Had 0 sales on my Info-Product. Feeling Exhausted. Anyone Else?

What's more valuable - hours spent reading a book about python, or $2?
If I'm investing this much time learning something, it better be worth it. If the author doesn't think it's worth much, why should I?

Among the other issues you may be having - pricing a valuable resource at $2 signals to potential buyers that it's either a) scam or b) worthless

I would address this first. Then look for ways to market it.

My best friend from college who is rich now by selling books, courses and couching, started with 0 sales (he is not in tech), 7 years ago. He failed 3 times before that. I used to smile when he was telling me he had like 20$ at the end of the month.
Now he is so popular in his niche, 1 hour of his time is several thousands dollars, and he has so much automated sales he is on totally different financial level than most people.

Keep going.

PS: i am also just starting the journey, never give up. I know it is a long run)

200 pages Python ebook? To be honest, I would never start reading it.

100s of 'Learn Python in 1 hour' courses on YouTube + 1000s of other ebooks/courses/guides. Why would anybody choose yours?

High-quality ebook for $2? Also strange...

The problem is there are tons of interactive and non-interactive content to learn Python from. And they are mostly free. Plus, many beginners learn to get a certificate or something.

I think if you want to make money from a Python book, it needs to be extremely deep in one vertical, like DS, Web, Internals, etc., and positioned for senior developers who want to be in the top 1% of Python developers. Because such information is hard to find and curate, I think many would pay for it.

I am sure the majority of Python devs have no idea how the garbage collector works under the hood, but a senior guy who wants to get a good job- needs at least an idea.

The price is a signal - I would expect a quality python book cost $25+. I'm gonna try the same (increase price) with my ebook Hackers Guide to Machine Learning.

Thanks!

Okay, so I think here are some misassumptions going on, let's go into it:

First of all: If all of your mentioned points are truly met, you would have made sales, so I conclude your green checkmarks are assumptions as well.

• The E-book has a demand - ✅ --> Demand in something doesn't mean demand is also there for something related. E-book is not the same as the language itself. Take this: There is demand in eating something, but there is probably no demand in eating a pork cheesecake. If I would assume there is demand for the latter because people like to eat in general, I made a mistake. Same can be applied to your e-book.

• Am I reaching the right audience - ✅ --> "Right audience" is pretty wide spread and has to be narrowed down further, i.e. if you write a book for beginners and the larger part of the reach is senior Python Architects, you would somehow reach people with interest in the same field your book is in, but nevertheless, the audience is not right.

Is the price Reasonable - ✅ --> You are assuming cheap = reasonable, but in reality this is not always the case. Assume I would offer traveling to the moon for $100. Nobody would buy this (even if in our thought experiment it is possible). This doesn't make $100 a reasonable price, even if it's cheaper than any other offer.

Is my Promotional creative eye-catching - ✅ check --> Hiring somebody doesn't guarantee an outcome, it just means you put money into getting a result. To make sure it really is eye-catching and converts, measure the clicks you get.

Is my sales copy Good - ✅ check, or atleast I think so. --> working on something for a long time doesn't mean it reaches the goals or is good per se.

I don't want to be rude, but want to make clear that your whole sales process is based on assumptions and that there is no indication at all that selling your book would have worked out.

So what should you do now?

1. Formulate all your assumptions (i.e. what I wrote above)
2. Build testable hypotheses (i.e. "I assume that promoting something on a Python Instagram Page makes me reach my audience").
3. Define criteria for success (i.e. "when I get 20 clicks on [some Python ad] on [an Instagram page] in [a specific time frame], I declare my experiment a success. If I get less than that, my hypothesis is invalidated".
4. Find out how to test and validate your criteria.
5. Execute, evaluate, iterate.

1. Raise your price to at minimum, 9.99.
2. Differentiate yourself. Here's an idea ->

Create a landing page with an interactive AI chatbot trained solely on a portion of your ebook (several SaaS companies offer this for like 10$ a month and embed on your landing page). Set up some simple instructions pulled directly from your ebook that create something interesting and fun with Python and prompt the user to follow along.

After the task is complete and the user has built a tic-tac-toe game or whatever, celebrate their success, making them feel good and funnel them to purchase the full ebook.

Bonus: add a sandbox code editor side by side with the chat bot. Build a user portal after purchase where the AI bot expands to the entire book and has exercises for them to follow. Suddenly you have your own small version of CodeAcademy and can replicate this for other languages, books or frameworks.

