May: Hacker news, marketing and ideas
May has ended, June is here. What happened in May?
A blog post that blew up on Hacker News
I wrote this blog post in which I shared my personal story of how I used to program in C and how I stumbled onto Odin, and how it fit my specific needs.
It wrote it partially because my book says “Odin point-for-point addresses many of the issues I've had with C, while also incorporating some of my favorite C best practices, straight into the language”. But it doesn’t elaborate much more than that. So the blog post fills in that blank!
It ended up Hacker News, on the front page! It is fun to see that Odin-related things tend to find their way to Hacker News so often.
Organic and paid marketing
Let’s talk a bit about marketing! The best kind of marketing is called “organic”. It means that people are excited enough about your product that they talk about it for you. They repost your social media posts, etc.
Even better is when the content wasn’t even created to be marketing. Perhaps you were just excited to share something. But it blew up. These kind of things can happen when one least expects it. It’s hard to “make it happen”. Because then you’re kind of “faking it”. Just make sure you’re making something you’re honestly excited about, and share interesting things about it!
I have never tried paid marketing before, until last month. During May I tried running ads for my book on Reddit. My idea was this: I put in $10 of ads per day. If I manage to sell 1 extra book per day then I’ve made $10 (since the book cost roughly $20). It felt like a good, non-risky way to approach it.
Did it work? I’m not 100% sure, since the Hacker News stuff happened at roughly the same time. But it seems like I’ve sold 1-2 more copies per day, even after the Hacker News exposure died down.
Why Reddit? Because it’s so easy to specifically target niche programming subreddits. That way I could get the maximum value for my daily $10. You can of course do targeted ads on other platforms as well, but it just feels easier to set up on Reddit. You can just choose to target some subreddit that you know you enjoy yourself.
Note: I did not target the Odinlang subreddit, since I’m the moderator of that one! Running ads on platforms where you’re supposed to be a neutral moderator may not look very good.
Small book update
Just before writing this, I also released a small book update. You can read the change log on itch. It’s nothing big, just a few typo fixes.
What happens now?
I wish I knew!
I’ve been trying to make a new game. It hasn’t gone very well. The book money is coming in, but I don’t think I’ll make enough to last me more than a few months. Doing these things is my main income.
I’ll still poke around with some projects and see if anything interesting pops up. But I do feel a bit deflated and stressed. As you may have noted, I’ve made less videos and blog posts than usual.
I’m sure I’ll get through it, but perhaps some bigger change will be needed soon. We’ll see! I’ll try to figure these things out during June. And then have a proper summer vacation in July.
Have a nice day!
/Karl Zylinski