On Self-Publishing “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics” | Hacker News Reader

On Self-Publishing “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics”

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163 pointsingve24 comments

Hey Jeremy,

If you're reading this, firstly, thank you! It looks awesome and I have purchased this on UK Amazon to read over the Xmas period. Two points, though:

A) Please generate an HTML version of the Table of Contents and consider putting that on your site, rather than making me guess it's in "First Pages", download a PDF, etc. I think you'd find the return on investment on getting a landing page expert to create a mini-site for the book worth itself many times over...

B) Invest your first sales profits into getting someone to turn this into the epub or mobi your audience are asking for.

I thought he has replied about the difficulty and costly to do the epub and mobi due to maths questions in the OP.

Jeremy, thanks for this book. I bought it today and it’s fantastic. I struggled with mathematics earlier in my career and being able to understand it through coding is immensely helpful.

As far as self-publishing goes, let’s take inventory of the tasks the author had to do to get this book out the door:

  - editing himself 3x over
  - building out a latex template
  - graphic design for the cover and the website
  - “struggled” to find someone to review each chapter
  - build a mailing list of 2,000 people
  - make a website
  - lost steam / hit a wall, as is natural when working mostly alone
  - customer service

He could have gone with a traditional publisher to help some of these things, but then he’d get 15% (!) royalties, write in Word (ew), and still have to do most of the marketing.

I’ve written/produced about 6 self-published books (Fullstack React, ng-book, etc.) and I’ve got a system down for semi-self publishing books that deals with all of the above issues.

We’ll help you:

  - research and outline the book 
  - write the book in markdown or latex, using git, plus our custom tools for importing code (which are way better than copy and paste)
  - deal with the marketing / cover / branding / graphic design
  - review / edit the book and recruit beta readers
  - market the book to our (active) email audience of 100,000+ programmers
  - deal with customer service
  - for 50/50 royalties

Basically we’ll make sure your book is good, it gets finished, and people buy it when it’s done.

(The author of Fullstack Vue earned $20k in royalties on the opening weekend and was not even close to our biggest book.)

If you’re thinking about self-publishing a programming book, I’d love to chat. See: https://www.fullstack.io/write-a-book/

Jashmenn, I just checked it out.. good work!

how about very niche topics? I self published a book on Ruby regular expressions last month on leanpub, currently working on Python version of it. Later I plan on command line topics like grep/sed/awk/perl/etc one-liners and stuff like that (I already have lots of material on these topics as tutorials on github, need to convert to books)

Selling is the biggest pain point for me

Absolutely. I’d love to do stuff on Bash in particular. Like many of us, I have a decades worth of bash commands collected too and I think editing those and teaching them to other devs would be super helpful.

Shoot me an email!

(For anyone else reading this, I’d also like to collaborate on a book about Rust, and another on Golang)

“I listed the book at $35 for the paperback and $20+ for the ebook. (i.e., $20 or pay what you want above that)”

Jeremy, if you’re reading this and want to share, did you find many buyers that opted to pay above the $20 baseline?

Thanks anyway for the blog post, it’s interesting and useful. Myself, I’ve written a kids sci-fi novel, currently stuck in editing phase, and still figuring out what my publication vector will be.

Good luck!

To the author: I just bought the book and skimmed a chapter whose topic I have studied. It seems pretty helpful for me, and it would be awesome if you did a second part that’s more advanced and/or covers more topics. Thanks

For what is worth, I try to buy systematically all books in hard-copy that the authors put available online for free. I have spent thousands of euros that way (printed GNU Manuals, math lecture notes, etc). In your case, I would not buy this book because it is not freely readable. I guess my case is not very representative, but I throw it here anyway.

You can find it on libgen.

I just want to encourage the practice of authors allowing everybody to read their books. Uploading it to libgen kinda defeats the purpose.

Just to be clear: I didn't buy the book or upload it to libgen.

But I don't really agree with you. The author will do what the author wants to do, it has no bearing on somebody else uploading something he bought to libgen or not. I view libgen as a tremendously valuable resource and I try to contribute as much as I can to it. Not everybody who could benefit from a book can afford to drop 10 or 20 or even 5 dollars on it.

I agree with you. Libgen is extremely valuable for everybody, not only for people who cannot buy the book. If I need a reference that appears in some obscure math book that is not in the library of my university, I can buy it and read it after a few days (or weeks), or I can ask my library to command it from another library and wait a few weeks, or I can just download it from libgen and look at the proof after a few seconds.

I actually proposed the administration of my lab to stop paying all silly online journal subscriptions and give half of the money to libgen and the other half to scihub. Everybody seemed to mostly agree, but in the end there are "high level" influences that block this kind of things.

I also think that it is perfectly moral and ethical to share a file that you have on your computer with other people, regardless of the opinion of the author of the file.

My only concern is that, if my main goal is to convince an author (who is already sharing a large part of his work) to publish the whole thing, it may not be the best idea to start by uploading his file to libgen. The fact that it is on libgen will not make me buy it in hard-copy. But if he puts the .tex sources online, then I will buy it.

You can ask your local library and perhaps they will buy a copy for you.

I just bought this book and I’m the opposite. I want everything electronic and as a PDF. The author understands that and has made it available via PDF without DRM - plenty good for me.

You’re criticizing the author for not making the ebook freely available? You only buy books for which you can obtain the ebook for free? I’m lost.

Evidently so, see downthread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643589.

> You’re criticizing the author for not making the ebook freely available?

Not at all.

> You only buy books for which you can obtain the ebook for free?

Yes, I do.

On reflection I think my comment sounds rather thoughtless. You clearly have an interesting philosophy. Could you explain it a little more? You say

> I just want to encourage the practice of authors allowing everybody to read their books.

And yes, that would be great. You're hoping for a world in which essentially voluntary paid contributions (e.g. for paper books) is sufficient incentive for authors, correct? I say essentially voluntary because in your world an electronic copy would be available to everyone for free.

My main question is: how far do you depart from the conventional incentive structure of capitalist/market-based societies? Do you think food should be free, also paid for by voluntary monetary or in-kind donations? Or only digitally-encoded information? Can you explain why information as a commodity should be treated differently?

Nothing too deep. I just loved the idea from this book : http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/ , where you can download even the .tex source and compile it yourself (and read the tex comments, they are great fun!)

Then I bought a few copies of this one, and I found that there are many books of the same kind. I enjoyed the concept and decided to buy all such books that I found (and ask my library to buy one or two copies as well).

> My main question is: how far do you depart from the conventional incentive structure of capitalist/market-based societies?

LOL, this is just a silly criterion of mine for buying books. Do not read too much into it. By the way, it acts as a great filter: authors who are obsessed in spreading their knowledge no matter what, tend to write very interesting things.

Hello! A tangential question: how did you manage to compile the book yourself? I find many errors that are hard to track down and Im not sure if its due to missing custom packages.

Great initiative. After a quick read-through of the preview I've decided to buy a hard-copy. Looking forward to reading it all.

Bought the book. My first maths book after the one bought by father in 1977 titled "elementary set theory". Hope this one is better.

Thanks for the book. How does it compare to 'Math for CS'.

Hi I just bought the book. Have you got other formats?

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