

Ask HN: Advice on promoting my next free ebook - latch

Next monday I'm releasing a new free ebook. A big reason for the success of the both The Little MongoDB Book and The Little Redis Book is because 10Gen and the Redis community really took the advertising to a level I had never expected.<p>This new ebook is different. It's more personal and it won't have the same type of community support as the last two.<p>Anyone have advice for how to best promote a free tech book?
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chrislawrence
I don't have experience in ebooks but I did just release a free album and I
think there may be some crossover. Here's some stuff that worked for me:

1\. Make sure it as easy as possible to access your work. Even though it is
free, you are still asking a lot from your readers by asking them to pick your
content over all the other content out there. For example I made a built-in
player for the website and a one-click download link.

2\. Send a brief email to people you respect within the community. This could
be bloggers, other writers, forum posters. For the last year I collected a
list of websites that I liked and when the album was done I had a nice list of
people to contact.

3\. Accept donations! I was surprised by how many people wanted to give me
money. There's nothing wrong with this if you don't be a jerk about it.

I guess this is mostly pretty obvious, and there's no substitute for having
good content!

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bdfh42
Who is your most likely reader? If you start with that, then locating your
readers and presenting your value proposition should flow naturally. Marketing
"free" is just marketing - you just have a lower sales barrier when you reach
your audience.

