How My Book Experiment Hit #1 on Amazon (For a Few Days)

13 May 2026 #experiments #bookwriting

Last February, I started a book experiment.

I turned my most popular self-help post into a mini book. If you’re curious, here’s the final result:

10 Surprisingly Simple Ideas That Changed My Life And Could Change Yours Too.

The success metric was 1 organic sale. By that definition, the experiment was a success. I announced it on Friday Links and it made 1 direct sale on Gumroad. Then I gave away some copies and it got its first Amazon review.

To keep the experiment going, I tried two promotion strategies:

#1. Use a promotion site.

I paid for a mention on RobinReads.

The day of the mention, my book got 19 sales on Amazon and 9 the next day. It went from #165 to hitting #1 in Personal Transformation & Spirituality.

The sales spike lasted 2 days, then the #1 spot disappeared. By week’s end, the book ranked #44 in One-Hour Health, Fitness & Dieting Short Reads. Still on the first page.

Overall, the RobinReads mention brought 33 sales that week. One was refunded—hopefully not because of a typo.

#2. Use ads.

I placed 4 ads using BookBub.

To cap my budget, I limited each ad to $5, paying per click. Not much, but it was enough to test the ad copy and to learn about book ads.

Here are the stats of the ads I tried:

Over 22,000 people saw my book cover in one day. Wow!

The ad on April 23rd had the best clicking rate. It drove 4 clicks and 3 book sales.

But there was a catch with the experiment: Book promotion sites expect discounted prices. Despite 38 sales in total, pricing at $0.99 wasn’t profitable.

Some final lessons from the experiment:

1. Don’t just publish your book and expect sales.
2. Book promotions bring more conversions than ads.
3. Ads alone aren’t profitable. Use them to test headlines, taglines, and copy.
4. Target specific book categories and authors.
5. Use book promotions/ads for the first book on a series.
6. Amazon chooses categories they want.

For the time being, I’m declaring this experiment a double success.

If you want to change your life and don’t know how, check out 10 Surprisingly Simple Ideas That Changed My Life And Could Change Yours Too—the same copy that made my best ad a success. Let’s see how far it can go.

How a Best-Selling Author Writes Flashbacks

12 May 2026 #writing

To learn to write, dissect the best fiction writers.

That’s a lesson from James Altucher, one of my favorite writers. I’ve been doing it with opening lines.

This time, I read Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons through writer’s eyes.

Here’s how he writes flashbacks:

#1. A situation, character, or object triggers a memory that takes you to the past.

“Langdon wanted to say something to her, offer his sympathy. He too had once felt the abrupt hollowness of unexpectedly losing a parent. He remembered the funeral mostly, rainy and gray…“

#2. A sound, character, or external element takes you to the present.

After describing Langdon’s father funeral,…“The ping of an elevator pulled Langdon back to the present.”

That’s exactly how we daydream or time travel: a snap or tap on the shoulder takes us back.

TIL: How to Fix the Missing Deps File in Visual Studio

11 May 2026 #todayilearned #visualstudio

After updating Visual Studio last week, I woke up with this error message: The local resource “C:/Some/Path/Somefile.Deps” doesn’t not exist.

None of the projects inside my solution compiled. I cleaned it, recompiled it, and even restarted Visual Studio. None of that worked.

The problem was a broken NuGet source left behind after running my digital decluttering plan.

To honor the 20-min rule, buried in this StackOverflow answer was the solution:

1. List all the Nuget sources with dotnet nuget list source
2. Remove the broken source with dotnet nuget remove source <source-name>

Et voilà!

Mastering your IDE is just one of the 30 lessons in Street-Smart Coding—the roadmap I wish I had on my journey from junior to senior.

Do What You Don't Feel Like Doing

10 May 2026 #selfgrowth

The right time to do something is when you don’t feel like doing it.

If you don’t feel like going to the gym, that’s when you should go. Don’t feel like getting out of bed? That’s when you should count up to 3 and get up. Don’t feel like writing? That’s when you should do it.

Today I didn’t feel like writing my daily post. To spice things up, I challenged myself to write this draft without looking at the text. I opened LibreOffice Writer, set the font to white, and wrote blindly.

A small, imperfect repetition is better than a broken habit.

Do what you don’t feel like doing today.

If you don’t want to get out of bed and want a change, check out these 10 ideas that changed my life and could change yours.

Kangaroos And The Road Sign (A 100-Word Fiction Story Inspired By a Photo)

09 May 2026 #misc

Here’s May photo prompt from 100 word story and my story.

When some friends came over and you had some beers…

Every five minutes I asked, “Dad, when are we going to see kangaroos?”

I was 5 or 6. I had read every kangaroo book in the library.

My dad had rented a car. I didn’t care about Sydney and the Opera House. I only wanted to see kangaroos.

I don’t remember where we were, but we heard, puff!…and the car stopped. OMG! Smoke everywhere, hot as hell. “And the kangaroos?” I started to cry.

My dad crossed the road and took this picture. That was the only kangaroo I saw in Australia.

I’ll never rent a car. Ever.