
Self-publishing and the 2nd edition of Ansible for DevOps - geerlingguy
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/self-publishing-and-2nd-edition-ansible-devops
======
geerlingguy
One of the inspirations for writing this book in the first place was reading
some of the 'Show HN' experiences over the years of other self-published
authors, so thanks for that!

Something I am still annoyed by is the way editions work with traditional
publishers and with Amazon—even if you update the content of a book on Amazon,
it remains at the old published date for your first version of the book, with
no way to change that.

So you pretty much _have_ to use editions to alert readers the content of your
book is not outdated. But doing so incurs the cost of giving up store
rankings, reviews, etc., effectively resetting your book to 'zero' on Amazon.

Am I missing something in that process or is that just how it is for 2nd
editions? It seems like I'm going to have to spend some time trying to get
people to purchase the 2nd edition copy, review it, link to it, etc. to be
able to get it to show up in search results with similar rankings to my 1st
edition.

~~~
robfitz
KDP phone support is _shockingly_ helpful. I call them frequently and they're
often able to accomplish stuff for me which doesn't have any sort of DIY
interface. I call them at least once a month for something or other and am
always impressed.

One of my friends just released a new edition and was able to it up and set
the new version as canonical, which preserved the ratings, reviews, etc. I
haven't done it myself and may be muddling the details, but I'd definitely
call KDP support before throwing in the towel.

~~~
geerlingguy
Thanks, I’ll give this a try!

~~~
felbane
Let us know how it goes! Other aspiring self-published authors are dying to
know.

------
asicsp
Congrats! I wish more authors try out self-publishing and hope that they find
success.

>Putting it in perspective, $200,000 over five years averages $40,000 per
year. It's definitely something, but that revenue would not be enough to
replace my salary, nor do I think my other book projects will match its
success (though I'd love to be surprised!).

That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you in
top 1% richest in my country. My case is an extreme corner case, but my yearly
expense is around $1500-$1800 (which looks likely to be earned with my ebooks
this year).

>You can buy Ansible for DevOps, 2nd Edition on Amazon, LeanPub, or iBooks.

Any reason you aren't using [https://gumroad.com/](https://gumroad.com/) as
well? That is much better than leanpub with fees being

* 5% + charge fee (3.5% + 30¢)

* or, 3.5% + 30¢ per charge only with different tiers ([https://gumroad.com/settings/tiers](https://gumroad.com/settings/tiers))

And payment withheld is maximum 2 weeks instead of possible 75 days with
leanpub

~~~
robfitz
My guess would be that leanpub is more "full stack" (formatting, layout,
website, etc) whereas gumroad is just a storefront. I use gumroad and like it,
but you need a bunch of other tools in your pipeline.

> That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you
> in top 1% richest in my country.

Exactly. It only scales up to a point, but that point can still be
meanintful.I live in Spain with fairly low cost of living and my (self-
published) books have been generating >10k/month profit for several years now,
which is several times more than I can spend.

Plus, books are completely zero-maintenance, pure passive income, which is a
massive relief compared to any sort of tech product. Would recommend it to
anyone who has the interest in writing. (And if you are one of those people,
feel free to email me -- I'm happy to help.)

But as OP mentioned, it needs to be a _good_ book. There are a million titles
self-published per year and most of them sell approximately zero copies.

~~~
asicsp
I just edited my comment to make it clearer. I wanted to convey why not use
gumroad as well, not instead of leanpub. Sorry for the confusion.

Personally I use pandoc [0] to generate pdf/epub from GitHub style markdown. I
use both leanpub and gumroad, with leanpub giving me paying customers more
than double the share of gumroad.

>books are completely zero-maintenance

That depends on the type of the book I suppose. I just spent about 4 months to
update all my books recently - and I expect to update them again to add new
content, changes due to new software version, feedback from readers, etc.

And I agree, for success you need a good book. I'll add that it will depend
upon how many users would need the material, able to reach said users in the
first place, etc.

[0] [https://learnbyexample.github.io/tutorial/ebook-
generation/c...](https://learnbyexample.github.io/tutorial/ebook-
generation/customizing-pandoc/)

------
Ansil849
> people who buy digital copies should be able to take advantage of the fact
> that ebooks can update the contents of a book over time, and authors should
> be able to update their books easily (if they choose to do so).

The important caveat that needs to be explicitly mentioned here is that
readers should be able to consent and opt-in to these updates. Authors should
be able to release updates, but they should not be able to push them,
overwriting the purchased version of the book without the reader's consent.
The keystone example of the outfall of giving an author/publisher the ability
to tamper with a purchased book is of course the infamous Amazon 1984 fiasco
[1].

[1] [https://io9.gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-
th...](https://io9.gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-
kindle-5317703)

