

Ask HN: Advice on selling tech ebooks - palidanx

I just finishing writing an ebook for an introduction to the architecture of Amazon Web Services.  I feel like I went through a lot of pain points just to understand how their framework operated and I wanted to document those things I learned.<p>What also helped is I had many hours of support talking with Amazon architects for them to explain the platform to me.<p>I don&#x27;t currently have any large set of tech followers or a popular tech blog.  Other than putting my content up on gumroad, do any HNers have any advice on how to get started to pitch the tech book online?
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gesman
You trying to oversell something that already being stackoverflowed. I still
suggest you to get ISBN for that and publish it on Amazon and get rich by
presenting yourself as a cloud computing expert. No money to speak of could be
made by selling tech ebook on AMZN services.

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diydsp
It may be a matter of experience and perspective. I only discovered AWS about
9 months ago or so and Amazon Affiliate program two months ago. I figured how
to do elastic servers by hacking around, but the other services are still
beyond me, especially which ones I need and how to connect them to each other.
I've read lots of stack exchange posts on how to do various subtasks like
installing an SVN server, but I wouldn't mind paying to read a coherent
presentation introducing the most relevant AWS services for my needs.

If you know of a thorough introduction to the use, caveats and good practices
on AWS through stackexchange, please let this author know. So far I have only
found thousands of Q & A, which is like eating ice cream with tweezers.

As far as OP goes, try to find folks like me who are starting small/home
office businesses in niche markets and make your book part of a larger bundle
of educational material on things like mailchimp, Quickbooks, etc. Also,
typical marketing for products like this is to give away the first chapter for
free.

Also, find blogs of people whose readers could use your ebook and write them
each a personalized email saying quite simply, "I made this book. I think your
readers might like it" and let them decide if they feel like writing about it.
You'd be surprised how many influential people you can reach in 4-12 hours of
searching for blogs and writing. Good luck! Also,

I see you link to menutail in your Profile. Get a link to your gumroad up
there, pronto! Get it in your sig and in your email, too.

Also, start a blog in which you handle a new topic from the book in
introductory depth each week. Venkatesh Rao did a good job promoting _Tempo_
this way and it can add value to the original material long after the
publishing.

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palidanx
Hey thanks for the feedback! I just finished my gumroad product here

[https://gumroad.com/l/HGlv](https://gumroad.com/l/HGlv)

If you have any feedback, let me know and I'll update the ebook.

