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Comment by limedaring | Hacker News Reader

Happy to answer any questions about the process of writing a book! It's been a surprisingly fun side-project that brings in some money too.

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Firstly congrats - as a recent HN submissions showed, half the battle is simply finishing the damn thing.

A couple of questions, if you don't mind.

How did you support yourself while writing the book? And if you were working another job, how did you find time?

Did you try any other marketing like giving away the first chapter or blogging/newsletters?

I've been toying with the idea of writing a book on programming AVR microcontrollers for a while, since most of the information online is horrifically fragmented. I'm tempted to go down the website route and then publish it separately as a cohesive ebook, but it looks like leanpub may be a good option if you can publish individual chapters as you write them.

> How did you support yourself while writing the book? And if you were working another job, how did you find time?

I am lucky that I have no rent, so the income from WeddingLovely (when I was paying myself $20k/yr) as well as income from the Kickstarter (I raised $13k) helped a ton. As for time, that's one of the main reasons why it took me a year — I couldn't work on it full time.

> Did you try any other marketing like giving away the first chapter or blogging/newsletters?

I give away a sample to every subscriber to the email list, which includes the first four chapters, I believe. There has been mentions on podcasts and some newsletters, but nothing has matched the results from Product Hunt/Reddit yet. Still working on it.

How many hours did you spend on the book to get to this point?

Urg, that might be impossible to estimate. Hundreds on the various tasks (writing, editing, designing, researching, etc.)

Could you... round to the nearest hundred?

Of course, I can't answer for limedaring but I write software ebooks too. For each ebook, it's between 200 and 300 hours for writing, editing, designing, researching, etc

What toelva said! I definitely added a week or so of work by doing all the design myself. Writing... if I focused, I could write another book in two weeks of full-time work (maybe less) but the issue is getting distracted, or taking the time to research, etc. Since the work was spread out over a year with a lot of my time focused on my startup or personal stuff, it's really hard to estimate, apologies.

Thanks for the writeup! I have a book coming out shortly as well.

What are your plans for keeping up book revenue moving forward?

It's been dropping pretty steadily so I'm leaning towards releasing an intermediate book with more web app exercises. Makes a great upsell, I can bundle it with the beginner book, I can do another kickstarter (maybe). So expanding the empire and trying to get more reach.

How many years of Django experience you had, before started writing this book? Does this book come with any example apps? Is that code available on Github?

Thanks for the sharing the numbers :)

About five years, but I consider myself a beginner-intermediate still. I think that helped with writing the book because I'm still very aware of how non-programmers think and how to explain things in a non-programmer-y way.

The book comes with a template app — I call it a "collection of things", which should work with a lot of different unique ideas, like building a directory of django programmers, a store, etc.

And yes, the code is available on Github: http://github.com/hellowebapp

Like Pinterest app? Cool!

Where can I buy this book in India?

You can buy from http://gumroad.com/limedaring though if you buy the paperback book, ~$14 US is added for international shipping.

What was the most difficult step in the self-publishing process?

Editing was hard, I didn't pay for a professional editor and I still wonder if the book could have been better had I paid for a professional to go through it. I did recruit an army of testers and volunteer readers though, which helped.

Fulfillment slowed me down a lot, especially since I released a paperback book rather than keeping it all digital (I really wanted to have something physical to take to events, plus designing an actual book is really fun.) I almost went with a local printer, as I wanted to support a local business... but their cost per book was ~$10, and going with a China-based printer (PrintNinja.com) dropped the book cost to $3.60 — I pretty much had no choice since I wanted to sell on Amazon (anything over $5 would kill my profit.) But being that it was printed in China, it added two months between submitting the print order to getting the books in hand, and I had a lot of people waiting for their books for about a year since the Kickstarter. It was really stressful, but at least now I know and can plan for this delay in the future.

Oh, and a shout-out to marketing, which this blog post obviously is. Of course I wish I could release the book and get revenue without effort, but that won't happen. Self-promotion is really hard, and I'm learning how to market my products better but it's really not that much fun and very stressful. Necessary though.

Besides HN, what promotion did you do?

I detail that in the linked post - the biggest was product hunt, and reddit was huge too.

How did you design the book? Did you use Adobe InDesign or something else? Whatever you did use, what was your reason, and was it difficult to learn?

I have a graphic design degree and room editorial design at university, so I definitely had a leg up there. I indeed used indesign, a lot of stuff I remembered but I also touched up on it by taking some skillahare classes on laying out books.

Indesign is very powerful, and ergo a little intimidating. For a newbie though, it shouldn't take that long to get a handle on it (by doing some tutorials and whatnot) but harder would be learning about typography and getting an inmate feel for good editorial design. Not something that can be taught in a day, unfortunately. Still, I recommend skillshare, they have a lot of great design tutorials.

Just saw the typo, sorry! I meant, "I have a graphic design degree and took editorial design..."

Do you have an opinion on LaTeX? I'd be interested to hear about it from someone used to publishing technical work in indesign.

I have heard one datapoint from another author that publishing in LaTeX has been nothing but pain (I think in mostly in regards to creating the eBooks). That said, the formatting in InDesign was kind of a pain on its own (it kept adding "typographers" curly apostrophes which would break the code), but I'd probably still choose that over LaTeX.

I'll bite. What motivated you to do this? What was the process like? Have you considered making instructional video for Udemy or other MOOCs as another resource?

I taught myself how to code about 5 years ago and while I eventually figured it out (and launched weddinglovely.com), I was really annoyed at the process and how every tutorial seemed like it assumed I came from a comp. sci. background. I decided I wanted to write a learn-to-code book aimed at people who have previous experience with front-end development and how websites work, but no programming experience.

The process was long... took me about a year. It could have been much shorter if some personal and startup events didn't interfere with the process, especially since it's such a small book (~140 pages). Another book that size would probably take me about three months. I ended up doing all of the design myself as well, which slowed me down, but it was enjoyable as I was able to use some of my design background and editorial design knowledge – a nice break from writing and programming.

I have thought about making instructional videos, since the ones that I sell in the "complete" package have been doing well. The biggest issue is time, since I'm still running my startup solo. Second biggest is potential revenue, since my salary for WeddingLovely is currently at $0 (long story) so I'm supporting myself completely on what Hello Web App is bringing in.

Thanks for the fun questions!

Nice to hear yet another non-CS degree holder taking the dive (CS degree holder here). I think keeping tech books like that short is key to success. We don't have the time or attention span to pour through 300-500 page books on tech stuff. I think 140 is in the sweet spot for sure. Keep it up and get on with the videos - I hear there's money in them there hills.

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