If I may take artistic license to reinterpret the comment, what I get from the comment is that given the very short term nature of the sales, no one really had time to read the content and then publicize their opinions to yield this sales curve. Basically, there is no word-of-mouth or social proof effect evident in this sales curve. Indeed, we see the opposite - more people bought the book before others subsequently purchased it. Sales were due to pent up demand versus waiting for others to verify quality or value.

Basically, the moment it was offered for sale, the product was purchased practically sight unseen (altho the article mentions that he in effect pre-released portions of the text to his newsletter subscribers).

Given this, the book could have been low quality and it wouldn't have impacted this sales curve. In which case, the OP could have spent 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, or 5 months writing the book and the sales curve would look similar.

What I gleaned from this article was not that it took substantial effort to write a book to evoke this sort of sales curve, but rather there was a process of building expectation and an audience which would result in substantial sales for a book, regardless of its level of quality. The level of quality became assumed and did not require prior evidence. Thus, labor / effort in writing was not proportional to sales.

Yes, it should be ignored. That's my point. I'm saying that investment and shouldn't be taken into account when gauging first-day success, because that quality and time-investment don't factor into first-day success. No one knows how long it took him to produce the book, so no one buys on quality initially. My whole point is that his success was based on marketing, not quality.

I think the parent was completely ignoring your line of argument and making an orthogonal point, that the headline "$26,679 in 24 hours" upon which this article is sold is a lie insofar as it's useless to think of that as being a duplicable event: you couldn't write and publish a book every 24 hours, so the income should actually be amortized over the time it took the book to be produced. (Assuming six months, the ROI-so-far has been $4k/mo--not bad, but pretty equivalent to having worked as a programmer for that period.)

I started the book September 6th and released it December 12th. So it took 3 months from start to finish. Sales are now over $40,000 for the last couple weeks, so if we average it out that is at least $13,000 a month for the time created. Plus sales will continue for months to come.

Even if one extrapolates earning out over the time-to-produce, it's still quite a sum of money.

The actual time vs. value comparison is irrelevant, though. Regardless of the time and effort it took to make, the 26k figure is pretty remarkable. We would not be having this discussion if he had made 1k-2k each day over the course of the past few weeks.

Moreover, the true quality of and time invested in the book doesn't change the fact that those who bought in the first day likely did so out of ignorance and without knowledge of the quality.

Given the amount of work put in, is it a truly huge payday for Nathan? Not really. Is it still a massive one-day sale figure? Yes.