Publishing My Emulator Book on Amazon KDP

At the beginning of the year I set myself a rule: build random stuff I’m actually interested in, as long as each thing can be done in three months max. The first project was a NES emulator, which I ended up turning into a book about building one from scratch in Crystal so other programmers could learn how emulators work by actually building one. Basically I wanted to write the book I wish had existed back when I decided to build an emulator.

After the book I built a dumb brainrot Chrome extension where you slap links instead of clicking them, with different shake effects, emojis and stuff you can unlock. And right now I’m waiting on some electronics to start building an ADS-B system that detects nearby flights and shows them on a LED screen, so you can wander around airports in different cities hunting for planes. That one’s especially nice in Buenos Aires, since Jorge Newbery airport gives you a clear view of takeoffs and landings right next to the coast.

The paywall thing 💸

The Chrome extension was a failure (zero sales 😅). A couple of people tried it but nobody paid. Part of this challenge I set myself, of building random stuff, is that I try to put a paywall behind each project. Not because I intend to make money off of it, but because I want to learn about the stuff I build AND about marketing, outreach, and getting a feel for what kind of projects people actually care about. The paywall is the feedback signal, not the goal.

Surprisingly though, the book, which was the very first project, was an utter success (in my opinion at least). The only thing I did was post it on Reddit, and only in two different subreddits, and over three months it sold more than 60 copies 🎉. I was expecting 0, or maybe 1 to 2 copies max. I reached out to some of the people who bought it and was genuinely delighted to hear they enjoyed it, and I got feedback on a few chapters that needed work.

Why three months 🤔

The whole point of the three-month limit is to not get attached to a specific project. I ran a software agency for three and a half years and it took me a while to jump off that boat, so I know how hard it is to put all your eggs in one basket when you’re building a business. It’s incredibly time consuming, and once you’re in it’s hard to jump into something new because you don’t want to abandon the thing you already started. So the three-month timer is basically me tricking myself into letting go before I dig in too deep, especially since I already have a full-time job I love and don’t want these projects to be time intensive.

So even though I had zero intention of putting more time into the book after publishing it, I decided to make those improvements and also publish it on Amazon as well, mostly to learn about the KDP platform and how sales, marketing and ad campaigns work over there.

Getting the emulator book onto Amazon KDP 📦

Amazon wanted an EPUB, which makes sense, since that’s what lets people read it on different screen sizes, especially Kindles (the PDF I had was fine on a laptop but painful on an actual Kindle, tiny fonts and all 😐). So I converted the book to EPUB and, while I was at it, made the chapter changes I’d gotten feedback on. I also pushed those same changes back to Leanpub, where I originally published the book, so nobody who bought it there ends up stuck with the worse version. The other thing I wanted out of KDP was to poke at how their ads and pricing work, which is a whole rabbit hole I’ll probably write about separately once I’ve actually run a campaign or two.

So if the post about building the emulator sounds like your kind of thing, the book now lives on Leanpub and on Amazon for Kindle. And if you’re not sure yet, there’s a free sample sitting at emulator.matiassalles99.codes that you can read before deciding anything.

On to the ADS-B build 🛩️

I’ll see you in a few weeks, once my ADS-B station is up and running and I can write about it. I also want to make a video out of that build, and maybe start a YouTube channel for these upcoming electronics projects, since I don’t plan on selling or monetizing that one and YouTube seems like a fun platform to tinker around with.

See you when the planes start showing up on the little screen 😎