Hi Rishabh! First of all, I understand that it is quite demotivating but don't give up. :)

I'm thinking, if you spent 2 months creating your e-book and it has 200 pages, why is it priced so low? I assume that you created a quality product, so you should charge adequately, IMO.

Did you also consider giving a sample for free, e.g. one chapter, so people can have a sneak peek? I'm not sure if there are already some famous books about Python. I assume yes, so you should clearly communicate how yours is different.

Try to write down your assumptions regarding price, marketing, copy, design etc. and test them one-by-one. There might be something that you've missed.

BTW, I'm a professional designer, so if you want feedback for the visual part, share your link and I will be happy to leave some comments. :)

An immediate red flag is the price of your e-book. If you don't think it's worth more than 2 dollars, your customers won't either.

Secondly, there are tons of people teaching/ selling python related courses. What makes you different? Do you have something unique in your profile that speaks for itself, eg Have you built stuff that many people have used before?

I agree with @thisiscetin. I'm a seasoned JavaScript developer, who touched Python just to run machine learning models with Pytorch. Am I your target audience?

Maybe you just decided to omit the detail, but python book seems vague. I don't mean you should rewrite the entire book, but maybe there's some strong content within your book that you can rephrase your messaging. For example, "Python for fullstack developer" would catch my eyes more.

Hey Rishabh,

Book sales before you have an audience is a grind. But it's 100% possible!

I've have previously promoted a book and slowly managed to accumulate over 100 Amazon reviews. Here's an outline of what I did:

1. Offer free copies: I identified people within my niche and personally sent them a copy along with a personalized note. This people who may have write articles, influencers, or any kind of content creator.

2. Leverage podcasts: I reached out to podcast hosts who catered to my target audience and offered them a complimentary copy of the book. Even better if you can do multiple podcasts and have them all drop their episode on the same week.

3. Engaging with reviewers: I proactively contacted reviewers within my niche who had provided positive feedback on similar books and had identifiable full names that I could scrape. For each person, I crafted a personal email or direct message explaining the relevance of my new book. More than half of the half responded positively and accepted the offer, and half of those who accepted publicly reviewed the book or posted about it on Twitter.

Definitely bump your prices up, and consider making a hard copy format of your book as well. Both will help the perceived value of your book for sure.

Consider doing a new launch, so that people who give the book to can feel like they're getting in early on the release.

You shouldn't be the one putting the green checks, we will do that. At least for 1 check it's already clear it's not in fact a green check.

Show us your things, and we will put a green check or red cross behind it.

My thoughts:

1. This is in fact true. However, how saturated is that market with your competitors?
2. ❌ You didn't have any conversions, so clearly you are not reaching the right audience. Why only Instagram? Is that the place to be for developers? Why not Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, ...?
3. ❌ $2??? Why would I do the effort to take out my credit card for something that is only worth $2??? I would set at least $20, at least!
4. ❓show us! The quality of Fiverr freelancers can go any direction.
5. ❓show us!

Hi Rishabh,

First of all, it's great that you did it! Well done!. Second of all, it seems unclear to me that how much you understand what happend.

for example, "The E-book has a demand" seems quite vague to me. It's a statement without quantities. If it is yes, there is a demand. Then how much is the demand? do you know how many people has seen your product page? do you know how much clicks you generated? that can tell you a bit more about the interest.

"Am I reaching the right audience " from your reason, it seems that you just dropped stuff on instagram page and hoped for the best. What do you mean by right audience? who are they? are they young professional or are those who want to make career changes? then i doubt instagram is a right place for these assumption of audience.

There are a lot to say. but keep going, never give up, mate!

Best,
David

Why not choose to put out a video tutorial, or a live course?
First you need to understand what kind of course your users need?
Second, what does your customer profile look like, and what kind of content do they prefer?
In addition, when you have a product, the first thing you have to do is to amplify your customer funnel, you choose to put it can be said to fight for, but it is a broader flow, you first have to find your most accurate deal traffic, and then to amplify it.

Do you have an audience on any platform? It's hard to cold-sell info products.

Also, best to pre-sell before actually doing the writing work.

Its very early to say anything about its success, but here my 2 cents:
Is paying you the only way I can get that knowledge? ❌️

A bit black hat, but I have seen great (and i mean really great!) success with getting your book into one of the top ranking listicles. the listicle author will charge you (maybe 2k?) but it is very worth it.

