
On Self-Publishing “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics” - ingve
https://medium.com/@jeremyjkun/on-self-publishing-a-programmers-introduction-to-mathematics-1472b7511c99
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peteretep
Hey Jeremy,

If you're reading this, firstly, thank you! It looks awesome and I have
purchased this on UK Amazon to read over the Xmas period. Two points, though:

A) Please generate an HTML version of the Table of Contents and consider
putting that on your site, rather than making me guess it's in "First Pages",
download a PDF, etc. I think you'd find the return on investment on getting a
landing page expert to create a mini-site for the book worth itself many times
over...

B) Invest your first sales profits into getting someone to turn this into the
epub or mobi your audience are asking for.

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kwccoin
I thought he has replied about the difficulty and costly to do the epub and
mobi due to maths questions in the OP.

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jashmenn
Jeremy, thanks for this book. I bought it today and it’s fantastic. I
struggled with mathematics earlier in my career and being able to understand
it through coding is immensely helpful.

As far as self-publishing goes, let’s take inventory of the tasks the author
had to do to get this book out the door:

    
    
      - editing himself 3x over
      - building out a latex template
      - graphic design for the cover and the website
      - “struggled” to find someone to review each chapter
      - build a mailing list of 2,000 people
      - make a website
      - lost steam / hit a wall, as is natural when working mostly alone
      - customer service
    

He could have gone with a traditional publisher to help some of these things,
but then he’d get 15% (!) royalties, write in Word (ew), and still have to do
most of the marketing.

I’ve written/produced about 6 self-published books (Fullstack React, ng-book,
etc.) and I’ve got a system down for semi-self publishing books that deals
with all of the above issues.

We’ll help you:

    
    
      - research and outline the book 
      - write the book in markdown or latex, using git, plus our custom tools for importing code (which are way better than copy and paste)
      - deal with the marketing / cover / branding / graphic design
      - review / edit the book and recruit beta readers
      - market the book to our (active) email audience of 100,000+ programmers
      - deal with customer service
      - for 50/50 royalties
    

Basically we’ll make sure your book is good, it gets finished, and people buy
it when it’s done.

(The author of Fullstack Vue earned $20k in royalties on the opening weekend
and was not even close to our biggest book.)

If you’re thinking about self-publishing a programming book, I’d love to chat.
See: [https://www.fullstack.io/write-a-book/](https://www.fullstack.io/write-
a-book/)

~~~
asicsp
Jashmenn, I just checked it out.. good work!

how about very niche topics? I self published a book on Ruby regular
expressions last month on leanpub, currently working on Python version of it.
Later I plan on command line topics like grep/sed/awk/perl/etc one-liners and
stuff like that (I already have lots of material on these topics as tutorials
on github, need to convert to books)

Selling is the biggest pain point for me

~~~
jashmenn
Absolutely. I’d love to do stuff on Bash in particular. Like many of us, I
have a decades worth of bash commands collected too and I think editing those
and teaching them to other devs would be super helpful.

Shoot me an email!

(For anyone else reading this, I’d also like to collaborate on a book about
Rust, and another on Golang)

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jeffwass
“I listed the book at $35 for the paperback and $20+ for the ebook. (i.e., $20
or pay what you want above that)”

Jeremy, if you’re reading this and want to share, did you find many buyers
that opted to pay above the $20 baseline?

Thanks anyway for the blog post, it’s interesting and useful. Myself, I’ve
written a kids sci-fi novel, currently stuck in editing phase, and still
figuring out what my publication vector will be.

Good luck!

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kayaknutrient
To the author: I just bought the book and skimmed a chapter whose topic I have
studied. It seems pretty helpful for me, and it would be awesome if you did a
second part that’s more advanced and/or covers more topics. Thanks

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enriquto
For what is worth, I try to buy systematically all books in hard-copy that the
authors put available online for free. I have spent thousands of euros that
way (printed GNU Manuals, math lecture notes, etc). In your case, I would not
buy this book because it is not freely readable. I guess my case is not very
representative, but I throw it here anyway.

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Myrmornis
You’re criticizing the author for not making the ebook freely available? You
only buy books for which you can obtain the ebook for free? I’m lost.

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enriquto
> You’re criticizing the author for not making the ebook freely available?

Not at all.

> You only buy books for which you can obtain the ebook for free?

Yes, I do.

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Myrmornis
On reflection I think my comment sounds rather thoughtless. You clearly have
an interesting philosophy. Could you explain it a little more? You say

> I just want to encourage the practice of authors allowing everybody to read
> their books.

And yes, that would be great. You're hoping for a world in which essentially
voluntary paid contributions (e.g. for paper books) is sufficient incentive
for authors, correct? I say essentially voluntary because in your world an
electronic copy would be available to everyone for free.

My main question is: how far do you depart from the conventional incentive
structure of capitalist/market-based societies? Do you think food should be
free, also paid for by voluntary monetary or in-kind donations? Or only
digitally-encoded information? Can you explain why information as a commodity
should be treated differently?

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enriquto
Nothing too deep. I just loved the idea from this book :
[http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/](http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/)
, where you can download even the .tex source and compile it yourself (and
read the tex comments, they are great fun!)

Then I bought a few copies of this one, and I found that there are many books
of the same kind. I enjoyed the concept and decided to buy all such books that
I found (and ask my library to buy one or two copies as well).

> My main question is: how far do you depart from the conventional incentive
> structure of capitalist/market-based societies?

LOL, this is just a silly criterion of mine for buying books. Do not read too
much into it. By the way, it acts as a _great_ filter: authors who are
obsessed in spreading their knowledge no matter what, tend to write very
interesting things.

~~~
diego898
Hello! A tangential question: how did you manage to compile the book yourself?
I find many errors that are hard to track down and Im not sure if its due to
missing custom packages.

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g_delgado14
Great initiative. After a quick read-through of the preview I've decided to
buy a hard-copy. Looking forward to reading it all.

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kwccoin
Bought the book. My first maths book after the one bought by father in 1977
titled "elementary set theory". Hope this one is better.

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sidcool
Thanks for the book. How does it compare to 'Math for CS'.

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lordnacho
Hi I just bought the book. Have you got other formats?

