Adventures in Self Publishing | Hacker News Reader

Adventures in Self Publishing

petekeen.net

104 pointszrail57 comments

A writer pointed out to me that writing a book is very similar to building a tech startup. The hours are long, it's critical to build a strong platform and there are the same swings from despair to elation.

Additional data points are always very much appreciated and it's very good of the author to release his tools and methods for others to learn from. Of course, the $5k in 2 weeks doesn't account for the time it took him to write the book or the opportunity cost of not taking other work, so this still might not have been a financially worthwhile venture, but hopefully it will keep selling and he'll publish more about it.

Yeah, definitely the $5k in two weeks doesn't include the development time. I figure I broke even on the writing when it hit $7k, but it's definitely not any kind of substitute for a full time salary.

Great work!

How much of the book is useful (probably wrong word choice) if the reader does not know Rails?

I have had several people work through it and stumble at points because the book assumes quite a bit of rails knowledge. At some point I'm going to add content for beginners but that's probably a few months away.

I was thinking more in terms of people who want to learn more about Stripe yet do not use Rails and have no immediate need or interest in learning it.

My guess is that an accomplished developer with a few languages under his/her belt might be able to understand and translate aspects of the code. At one point it becomes more opaque and you can't go further without learning Rails. I know nothing about Rails, which means I don't have a real sense of how difficult it might be for someone coming from, say, Python, to read and understand Rails.

Note: This isn't criticism. I am interested in the book but don't work with Rails and don't have the time to dive into learning it. Because of that I am trying to determine if the book would really be useful to me. I am currently working with Python and have good command of probably a dozen or more other languages.

Ah, I see. Well, the broad strokes are definitely applicable and if you can find substitutes for the gems that I use (in particular, a background worker system, automatic state machine semantics for models, and a way to keep an audit trail) then the code examples will probably be at least understandable and sort of useful.

Would you mind telling us how long it took you to write? The impression I get is that people routinely underestimate how long good writing takes by orders of magnitude.

Thanks again for publishing this.

Sure. 70 hours for the first draft and probably another 70 for the editing and revisions. I had the first draft done on July 1st, then spent two weeks editing before starting the preorders. I was developing the companion rails application at the same time so it's hard to get real numbers.

Having written a Ruby book I would definitely agree, even though my book was very modest in size it took an order of magnitude more work than I had expected. Coming up with code examples, editing, creating a book cover, not to mention how grueling it can be to write especially after a long day of coding.

All that and not even a single link to it? Where's the shameless self-promotion slash example?

http://www.therubybook.com/

Here is a link to the book. Yeah, I'm pretty shameless but haven't done much promotion yet :-)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rapid-Rubyist-ebook/dp/B00DPQ5P24

I'm really glad that other writers are making this comparison! I did (see https://leanpub.com/manifesto, http://youtu.be/ozO0kOnqmyA and http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/leanpub-...) and it's the basis of the Lean Publishing ideas and Leanpub...

I self-published a programming book a while ago, and it brings in about $700 per month. I didn't see the big initial spike the OP did (shame), but the money has been consistent, and I would expect it to continue for several years.

Total start-up costs: $150 (proof copies etc.)

We're lucky as programmers that we tend to be able to wrangle LaTeX, and some of us have taste in typography and an ability to write decent prose. This means that the up-front cost of editors, typesetters, cover designers and so on is gone.

The disadvantages compared with my previous (real) publisher are a) no advance and b) no marketing and c) paying for translations to be done. Everything else has been an advantage.

When someone buys my book on Amazon for $35 I get $21. No traditional publisher can beat that.

That's awesome, congratulations!

> no marketing

That's definitely been the biggest learning component of this project. Having to do all of the marketing myself has been eye opening and very instructional.

You know that it's very easy to get your book on Amazon through their subsidiary CreateSpace, right? You already have the PDF... Also getting it into the kindle store is free and easy. If you're just selling the ebook on your website, you're missing a trick.

I haven't really done any marketing except for the initial announcements. Most people find it directly on Amazon, or find the website by searching for "<language> book".

I've briefly looked into it, sounds like I should probably look into it more. I was thinking about doing a limited print run through Lulu but that wouldn't really help with the marketing.

Thanks!

Does it sell more as a PDF (via web site), Kindle, or paper book on Amazon? I've done the traditional publishing route before, too, and agree that the advance is nice but the percentage cut of sales is miserable.

Copies sold 60/20/20 amazon/kindle/PDF

Profit per copy $21/$9/$14 amazon/kindle/PDF

Haven't done any real price experiments yet.

Thanks for the reply. Very interesting numbers. I wonder if pulp is the most popular option because Amazon provides better shelf space than your self-hosted web site or because tech book purchasers prefer having a physical object to refer to...

That's fantastic! Good job executing and congratulations on the success! It's well deserved.

Thanks for being so open with the numbers. That same openness is what got me to start over a year ago. Glad I could serve as an inspiration as well.

