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Comment by wesbos | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a book and video series on Sublime Text - https://SublimeTextBook.com

It's done about 80k in sales in 3 months - I'm in the process of writing a blog post about how I did it, what worked and what didn't. It's not inexpensive, but it pays for itself quickly so people are fine with spending the $45 on the book + videos.

Feel free to ask questions here so I have content for the post.

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Where there any legal implications you had to consider? I mean did you reach out to the creators of SublimeText before creating your product?

Yep - I have permission to use "Sublime Text" in the book title

How did you get into writing?

I tried to write blogs and had to write papers for university, but I always struggle.

I have the feeling that some people can produce much text from nothing, where I put my ideas into a few sentences...

It was really hard to write - took me 1.5 years, tons of research and re-writing. This isn't something I slapped together over a weekend. Far from passive income.

Creating content for me is always hard, but once it's done, I love to deliver it (via talks, teaching, videos or books...)

Great job man. Skimmed your book a couple months ago.

Well, the passiveness of that income probably depends on how timeless your book is.

Thanks for sharing. Writing for a 1.5 years is a long time. How did you stay motivated to keep going?

I too, am laconic.

That's pretty cool. How did you market it? What's your net looking like(assuming 80k is gross sales)?

There have been 5-6 things that have contributed to - the biggest one is that I'm somewhat of an expert in the community - I have lots of free blog posts and videos so I've gained trust there.

Hi Wes, I would very much be interested in the case study of what you did for marketing of the book. What did you do? How did you go about it after you wrote the book?

Thanks! Matt

You used to (still do?) spam this heavily on the programming subreddit. It annoys me to see that it's selling rather well, yet you apparently can't be bothered to buy an ad.

Please see: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_spam.3...

I just looked at my submission history and I've only submitted it to /r/programming once - so that isn't spam.

And yes - I've bought all the reddit ads I can get my hands on - they are in pretty limited quantity.

Nearly every submission you've ever made to reddit is either directly to your book, or to a post on your blog, most of which include a massive ad at the bottom for your book. That's spam. Even if there was no ad on your blog and you receive no compensation in any way, it's still spam.

Here's another good informational link that delves into this aspect: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion

I'm glad you've bought ads (though I don't remember ever seeing one), but that doesn't exempt you from the rules about self promotion.

Get over yourself. This is part of why I hate the Reddit community-- it's a bunch of snarky, pretensious neckbeards.

Folks gotta eat and have kids to pay for as well.

People demanding something for nothing doesn't scale, so it we must settle for something in between: Mutual value.

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