I would suggest you to start from close circle of people you know and care about your product. Think of 3 people that actually care about you and your success, then show them 1 on 1 and they will promote your product for more people if they feel it helped them. After that I think it will be much easier.

Share the link please

I would recommend looking into every stage of your funnel and seeing where you're actually losing leads.

What are your website stats? How many people visited your landing page and what was the average time spent and scroll depth?

If there are few visitors — you should reconsider your marketing channel. As SaltyWaffle mentioned earlier, Instagram might not be the best option.

If people just come and leave right away without even checking the pricing options — you might target the wrong audience.

If they scroll deep, check the price, and go away — they might not be satisfied with the value proposition and it's a sign to revise your landing page.

What you're doing is the first step in a series of experiments that will lead you to a better understanding of how to market your product properly. It just takes some time and patience.

Good luck!

I have a fallback plan to offer: you put a ton of effort into this no doubt, it can be recycled into all kinds of things starting with a series of YouTube videos that are numbered and can generate either ad revenue or be held private in a video training course - in both cases use the text in combination with a screen shot and break it into bite sized chunks of video that each have at least space for two ads in them. Number all the videos and daisy-chain them together.

I agree with @elton_build3, the price is a red flag.

And the other one may be this:

Do you have an audience? I mean an audience of yours. Have you demonstrated what you know about python before? Do you have some authority in the matter?

People can see your ads, but when they go to buy, what do the see? Just a landing page of the book? Your website where you've been publishing and demonstrating how much you know about the matter?

It's very difficut (if not impossible) to sell anything if nobody knows you...

I'm sorry my man, but you are missing the point about Software Developers in general. How many book do you buy or devs in general buy to learn something?

Python developer myself for 15+ years. And I'm yet to meet a Dev that reads book.

The common sense is to read the readme or just the basic tutorial in any given topic and brute force your wait out of problems

Please research your audience by just looking the common treats on it.

Also a $2 book tell me to keep away from your offer.

In addition to the other comments I'd suggest you try out some other marketing channels as well. It can happen that one channel just doesn't work for whatever reason.

This is hard, hang in there, this one e-book can be repurposed into many different products/content pieces now, so all your work hasn't gone to waste.

Honest opinion -

Info products shouldn't be created and sold like this anymore.

Generic content is already easily available everywhere..

We need to create specific, actionable content after validating what users want.

We can validate by -

• Asking audience (if we have it already on some platform).
• Researching what people are searching for on info product platforms such as - Amazon, Udemy, even Google.
• Researching and speaking to people in niche communities.

Probably the first thing you will learn during research is that people aren't interested in reading a 200 page e-book.

They prefer short, actionable byte sized pieces of content.

This is easy. You barely did any sales and marketing, and you're only 2 months. Do more sales and marketing.

Firstly, $5 is super challenging to be sustainable. I would consider atleast a $99 price. And then reflect if the content is worth that. Why would someone use it instead of learning for free? E.g. Replit's 100 days of code for python is a practical course for free - what will your ebook offer in addition to things like that? A link of where you've hosted the ebook will help. Try listing it on gumroad - get some real feedback from python devs on content and structure and launch for a higher price.

Hi Rishabh, This might help.

Try PPC advertising, SEO or SMM. These all help one thing brand awareness and that is key.

Also raise the price to $10 and add a fake mark down (discount). This will do two things first it will Increase the perceived value of the e-book and second it will add urgency.

Thomas:)

Hey there,

I feel your struggle. Getting customers can be really tough, especially at the start.

A key factor to consider here is product-market fit. It's about making sure your product/service meets a strong market demand. Here's a simplified approach I usually recommend:

• Know Your Market: Understand who your potential customers are and what they need. It's about digging deep into their pain points and how your product can solve them.

• Evaluate the Competition: Look at similar products or services in the market. What do they offer? Where are the gaps that your product can fill?

• Follow Trends: Stay updated with industry trends. This can help you understand if your product aligns with what's currently in demand.

• Ask for Feedback: Never shy away from seeking feedback. It can provide valuable insights and possible areas for improvement.

Now, all this can be pretty time-consuming if you do it manually.

Remember, it's okay to feel stuck sometimes. Every successful business had its rough patches. Keep learning and iterating! Best of luck!