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Comment by rachelandrew | Hacker News Reader

I keep meaning to write up complete figures but I launched my self-published ebook The Profitable Side Project Handbook in January http://rachelandrew.co.uk/books/the-profitable-side-project

Sales from that are well over 10K USD at this point. A lot of that was over the launch week, I've not had a huge amount of time to devote to marketing it over the last couple of months as our main business (which was a side project until it took off) has kept me busy, so it really is passive income at this point.

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Great work. For writing books do you use any book editor software of just MS Word ? I am in the process of writing a book and couldn't find a good editor/software. Thanks

I start out in Scrivener and end up in HTML. Scrivener is great for the actual writing process, although it takes a bit of learning to get used to.

I wrote up on my blog about creating the various versions http://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/01/07/html-epub-mobi...

I've also recently presented on how to build books in CSS and HTML and the slides and various useful resources are here: http://rachelandrew.co.uk/presentations/css-books

I highly recommend a LaTeX typesetting pipeline for producing the print version your book.

The fonts and page layout make for high quality books.

Using pandoc you can convert pretty much any modern markup language to .tex (I don't recommend .tex as the source format, as it might be difficult to get used to if you don't have experience with it + it is not trivial to produce .html/.epub from .tex sources.

I believe Tim Ferriss said he wrote his first book entirely in Evernote but now raves (with others) about Scrivener.

Keep up the good work.

Scrivener is what all the pros rave about. But if you wan't to check out another option, keep an eye on my sideproject http://blankpage.io :)

How did you market it at launch? Tips?

Pre-announced and got people to sign up to my mailing list in return they got chapter 1 and the table of contents early. I write a weekly email about side projects and building products so a lot of my early traffic came from that. We did exactly the same thing when we launched Perch, and that launch day paid back in sales everything we had spent on the product to get it to launch (not our time but actual cash outlay).

You need to be building an audience for your book long before you actually launch it if you want to have a decent launch. Nathan Barry writes some good stuff about this, check out his book Authority: http://nathanbarry.com/authority/

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