I sold 50k books (and I didn't predict this either) | #271

My journey with The Pathless Path

👋 Hey there 5-Bullet Friday friends and thanks to Tim for sending people my way. If you are interested in the book (after reading the below of course, you can purchase it here).

My entire book journey is one of low expectations, continuous surprises, and seeming enjoyment from others watching me be shocked by book sales.

I recently hit 50k books sold. And while book sales seem to be slowing, they are still selling at a steady clip. It blows me away that for almost 900 days in a row, I’ve sold at least one book.

People seem to like the peak behind the scenes so I thought it would be useful to do a deep dive behind the scenes of what it’s like. I recorded a video to go through all of this but also have shared quite a bit more below:

Overall Sales

When I published the book, I wasn’t sure what would happen. If I had to guess how many books I might sell over the coming 2 years, I would have guessed somewhere between 2,500 and 5,000.

In the first week, I wrote:

I sense that the initial audience will be people that have already read my writing, and if the book does find some marginal success, it will likely be slow and steady growth.

The reason behind this was I wrote the book with a specific kind of person in mind. I was not writing to the mass market but to the hundreds of people I had talked with over the previous three years, ones who were hungry for new ideas on how to think about work and life paths. However, the market for this book was bigger than I realized. A broader group of people don’t feel good about their relationship to work and want better stories about why that might be.

In the first 11 months, I was surprised at how steadily the book sold and it’s funny to look back on the fact that my first week and first month of sales were the lowest they’ve been in the last 2.5 years.

Two signals encouraged me that I was on to something with the book. First, a friend who had worked with a lot of self-published authors told me that 1,000 books in 100 days is the the metric to hit. I blew past that in less than 60 days. Second, the reactions from readers were strong. People were sending me full-on essay email responses on every platform (and still do every week) telling me that not only did they love the book, but they also ended up buying five copies for friends.

Take-Off

It’s mid-December 2022. I’ve already declared complete success with my book. More than 5,000 sales in less than a year! But one day, I opened the KDP reports page and saw something crazy. WTF I sold over 100 books? Where is this coming from? It was the first time I had

After some perusing, I figured out that Ali Abdaal shouted out the book in one of his book recommendation videos, one of 100 books he recommended. Wow this guy can move books!

I ended up selling 3,402 books that month across all formats and from there, the book is only now coming back to Earth:

I think Ali’s shoutout and subsequent standalone video which got 500k+ views were so profound because:

1. He was genuinely talking about his own leap experience and genuine feelings behind taking the leap

2. He had been following my writing for a couple of years before and understood viscerally a lot of the things I was sharing about my journey

3. His audience is a bunch of nerds who read, reflect, and more importantly, buy books.

Predictions After Year 1

I forgot I did this until now but after the first-year recap of my book, in which I had just hit 10k sales, I made a bunch of probabilistic predictions about my book. Here’s what I predicted for sales and the updates on what actually happened:

• Sells less than 2,500 copies (10%)

• Sells more than 2,500 but less than 5,000 copies (30%)

• Sells from 5,000 to 10,000 copies (40%)

• Sells more than 10,000 copies (20%) (Actual: 35,000)

And some other ones:

• Some mainstream press will mention my book (25%) I don’t think this happened but Insider did do a short article on me in 2024.

• A top podcaster that I haven’t will ask me to go on their show (determined by apple rankings) (25%) Yes, Lenny’s Podcast

• I will appear on TV to talk about my book (5%) Nope.

• I will decide to write another book by the end of the year (30%) Yes!

• Oprah will read my book (1%) No, lol

• My book will be mentioned by another YouTuber with >2M subscribers (20%) I don’t think this has happened.

• Mr. Beast will buy 1 million copies and airdrop them onto an island of knowledge workers (1%) Not yet.

• Ali Abdaal will mention my book on a public platform at least once in 2023 (100%) He did a standalone video in April of last year which led to a HUGE boost in sales. Though I wouldn’t have predicted that either!

• I will continue to gift my book to anyone that asks (100%) Yup!

My predictions seem to skew negative. Right now, I predict that my sales will stay low.

If I had to predict total sales at the end of 2025, I’d probably predict around 75,000 totall sales.

But who knows, maybe Tim Ferriss is finally going to recommend the book this month!

Money, Money, Money

It’s hard to find good data on how much books make and along the way I’ve been sharing as much as possible.

Here is the most recent breakdown:

And then some further breakdowns by format and channels and by year:

Comparing To TradPub

Two friends have graciously shared their actual results from traditionally published books and I thought it would be useful to show you some of the comparisons. The biggest thing you’ll notice is that the mix is completely different.