For those making revenue/hours comparisons: Yes, a book will often make less money then consulting in the short term.

If you always focus on the next week or month then you won't be able to move beyond those consulting numbers.

Real success requires long-term thinking. Pete has started something that—at a minimum—will allow him to significantly increase a consulting rate. But more likely he can turn the beginnings of his list and book into screencasts, speaking engagements, more books, etc.

High quality instruction is always in demand. Given enough time and work you can make $250k+ a year doing it.

The second biggest driver was a link in Ruby Weekly. [..] Not to mention, the amount of money I would get from direct sales is vastly more than I would get from the same number of sales if I were getting royalties.

I'm always happy to link to good stuff, but I must admit, if I'm not making any money out of it, I never push anything particularly hard.

This makes me wonder if I partnered with or acted as a publisher to indie writers like this, I could quite easily offer a 50-75% "royalty" yet push it more frequently and heavily to my audience and everyone wins. Indeed, I believe this is what Pragmatic Bookshelf does when it takes on previously written indie books(?)

That sounds kind of like an affiliate program. I bet you could make it work with the kind of niche audiences you've got.

Sort of. I've done affiliate stuff before but I don't like the vibe it gives off. Selling the products directly in a more publisher-esque way feels more honest, although I'm not entirely sure why.

I think "affiliates" may have a bad vibe, but you could message it in a way that wouldn't. I know Gumroad is coming out with some functionality along those lines and they call it "tastemakers" or something similar.

I bet you could significantly increase your revenue by working directly with authors—though if you try to republish their books it would be more work for them.

Just work with one author a month, whose book you have carefully vetted, and promote it to your lists for a commission.

I'm planning on releasing a book soon and have been strongly considering gumroad. I couldn't find anything about an affiliate program (now or coming soon). Do you have a link for this, or is it just from your talks with them?

You could probably do quite well with it, as long as you take great care to ensure it is quality stuff that reflects well on your brand.

Given the amount of traffic I'm getting for even my rather esoteric compiler articles from your sites (including a steady trickle of visitors still coming from your Ruby Inside article a couple of years ago), you must be delivering quite substantial traffic to more "mainstream" Ruby related sites.

Nice article and great to read some additional validation of the Patio11/Nathan Barry playbook. A few things I'm interested to know:

- How many sales you got from this HN post?

- Have you received any consulting gigs from the book?

- How big did your mailing list get?

- Why aren't you collecting signups to your list from this blog post?!?!

Only a few sales from this post thus far today. I have gotten a few inquiries about consulting but I haven't had any available bandwidth to take them on. The mailing list stands right now at a little over 300.

There's a signup button at the bottom of the sales landing page, but you're right it should definitely be on the blog post too. I'll fix that shortly.

I love the way you choose your niche. There is a very large number of niches to be had by combining two or more things you know well and that have paying markets.

I do not know if you are from USA, but I am from Canada and I never been able to fill up the form to get a itin number (to not have to have extra tax to paid when you get royalty). I even paid 50$ at the US embassy to have the paper stamped and it has been rejected without any indication. Does any one has better experience?

Very timely, congrats, and thanks for the insights! It's quite hard core to go all the way self-published with self-built architecture.

I keep churning a couple of book ideas over in my head, and probably should put them out for testing, to see which one would work in practice. One about physics in the "Learn X the Hard Way" style, one about Facebook page/group management since that's what I was doing with a bunch of side projects, but it's a very quicksand topic. https://leanpub.com/u/imrehg

In the meantime, trying to help a friend to turn his paper-book into ebook, which comes with its own can of worms. How to Start a Business in Taiwan https://leanpub.com/startabusinessintaiwan

That's pretty impressive. I wrote one of the better selling Ruby books on Amazon and it would take over a year to make 5k for sure.

That's why self-publishing is awesome. Control of pricing and owning the customer list can make a huge difference.

Yeah I agree. Exposure though is the issue, you'd presumably have to do a lot of self promotion otherwise. Or maybe posting to HN and reddit is enough. Not sure.

Did Amazon really give you that much exposure? I haven't sold on there, but my friends who have drove the entire audience. They didn't get a lot of sales from Amazon directly.

I think it has yeah. I haven't driven any traffic there, nor have I promoted the book much at all and it moved up the charts to where it's generally in the top 5 books in it's category, sometimes higher.

Over time it seems to be selling more and more. The first month was pretty slow in sales though.

Interesting to see the tools used to make the book. It wouldn't come to my mind using anything but LaTeX.

This was a great read. Funny timing in that I just announced that I've been writing a book earlier today: http://spencerfry.com/i-m-writing-a-book

An old friend wrote a book on Cisco technology. He said it was a great experience, and helped his non-writing career along, but unlike a startup you shouldn't plan on a financial return on the investment.

For my technical book, I was getting frustrated with the page breaks interrupting the code sections in weird places.

