Thread by @arvidkahl

I just launched my second book, The Embedded Entrepreneur. 📚🚀🥳

In this book, you will learn how to:

🔎 Find your audience
🗺 Explore their communities
🩺 Discover their problems
📣 Build a following and a business

embeddedentrepreneur.com

Read on for the full story! 🧵👇

The Embedded Entrepreneur is a book about audiences written with and for an audience. From the start, the book was written in public, because I knew that my future readers were the best source of feedback.

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1314505368987414528

The original title of the book was "Audience First," which got changed to "The Embedded Entrepreneur" after I had a few insightful conversations with my audience.

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1356545305307717632

It all started with a landing page at embeddedentrepreneur.com, where I talked about the main theme of the book, and asked interested readers to tell me about the topics they'd like to see in a book about building (for) audiences.

Here is what that long list looked like, fusing my own ideas with suggestions from my future readers. I added almost every suggestion that I received to that list — and many were incredibly eye-opening. Lots of topics I might have missed had I not asked.

I can tell you, people love to have an impact on what a book should be about. Over the months of talking about the project, hundreds of interested founders sent me emails with ideas and questions, most of which made it into the book.

I used those questions as a guide to creating the initial outline of the book. On January 1st, 2021, I sat down and started writing the first draft. I finished by February 1st. I wrote 1000-3000 words every day, jumping back and forth through the book.

From there, I immediately took the manuscript and started sharing it with my future readers. Using helpthisbook.com, I started inviting batches of alpha readers to check out and comment on the draft.

Overall, more than 500 alpha readers were involved in the editing process. Four drafts were collaboratively edited before the manuscript went for final professional proofreading.

With a professional cover (which was also hand-picked by the alpha reader community) and a dozen wonderful illustrations by the great @GraemeCrawley_, this book clearly is a community effort. Without the founder community, this work would not exist.

The book has 306 pages and contains four parts:

- Audience Discovery
- Audience Exploration
- Problem Discovery
- Audience-Building

Here's a glimpse into the Table of Contents (and a peek at the whole book):

Each step lays the foundation for the next one. I made each chapter as actionable as possible because this early stage of the business is the most crucial one: validation can't happen soon enough. Embedded Entrepreneurship focused on just that.

In the Audience Discovery chapters, you will learn how to find the people you want to serve and empower with your business. You'll find a 5-step guide to brainstorm a lot of potential audiences, score them, and pick the most lucrative one.

The Audience Exploration chapters will teach you how to then embed yourself in your future audience's communities, learn what they care about and how they communicate.

At this point, you will start doing Problem Discovery. You're hunting for signs of critical problems that you can help solve. You'll learn how to recognize problems in the communities you're already in and how to research them methodically.

Finally, you'll learn how to build an audience. This isn't limited to mere follower numbers. The Audience-Building chapter will introduce you to the concepts of Engagement, Empowerment, & Valuable Content. I share a lot of my experiences using Twitter to build (for) an audience.

The Embedded Entrepreneur is a practical book for people who are ready to take action. If you want to find the audience you will love to serve and empower for many years, get the book today and start reading.

The book is available on Amazon and Gumroad. On Amazon, you'll find a paperback, a hardcover, and a Kindle version. Gumroad offers the eBook, a PDF version, and — additionally — The Embedded Entrepreneur's Toolkit: 15 actionable spreadsheets and 6 additional guides.

Please visit The Embedded Entrepreneur website to find the best Amazon links for your store.

embeddedentrepreneur.com

Here's the @gumroad page for The Embedded Entrepreneur.

gumroad.com/l/embedded-ent…

If Amazon doesn't carry the print book in your country, you can order it from a book store via this ISBN: 9783982195766. Call up the store, ask them to order the book, and it'll be printed and shipped to the store by @IngramSpark.

An audiobook will be available in the future, too. Once all the kinks are ironed out with the book, production will start. Shouldn't take long this time. I'll be very vocal about progress on this one.

For the first time, I offer additional content. Because this is a practical book that benefits from a data-driven approach, I have created The Embedded Entrepreneur's Toolkit, a collection of 15 actionable spreadsheets and 6 additional guides.

embeddedentrepreneur.com/toolkit/

If you have already reviewed the book, either as one of the many alpha readers or as a reviewer, please consider leaving an honest review on Amazon, Goodreads, or Gumroad. It'll give other curious minds a chance to see if the book is for them.

goodreads.com/book/show/5805…

I'll be updating this thread with sales information and other milestones for the next few days and weeks. If you want to know anything in particular, reply and let me know!

And here we have it, the first @gumroad sale within seconds of launching the book:

If you want to support me, please like and retweet the first tweet in this thread. I'd love it if you'd let me know what you think of the book as well in a reply or as a quote tweet. It really makes a difference.

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1394920389428535298

Gumroad sales looking good 🤩

Alright, quick sales update after one hour:

45 book sales so far, and with Amazon lagging behind I'd say we are at ~50 copies.

🥳

Here's a bit more of the story on how this book came to be. Thanks to all the @IndieHackers that made this possible.

indiehackers.com/post/launched-…

So far, 61 sales on Gumroad and 25 on Amazon. Inching ever closer to the big 100 :D

Sales Update: we have crossed 120 sales. 🥰🤩

75 sales ($1200 worth) on @gumroad
45 sales (somewhere around $250) on Amazon

This excludes all paperbacks and hardcovers: they only count once delivered. And I bet there are quite a few of those!

Sales Update: 150 sales! 🚀

100 on Gumroad!
50 on Amazon!
+ mystery amounts of printed books

Wow! 🤯

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1395056310270451714

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1395113734973104141?s=20

Another update:

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1395284604836265986

Now that the launch day is over, I would like to say thank you to everyone who supported me:

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1395396959528263681?s=20

For reference, here are the economics of self-publishing a book:

#buildinpublic

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1395322315613904897

Here are the 48h mark numbers:

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1395731047241949192

We're 72 hours into the life of the book, and 453 bookshelves have gained a little weight :)

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1396088808907710464

Here are the stats one week into the launch!

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1397937610488745993

Two and a half weeks after launch:

https://twitter.com/arvidkahl/status/1401142395710889987?s=20