Self-publishing and the 2nd edition of Ansible for DevOps
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
Something I am still annoyed by is the way editions work with traditional publishers and with Amazon—even if you update the content of a book on Amazon, it remains at the old published date for your first version of the book, with no way to change that.
So you pretty much have to use editions to alert readers the content of your book is not outdated. But doing so incurs the cost of giving up store rankings, reviews, etc., effectively resetting your book to 'zero' on Amazon.
Am I missing something in that process or is that just how it is for 2nd editions? It seems like I'm going to have to spend some time trying to get people to purchase the 2nd edition copy, review it, link to it, etc. to be able to get it to show up in search results with similar rankings to my 1st edition.
I created a pair of tools [1][2] to address exactly this issue, but I kinda left developing it midway.
One way to solve this issue is by publishing your manuscript like a website. I know that while it solves the issue of releasing the most updated edition/version of your book, it probably does not exactly solve the perception held by the readers of 'what is a book' vs. a website–and therefore, only a few would be willing to pay you for it.
The other solution, imo, is to bring a book-like experience on the web, but that is a whole another beast altogether.
One of my friends just released a new edition and was able to it up and set the new version as canonical, which preserved the ratings, reviews, etc. I haven't done it myself and may be muddling the details, but I'd definitely call KDP support before throwing in the towel.
>Putting it in perspective, $200,000 over five years averages $40,000 per year. It's definitely something, but that revenue would not be enough to replace my salary, nor do I think my other book projects will match its success (though I'd love to be surprised!).
That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you in top 1% richest in my country. My case is an extreme corner case, but my yearly expense is around $1500-$1800 (which looks likely to be earned with my ebooks this year).
>You can buy Ansible for DevOps, 2nd Edition on Amazon, LeanPub, or iBooks.
Any reason you aren't using https://gumroad.com/ as well? That is much better than leanpub with fees being
* 5% + charge fee (3.5% + 30¢)
* or, 3.5% + 30¢ per charge only with different tiers (https://gumroad.com/settings/tiers)
And payment withheld is maximum 2 weeks instead of possible 75 days with leanpub
> That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you in top 1% richest in my country.
Exactly. It only scales up to a point, but that point can still be meanintful.I live in Spain with fairly low cost of living and my (self-published) books have been generating >10k/month profit for several years now, which is several times more than I can spend.
Plus, books are completely zero-maintenance, pure passive income, which is a massive relief compared to any sort of tech product. Would recommend it to anyone who has the interest in writing. (And if you are one of those people, feel free to email me -- I'm happy to help.)
But as OP mentioned, it needs to be a good book. There are a million titles self-published per year and most of them sell approximately zero copies.
Personally I use pandoc [0] to generate pdf/epub from GitHub style markdown. I use both leanpub and gumroad, with leanpub giving me paying customers more than double the share of gumroad.
>books are completely zero-maintenance
That depends on the type of the book I suppose. I just spent about 4 months to update all my books recently - and I expect to update them again to add new content, changes due to new software version, feedback from readers, etc.
And I agree, for success you need a good book. I'll add that it will depend upon how many users would need the material, able to reach said users in the first place, etc.
[0] https://learnbyexample.github.io/tutorial/ebook-generation/c...
The important caveat that needs to be explicitly mentioned here is that readers should be able to consent and opt-in to these updates. Authors should be able to release updates, but they should not be able to push them, overwriting the purchased version of the book without the reader's consent. The keystone example of the outfall of giving an author/publisher the ability to tamper with a purchased book is of course the infamous Amazon 1984 fiasco [1].
[1] https://io9.gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-th...
The forced one is pushed to every device automatically, and Amazon strongly warns against this when you attempt to do it, becaues it deletes all the readers' notes, comments, and bookmarks. It's basically suggested to only use it for book-breaking issues where the current version is essentially worthless.
The optional one adds a little update marker to the book in kindle (similar to a phone app) and lets the user grab it at their own leisure, or ignore it. It's highly unreliable, but is the best practice for any updates which aren't fixing a book-breaking issue.
For simpler things (eg small infra where I might need to configure a route 53 domain, a few EC2 instances, and something in RDS), I would stick with Ansible since I can do everything from AMI build to provision to reconfigure/deploy with it.
But for a lot of more complicated things, I do use Terraform. I'm working on a good example of using Terraform with GCP for Kubernetes in my next book, and will likely also show how I still tie things together with Ansible.
I used both recently to setup a Discourse site and associated Postfix mail server. Packer spins up the machines and then calls Ansible to handle the actual provisioning. Once that’s done, Packer takes a snapshot of each machine, so you end up with images that are ready for deployment with, e.g., Terraform.
Granted, this was just a toy project for me to try these tools out, so any advice would be appreciated!
[1] Especially https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/self-publish-dont-wri...
Also when visiting the old listing for your book, you should try to get one of those "There's a newer version of this book available" boxes that I sometimes see on Amazon.