A retrospective on my first lean publishing experience
aaronsumner.com
aaronsumner.com
Thanks for the great post, Aaron. Lots of food for thought.
First, Aaron is really our ideal author: he has an audience, has some content that would make a great book and he values his time (i.e. he knows it's a bad idea to create a book generation workflow and setup a website to sell the book). Oh, and he's a good writer :).
What stood out for me is this line:
My original plan was to deal with all the rendering myself, set up an
online storefront somewhere, and make it available that way. I wasn’t
crazy about that plan, but it seemed like that’s how most of the
self-published authors I’d read in the past handled it.
Then I stumbled across Leanpub.
I think I'll finish up this feature I'm working on (which is awesome and our authors have been asking for it forever, don't get me wrong, but doesn't solve the problem of people not hearing about us) and then stick the marketing hat on my head with crazy-glue.
Seriously, though, I think is getting an increasing amount of word-of-mouth publicity. That's how I heard about it when I did--a panelist on the Ruby Rogues podcast mentioned a new book that the author had "Leanpubbed" and I did some sleuthing from there (and you know you're on the right track when your product name is used as a verb). So in that regard there may be more that we Leanpub authors can do to promote the platform and keep it going strong--it's been good for me and I'd love to see it be a rousing success, you know? Are there ways you can help us help you get the word out?