I Tried Ebook Publishing for 90 Days. Here's What Happened.

I published my first ebook on a Sunday night in January, sitting on my couch with a $17 bottle of wine and a Google Doc that had taken me three weekends to write. I had no audience. No email list. No idea what I was doing. What I had was a 47-page guide about organizing freelance workflows in Notion, and a vague memory of someone on Twitter saying they'd made $800 in a month selling a PDF.

Day 1 to Day 14: Building the Thing

The ebook was called "The Freelancer's Notion Stack: From Chaos to Clients." I wrote it because I'd spent the previous year freelancing as a virtual assistant, and I'd built a Notion system that actually worked. My client retention went up. My scope-creep conversations went down. I figured if it worked for me, it might work for others.

I wrote the draft in Google Docs. No fancy software. Then I exported it as a PDF and opened it on my phone to check formatting. It looked terrible. I spent $29 on a Canva Pro subscription and designed a clean, readable layout: 6x9 pages, 12pt font, proper margins, a simple cover with a navy background and white text. The whole design took four hours.

I set up a Gumroad account. No monthly fees, they just take 10% of each sale plus processing. I priced the ebook at $12. Why $12? Because $9 felt too cheap for the effort I'd put in, and $19 felt too expensive for a 47-page PDF from someone nobody knew. I wrote a sales description in plain English: what the ebook covers, who it's for, and what outcome they could expect. No hype. No fake scarcity. I hit publish.

Day 15 to Day 30: The Sound of Silence

For the first two weeks, I sold exactly zero copies. I tweeted about it three times. Crickets. I posted in two Facebook groups for freelancers. One post got deleted by moderators for "self-promotion." The other got three pity likes from people I already knew.

Then on day 19, something unexpected happened. I'd written a detailed Reddit post in r/freelance about how I organized my client onboarding process. It wasn't promotional-I mentioned the ebook once at the end, almost as an afterthought. The post got 340 upvotes and 67 comments. Three people DMed me asking for the link. I made my first three sales that evening: $36 total. Gumroad took $3.60. I kept $32.40.

I screenshotted that $32.40 payout notification. It was more exciting than any paycheck I'd received that month, because it came from something I'd built myself.

Day 31 to Day 60: Figuring Out Distribution

That Reddit post taught me the first real lesson: the ebook wasn't the product. The helpful content that led to the ebook was the product. I spent the next month writing three detailed Twitter threads about freelance systems, each with a soft link to the ebook at the end. None of them went viral. But they did something better: they brought in 47 email subscribers through a ConvertKit landing page I'd set up.

ConvertKit has a free tier up to 1,000 subscribers. I used that. Every new subscriber got an automated email sequence: a welcome email with a free Notion template, three educational emails about freelance organization, and then a soft pitch for the ebook. The open rate on my emails was 34%. The click rate was 4%. Those aren't great numbers, but they were real numbers from real people.

By day 60, I'd sold 14 copies total. Revenue: $168. After Gumroad fees: $151.20. I'd spent $29 on Canva and $0 on ConvertKit. Net profit: $122.20. For 90 days of effort, that's not impressive. But here's the part nobody talks about: I now had 47 people who'd raised their hand and said "I care about this topic." That list was worth more than the $122.

Day 61 to Day 90: The Pivot

On day 62, a buyer emailed me. They loved the ebook but wanted a video walkthrough of the Notion setup. I quoted $97 for a 30-minute Loom video and a 15-minute follow-up call. They paid. That one upsell made more than half my ebook sales combined.

This changed everything. The ebook wasn't a business. It was a lead magnet that happened to generate revenue. I created a second product: a $47 Notion template with embedded tutorial videos. I used the same Gumroad account. I emailed my 47 subscribers. Four people bought in the first week. Revenue: $188. After fees: $169.20.

I also experimented with Amazon KDP. I reformatted the ebook for Kindle, added a proper table of contents, and uploaded it. Amazon takes 30% for ebooks priced $2.99-$9.99, and 65% above that. I priced the Kindle version at $4.99 to stay in the lower royalty bracket. In the remaining 30 days, I sold 8 Kindle copies. Amazon paid me $2.79 per copy. Total: $22.32. Not much, but it was passive. I did zero marketing for KDP after uploading.

The Final Numbers

At the end of 90 days, here's where I stood: 22 Gumroad ebook sales ($264 revenue), 8 Amazon KDP sales ($22.32 royalty), 4 upsell video packages ($388 revenue), 3 template sales ($141 revenue). Total revenue: $815.32. Total fees to platforms: about $81.50. Net: approximately $734.

Hours invested: roughly 60 across writing, design, marketing, and support. Effective hourly rate: $12.23. That's below minimum wage in some states. I don't care. Because those 60 hours also built me an email list of 83 people, a Gumroad storefront, a KDP account, and proof that I could create something people would pay for.

The real win wasn't the $734. It was the shift from "I should write an ebook someday" to "I have published two products and people have paid me for them." That identity change is what carries forward.

What I'd Do Differently

I'd start building the email list before writing the ebook. I wrote first, then tried to find readers. Reversed order. Next time, I'll write the content in public-tweets, posts, free templates-and only package the ebook once I have 200+ people asking for it.

I'd also skip KDP for a first product unless you have an established audience. The discoverability isn't what people think. Gumroad worked better for me because I could drive my own traffic and keep a direct relationship with buyers.

And I'd raise the price. $12 was too low. At $27, I probably would have had fewer buyers but made the same or more revenue with less support burden. The people who pay $27 value it more and actually implement it. The $12 buyers were more likely to download and forget.

If you're thinking about ebook publishing, start smaller than I did. Write a 20-page guide on something you actually know. Price it at $19. Sell it to five people. Then iterate. The 90-day experiment isn't about the money you make. It's about proving to yourself that you can ship.

Questions? Hit me up. I read every message.