~~~
robfitz
For kindle, at least, authors can do an "optional" update or a "forced"
update.

The forced one is pushed to every device automatically, and Amazon _strongly_
warns against this when you attempt to do it, becaues it deletes all the
readers' notes, comments, and bookmarks. It's basically suggested to only use
it for book-breaking issues where the current version is essentially
worthless.

The optional one adds a little update marker to the book in kindle (similar to
a phone app) and lets the user grab it at their own leisure, or ignore it.
It's highly unreliable, but is the best practice for any updates which aren't
fixing a book-breaking issue.

~~~
geerlingguy
And with LeanPub, it’s opt-in only; the author can send a notification but
it’s up to the reader if and when they update.

------
sali0
This is awesome. Thank you for making this, I will be buying a hard copy. I
have recently had to learn DevOps due to being on a project setting up
infrastructure, and have now been exposed to Ansible and Terraform. These are
extremely powerful tools. Do you use Terraform at all, or do you do your
provisioning with Ansible? Is Ansible able to do the things that Terraform
would be used for? Just curious for your thoughts. Thanks!

~~~
geerlingguy
Terraform excels at provisioning resources, and Ansible excels at configuring
resources, but can also provision most things as-needed.

For simpler things (eg small infra where I might need to configure a route 53
domain, a few EC2 instances, and something in RDS), I would stick with Ansible
since I can do everything from AMI build to provision to reconfigure/deploy
with it.

But for a lot of more complicated things, I do use Terraform. I'm working on a
good example of using Terraform with GCP for Kubernetes in my next book, and
will likely also show how I still tie things together with Ansible.

~~~
Cyph0n
For provisioning, Packer + Ansible seems like a great combination.

I used both recently to setup a Discourse site and associated Postfix mail
server. Packer spins up the machines and then calls Ansible to handle the
actual provisioning. Once that’s done, Packer takes a snapshot of each
machine, so you end up with images that are ready for deployment with, e.g.,
Terraform.

Granted, this was just a toy project for me to try these tools out, so any
advice would be appreciated!

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Jake89_
Oh god. The guy studied liberal arts and theology and he's doing top notch
work in his published computer related works. I have met engineers with master
degrees who could not write a report succintgly to explain what the hell they
build. Keep up the good work Jeff. You are No1 in relation to many other so
called expert "engineers" out there.

------
jbergknoff
Great work on the book, and thank you for writing about the self-publishing
process [1]. I'm in the process of writing a book, and your writing has
addressed several things that have been on my mind.

[1] Especially [https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/self-publish-dont-
wri...](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/self-publish-dont-write-
publisher)

------
Androider
Your book list on Amazon is a bit confusing since the first and second
editions are both listed with the exact same title. If they can't be
consolidated as one entry, maybe add "Second Edition" to the title of the
latest one?

Also when visiting the old listing for your book, you should try to get one of
those "There's a newer version of this book available" boxes that I sometimes
see on Amazon.

------
mintyc
Any news on what will no doubt become the definitive guide to kubernetes (no
pressure).

~~~
geerlingguy
Ha! Well, hopefully a good guide on automating Kubernetes, at least! Now that
this second edition is done, I’m re-focusing on finishing the first edition of
Ansible for Kubernetes. You can get the book in progress on LeanPub, of
course!

------
tangoalpha
Congrats, Jeff! Nice to see the new publication.

