (a book or more per month).

Personally, I write things that don't slot quite cleanly into a genre, and I have a tendency to genre hop. I know it's sub-optimal, but I'm pretty sure I'd just burn out trying to do it the other way.

I'm also not yet at the point where I can write work I'm proud of at that velocity; the last book I wrote took me two months to get a first draft, and it's probably going to take another two months to get it to a "finished" state. So I'm on a "three books a year" pace, and it already feels exhausting/I may need to slow down.

Marketing that entertains (and informs) is perfectly ok.

I didn’t say it wasn’t. Just naive to pretend it is intended as purely informational.