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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

I am the author of two books: "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" (http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com), which came out in October, and "Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things" (http://www.correlated.org), which came out earlier this month.

One thing I didn't realize when I started pitching the first book was that there would be "passive income" in addition to the book advance and royalties.

For instance, I've had three foreign-rights deals for "Experimenting With Babies," and the only additional work I had to do was put my signature on some paperwork.

And I have Amazon referral links on both websites, pointing to each book on Amazon. Those links generate a monthly average of about $40 in commissions per month, although my monthly high has been as much as $630.

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Oh wow, I just got a sample of your book for the Kindle last week! I got introduced to it by a friend with a baby, talking to another friend with a baby, both of whom are very scientifically minded.

I only read the first two "experiments" but it looks awesome! Waiting for a child of my own to try all these experiments on.

I'd love to hear about the history of the book - how did you decide to work on something like this?

I spent the first 10 years of my career as an editor at newspapers and magazines, and after switching to full-time software development, I was itching to write again.

I got the idea for the book while rocking my son back to sleep in the middle of the night. I realized that I had been doing lots of informal experiments, and I thought it would be really cool to adapt real experiments from various fields of child-development research so that parents could perform them on their own children, with no special equipment needed.

The Experimenting book is really nicely put together. I bought it a few months ago and have enjoyed it. Thanks!

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

For "Experimenting With Babies," I used Google Drive for rought-draft stuff, then switched to OpenOffice. By the time you're passing it back and forth with your editor, you'll need to be using something that's compatible with Word, because that's what your editor will be using (assuming you're working with a traditional publisher).

For "Correlated," I used a lot of natural-language generation, so I suppose you could say that my editor was Sublime Text, at least for the drafts. Then ported into Word format.

Thanks for the info.

anyone used GitBook Editor ? https://github.com/GitbookIO/editor (I haven't - looking for comments from real users)

I bought your book for my scientist lady-friend! It's awesome! Nice work!

Did you do any "marketing" or publicize the books in anyway? Tips for anyone planning to write a book?

A couple of tips:

If you're hoping to get your book in bookstores, get an agent and work with a traditional publisher. Actually, I think going the traditional book-deal route is normally a better bet than self-publishing, unless you expect the vast majority of your sales will be digital and you have a large pre-order list that gives you an assurance of a larger paycheck than any advance you're offered.

Of course, authors must always be their book's best marketer, but having a publicist takes a load off your plate. In my case, the publisher's in-house publicist handled pitching media outlets so I didn't have to.

If you're going to spend money to publicize your book, spend it on pitching media outlets. A single mention in a well-read magazine or newspaper can give you a real bump in sales.

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