Six-ish Months of eBook Sales: Riak Handbook | Hacker News Reader

Six-ish Months of eBook Sales: Riak Handbook

paperplanes.de

I bought the book. The reason why: there was a clear lack of documentation on Riak at the time (still is). Your book is bar none one of the best sources of material for quickly getting up to speed on Riak. I read it cover to cover several times. Your writing style, ability to explain complex topics with simple prose, and fantastic executable code snippet examples also contributed to my decision to shell out the $29 - after I had read the sample chapter. Frankly, I probably would have had no issue paying more for it.

Now, if someone would just give the node riak driver some love....

Thank you so much for the kind words. I'm really glad you're finding the book this helpful!

Now, about the Node client. You are correct that there's been stalling over the last six or more months, but there's work on continuing the work on it, adapting it to new features in Riak and to push Frank's (original author) work on rewriting it in pure JavaScript towards the finish line.

Thanks again, your comment is very much appreciated!

Check out https://github.com/mranney/node_riak by the guys at Voxer.

Less documentation right now, but it runs in the world's biggest production deployment of Node.

(and it's not written in coffee script)

I love this trend that people share their numbers, discuss pricing etc. I will definitely do the same in the coming months if all goes well.

Please share the numbers even if things don't go well. A balance of successes and failures helps everyone learn.

Will do! My "all goes well" was more about estimating the "when" than about the outcome (which is already fairly positive anyway!).

Did you do any validation on the book idea before you started writing? How much time did you invest before you decided to publish it?

In the article I wrote that there was no guarantee the book would be a success. The reason for that is that I didn't have any validation upfront whether the book is a good and viable product idea or not. I started work on it long before I joined the 30x500 class, and how the book came about is not exactly in the spirit of it, as it takes a whole different approach on finding audiences for products and all that.

The total time that went into the book is hard to put a number on. I'd say at least three months of dedicated writing, testing out theories in practice, editing, proof-reading and building up marketing momentum around it went into the book.

Can you explain a little more about the mechanics of selling the eBooks? You mentioned 8.9% going to a fulfillment provider. Who? What exactly did they do for you?

Great article.

Sure can. I actually wrote a post about how I'm building and publishing the book a while back which has more details on the fulfillment provider as well: http://www.paperplanes.de/2012/1/12/my-publishing-tool-chain...

I'm starting to think that Amy Hoy 30x500 class will make more money than her products (^_^)

Don't forget that infoproduct (ebook & class) income is an alternative way to fund product development.

In a way, in addition to being helped to their own sustainable success, revenue from the classes supplants the need for angel or venture money in order to help fuel growth of the software products.

And in the end she owns 100% of her business, all the while fulfilling her mission to help people launch their own businesses that they can own 100% of as well.

Well, one way to make a lot of money is to help other people make money, with some demonstrable results.

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