There's a bit of a hack you can do to create a continuous single-page PDF if you're generating your book from html/css:

    @page {
      size: 216mm 17600mm;
    }

That tells the PDF printer to make the page 8.5 inches wide and really really long.

It's dirty, but it works!

Derek Sivers said this about it when I sent him a copy:

"I love that continuous-page PDF format. Never seen that before, but it's so much handier than artificial pages."

For my upcoming book, I'm releasing both a page-breaks and a continuous version of the PDF.

http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...

The continuous PDF doesn't work well in some PDF readers, so unfortunately I have to also provide a version with page breaks.

## Full Setup

For the curious, here's the rest of my setup:

I'm using Jekyll so I can just do everything in markdown/html/css. It uses pygments for the syntax highlighting and I'm using my own customized syntax coloring styles. Then I use PrinceXML for generating the pdf.

It makes for a nice workflow...

First I start the jekyll server with the --watch flag so it will auto-recompile the html:

    jekyll serve --watch

Then I use PrinceXML to generate the pdf:

    prince http://0.0.0.0:4000/breaks-no.html -o breaks-no.pdf

If I want to have the pdf auto-generated too, I use fswatch (OSX utility similar to inotifywatch):

    fswatch dir_to_watch_for_changes "prince http://0.0.0.0:4000/breaks-no.html -o breaks-no.pdf"

Jekyll is handy since I can have multiple versions of the book, but still keep things DRY via includes. For example, I have the book version with page breaks (breaks-yes.html) and a continuous page version (breaks-no.html).

I tried several other pdf generation utilities, but none came close to the quality and consistency of PrinceXML.

The pro license for the server version of PrinceXML is pricey - $495 ( http://www.princexml.com/purchase/ ). So, I'm only using the pro version for development and for the final versions, I'll be using their SaaS product which is only $15/mo: http://docraptor.com/plans

Anyway, that's the process so far!

## Book Launch Tomorrow

Manage servers? One of the biggest wins for making your systems more awesome is to use a configuration management tool like Puppet, Chef, Salt, or Ansible.

If you want to make sure your systems are fast, scalable, and secure, the first step is having full control and power over them.

Tomorrow, Sept 4th, I'm launching my book "Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible" which is designed to save you the days or weeks of research when picking one of these tools.

In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see what each one is like to work with. You may be surprised at which ones were super easy and which ones were really difficult to work with.

To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...

I hadn't ever thought about a continuous PDF, that's a good idea, and should be a snap with Docverter.

Looks like a good book, good luck on your launch!

Thanks :) Docverter is new to me, I'll definitely check it out!

Can you use `km` as units?

hmmm,

2 weeks => 8 work hrs. per day. 5000$:80hrs. = 62,50$

1 $ = 0,7592$ = 47,4479€ = 47,45€ ---------------- total: 3796€ in two weeks.

50€ per hr. is a german student designer/programmer (first uni year) price. nothing special. the most work for 70-120,00€ p. hour.

it would be much more productive to discuss the merits of the article and the author's efforts rather than trying to look smart.

Yes. However, that $5000 was at a point where I wasn't actually actively working on the product itself. The total is nearly $9k at this point, but assuming I put in 140 hours of work that comes out to roughly the same per hour amount. Like I said above, this is definitely not a full time thing yet.

> 50€ per hr. is a german student designer/programmer (first uni year) price.

I've definitely doubts about that price for a german first semester student. As a student in first semester you'll be a non payed trainee in germany.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that was stupidly high for a college student...

120€/hr in Germany for a 1st year uni student? I find that hard to believe..

You know that prices are (often) more a function of marketing than of competence...

Sure -- no argument there: for any population, there will exist individuals who can market themselves at extraordinary rates.

I was interpreting the post as a statement of the average market rate, which is something else entirely.

I'd prefer make that much writing, doing something I enjoy rather than the same salary or even more at a company being a pawn.

It may be "nothing" special, but ignoring the people who have taken you to task for the amount itself, consider that writing programming books often delivers the biggest value in reputation and follow-on consulting jobs etc.

A lot of technical books (for that matter: most books, regardless of subject) never generate a living wage from the book itself.

Thanks for making Germans look like dicks...

IMHO you are not factoring in the value of the built email list building. This will (hopefully) allow Pete to be exponentially more successful with future books.

1) A book is an asset, and provides long term revenue (even though it diminishes over time without some form of marketing / outreach)

2) A book establishes a customer base, and Pete can provide future offerings to this pool.

3) A book is a great way to establish credibility in a space. When someone is looking to hire a consultant to work out Rails <> Stripe, who looks more attractive: the guy who wrote the book on it, or "generic Rails developer"?

The focus is on long term asset building, not short term gain.

I now follow Pete on Twitter, know his name, and know he does Rails and can start and finish a project. Plus he wouldn't do this if he didn't like it. 3796€ for a fun side project? Yes please.

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