Write & Sell Your Damn Book (Paul Jarvis) | Hacker News Reader

Write & Sell Your Damn Book (Paul Jarvis)

mydamnbook.com

33 points3stripe15 comments

The most interesting thing to me is that this is sponsored by Gumroad and Mailchimp. This suggests that self-publishing is at the end of the early adopter phase, and perhaps on its way to becoming mainstream. Would love to know more about the corp. involvement here.

(And yes, signed up.)

Update: By "corp. involvement" I'm not suggesting this is a shill for Gumroad and Mailchimp, but rather it's interesting they see enough potential in this sector to agree to sponsor this. Also it is an interesting wrinkle on the self-publishing / info product phenomenon to get sponsors for your book.

I'm the guy running the course. Basically I asked both companies if they'd want to sponsor it, and they said yes. Zero content is written for the sponsors, but I do include their logo on the website and in the emails.

I think that all self-publishing needs to go mainstream is a few major authors to go down that route. We used to rely on bookstores to decide which books were the ones to read, much as video rental stores and movie theatres told us which movies to watch. It shouldn't be long now that book reading goes through the same revolution: it needs a new power-player like Netflix and Hulu for books, and high-profile review sites like rogerebert.com for movies reviews.

Self-publishing has been around for more or less as long as there has been books.

Personally, I hope it doesn't become 'mainstream' otherwise every Tom, Dick and Harry who thinks they can write will be churning out their own 'masterpiece', and then wondering why no-one is interested in it. There is something to be said for budding authors to get their 10,000 hours in in 'publishing silence', and then produce something actually worthwhile reading.

That said, if someone has produced a guide that will benefit good writers that otherwise might flounder a bit with the self-publication process, more power to them. And the creator of this approach does note, to his credit, that this won't make you a better writer. I wonder how many will take serious note of this point!

I think EVERYONE needs to write a book, at least once. I am not entirely convinced every book should be published, however.

Since we're in the topic of book-writing, I want to ask HNers for opinion:

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable with Google App Engine (built 2 websites with it). I'm thinking of writing a (self-published) book on the topic. In my dev, I use Scala and CoffeeScript+AngularJS. My questions are:

(1) Is App Engine too small to worth writing?

(2) Should I include "beginning Scala and CoffeeScript+AngularJS" (which means will be OOT and take significantly more effort to write)?

(3) But if I don't include them, wouldn't that significantly limit my target market? (people who use Scala and CoffeeScript+AngularJS on App Engine)

I feel like the intersection of those three topics would be fairly small.

Maybe App Engine Development with Scala. And then the coffeescript and angular as a separate book or a short appendix.

Check out the Leanpub bookstore for some ideas about what is selling well...

https://leanpub.com/c/software

My opinion (as a Scala consultant, so biased) is the market for a good book on Scala web dev is larger than a book on GAE.

As a Scala developer I would really buy a book on Scala, which explains advanced features. "Scala in Depth" is good, but I would want a book with a lot of stuff on type system, FP, to the level of Scalaz, Shapeless, and macros.

One thing that bothers me about "write your book" courses and howtos is that they rarely specify what type of book the course is geared towards. In particular, is this course for fiction or non-fiction writers?

Both. Although I am a non-fiction writer, I was careful to make sure the ideas (and they're all general) fit for both genres.

Book, that's a very broad term. Are we talking textbooks, recipe books, short-fiction, novels, non-fiction or any of the other tens of genres?

You should rethink the whole pitch because it fails to deliver the main point.

Nice design though.

Paul I've signed up - it's a no brainer not to. I will commit to completing the course, and if you need me to publish a review or help out then let me know my friend.

Best wishes, and thanks. Julian.

PS. So far it's super slick, and I can't wait to get started.

Thanks Julian! Any help you've got, I appreciate and am humbled by.

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