Traditional publishers focus heavily on moving hardcover books, especially at the launch and early months. This is because if they can get traction, the bookstores will keep the book stocked.

With TradPub Book 1, you’ll notice that it’s majority hardcover. This is because, with many traditional publishers, they only release a paperback a year after releasing the hardcover. I am not sure why they do this, as I love paperbacks and almost always prefer Kindle over hardcover.

With TradPub Book 2, I don’t have audio data but it’s majority paperback. This is due to one major order from a top retailer for the book. This is another thing that I don’t have access to.

When we look at the royalties, we can also see big differences:

Behind these numbers are various pricing decisions. I’ve mostly tried to make as much as possible from books, which means that I haven’t tried to maximize sales.

For example, I charge $18.99 for my paperback and $25 for my hardcover, both of which help me earn about $7-8 per book. For Kindle, I priced my book at $9.99 for the first year and a half, earning about $6.50-$7 per book. More recently, I have played with the price of Kindle and lowered it to between $4.99 - $7.99 depending on the region (which does seem to increase sales AND total profit, which is cool).

So above, in ebooks, I price at about 33% of traditional publishers, earn about the same per book, and likely sell far more books than they can at higher price points.

I’m not sure why traditional publishers do this. It hurts authors and likely hurts business bottom lines too. It seems silly but mostly seems like a legacy grievance from all the legal drama in the early 2010s.

The Mistakes: Audio + Foreign Rights

One of the biggest misses for me was not getting my audiobook out sooner. I was shocked at how well the audiobook sold once it was published. Since releasing it in July 2023, it’s been close to a quarter of all sales.

Another mistake was using Amazon’s distribution for hardcover. I only figured out that I could turn off hardcover printing on Amazon and have it fulfilled through Ingram a few months ago. This enables it to ship Prime (which means I probably sacrificed a bunch of sales because shipping dates were so slow via Amazon).

The other miss was foreign rights. I was too slow to realize I should pursue an agent earlier in the process, as this global game is still done in-person and behind closed doors. Especially during the second year when the book was taking off, I ended up quickly signing with an agent who wasn’t a good fit.

After moving on from him, I recently signed with Dropcap, who has a lot of experience repping self-published books through their work with scribe. Now I’ve signed translation deals in India, Malaysia, and Russia, and maybe France soon.

I’ve had a solid audience in India and the publisher who signed my book is pretty bullish on it. Could it go big there? We will see.

My dream is to get this translated into Chinese and be sold in stores in Taiwan. Fingers crossed.

What’s Next?

I still think The Pathless Path has legs. I’m guessing there are probably 10x more people who might get something from my book, not to mention the tens of thousands, if not more, who newly find themselves in a career crisis each year.

I could continue to go on podcasts and such but the most interesting thing to me seems to be to follow the creativity and do something fun.

I recently decided that this would involve creating a NICE hardcover edition of the book. Some inspirations include the following books:

And others. If you have any cool ideas, send them my way.

This will likely be a limited edition premium product, likely costing above $50.

My goal is to outcompete traditional publishing on their theoretical strength. It should be fun.

---

Hey! Thanks for reading…

I am not sure how you ended up here but might have stumbled upon me through my writing or podcasting on our relationship to work, a topic that has interested me for years.

If you don’t enjoy the writing, I strongly encourage you to unsubscribe below. There’s so much good stuff on the internet!! A reminder: I don’t check unsubscribe alerts and never look at my subscriber list. So if you feel like unsubscribing, you can do so below.

But if you do want to stick around:

1. If you’d like to meet others on “pathless paths”, you can join The Pathless Path Community

2. Buy or listen to my book, The Pathless Path. If you’d like to do a bulk order you can do that here for a discount.

3. You can buy pathless path swag like a hat or shirt here

4. Subscribe to my podcast and leave a review.

Home Swapping: We’ll likely be using Kindred a bit this summer. It’s a pretty cool home-swapping alternative to Airbnb. If you want to join, use my signup code.

5.5% Savings: Use this link to get 5.5% on your savings on Wealthfront and increase your runway on your pathless path

Affiliates: In addition, I recommend all of the following services: Ali Abdaal’s YouTube Course, Collective for setting up an S-Corp in the US (recommended >$60k revenue), Riverside.fm for HD podcasting, Descript for text-based video editing, Transistor for podcast hosting, Podia or Teachable for courses, Skystra for WordPress Hosting, and Circle for running a community.

Submissions: Want to share your journey with my audience? I accept drafts for submission.