
Adventures in Self Publishing - zrail
https://www.petekeen.net/adventures-in-self-publishing
======
casca
A writer pointed out to me that writing a book is very similar to building a
tech startup. The hours are long, it's critical to build a strong platform and
there are the same swings from despair to elation.

Additional data points are always very much appreciated and it's very good of
the author to release his tools and methods for others to learn from. Of
course, the $5k in 2 weeks doesn't account for the time it took him to write
the book or the opportunity cost of not taking other work, so this still might
not have been a financially worthwhile venture, but hopefully it will keep
selling and he'll publish more about it.

~~~
zrail
Yeah, definitely the $5k in two weeks doesn't include the development time. I
figure I broke even on the writing when it hit $7k, but it's definitely not
any kind of substitute for a full time salary.

~~~
casca
Would you mind telling us how long it took you to write? The impression I get
is that people routinely underestimate how long good writing takes by orders
of magnitude.

Thanks again for publishing this.

~~~
MattStopa
Having written a Ruby book I would definitely agree, even though my book was
very modest in size it took an order of magnitude more work than I had
expected. Coming up with code examples, editing, creating a book cover, not to
mention how grueling it can be to write especially after a long day of coding.

~~~
astrodust
All that and not even a single link to it? Where's the shameless self-
promotion slash example?

~~~
MattStopa
Here is a link to the book. Yeah, I'm pretty shameless but haven't done much
promotion yet :-)

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Rapid-Rubyist-
ebook/dp/B00DPQ5P24](http://www.amazon.com/The-Rapid-Rubyist-
ebook/dp/B00DPQ5P24)

------
Throwaway3rdSep
I self-published a programming book a while ago, and it brings in about $700
per month. I didn't see the big initial spike the OP did (shame), but the
money has been consistent, and I would expect it to continue for several
years.

Total start-up costs: $150 (proof copies etc.)

We're lucky as programmers that we tend to be able to wrangle LaTeX, and some
of us have taste in typography and an ability to write decent prose. This
means that the up-front cost of editors, typesetters, cover designers and so
on is gone.

The disadvantages compared with my previous (real) publisher are a) no advance
and b) no marketing and c) paying for translations to be done. Everything else
has been an advantage.

When someone buys my book on Amazon for $35 I get $21. No traditional
publisher can beat that.

~~~
zrail
That's awesome, congratulations!

> no marketing

That's definitely been the biggest learning component of this project. Having
to do all of the marketing myself has been eye opening and very instructional.

~~~
Throwaway3rdSep
You know that it's very easy to get your book on Amazon through their
subsidiary CreateSpace, right? You already have the PDF... Also getting it
into the kindle store is free and easy. If you're just selling the ebook on
your website, you're missing a trick.

I haven't really done any marketing except for the initial announcements. Most
people find it directly on Amazon, or find the website by searching for
"<language> book".

~~~
zrail
I've briefly looked into it, sounds like I should probably look into it more.
I was thinking about doing a limited print run through Lulu but that wouldn't
really help with the marketing.

Thanks!

------
nathanbarry
That's fantastic! Good job executing and congratulations on the success! It's
well deserved.

Thanks for being so open with the numbers. That same openness is what got me
to start over a year ago. Glad I could serve as an inspiration as well.

For those making revenue/hours comparisons: Yes, a book will often make less
money then consulting in the short term.

If you always focus on the next week or month then you won't be able to move
beyond those consulting numbers.

Real success requires long-term thinking. Pete has started something that—at a
minimum—will allow him to significantly increase a consulting rate. But more
likely he can turn the beginnings of his list and book into screencasts,
speaking engagements, more books, etc.

High quality instruction is always in demand. Given enough time and work you
can make $250k+ a year doing it.

------
petercooper
_The second biggest driver was a link in Ruby Weekly. [..] Not to mention, the
amount of money I would get from direct sales is vastly more than I would get
from the same number of sales if I were getting royalties._

I'm always happy to link to good stuff, but I must admit, if I'm not making
any money out of it, I never push anything particularly hard.

This makes me wonder if I partnered with or acted as a publisher to indie
writers like this, I could quite easily offer a 50-75% "royalty" yet push it
more frequently and heavily to my audience and everyone wins. Indeed, I
believe this is what Pragmatic Bookshelf does when it takes on previously
written indie books(?)

~~~
zrail
That sounds kind of like an affiliate program. I bet you could make it work
with the kind of niche audiences you've got.

~~~
petercooper
Sort of. I've done affiliate stuff before but I don't like the vibe it gives
off. Selling the products directly in a more publisher-esque way feels more
honest, although I'm not entirely sure why.

~~~
nathanbarry
I think "affiliates" may have a bad vibe, but you could message it in a way
that wouldn't. I know Gumroad is coming out with some functionality along
those lines and they call it "tastemakers" or something similar.

I bet you could significantly increase your revenue by working directly with
authors—though if you try to republish their books it would be more work for
them.

Just work with one author a month, whose book you have carefully vetted, and
promote it to your lists for a commission.

~~~
clarky07
I'm planning on releasing a book soon and have been strongly considering
gumroad. I couldn't find anything about an affiliate program (now or coming
soon). Do you have a link for this, or is it just from your talks with them?

------
noelwelsh
Nice article and great to read some additional validation of the
Patio11/Nathan Barry playbook. A few things I'm interested to know:

\- How many sales you got from this HN post?

\- Have you received any consulting gigs from the book?

\- How big did your mailing list get?

\- Why aren't you collecting signups to your list from this blog post?!?!

~~~
zrail
Only a few sales from this post thus far today. I have gotten a few inquiries
about consulting but I haven't had any available bandwidth to take them on.
The mailing list stands right now at a little over 300.

There's a signup button at the bottom of the sales landing page, but you're
right it should definitely be on the blog post too. I'll fix that shortly.

------
graeme
I love the way you choose your niche. There is a very large number of niches
to be had by combining two or more things you know well and that have paying
markets.

------
daok
I do not know if you are from USA, but I am from Canada and I never been able
to fill up the form to get a itin number (to not have to have extra tax to
paid when you get royalty). I even paid 50$ at the US embassy to have the
paper stamped and it has been rejected without any indication. Does any one
has better experience?

------
imrehg
Very timely, congrats, and thanks for the insights! It's quite hard core to go
all the way _self_ -published with self-built architecture.

I keep churning a couple of book ideas over in my head, and probably should
put them out for testing, to see which one would work in practice. One about
physics in the "Learn X the Hard Way" style, one about Facebook page/group
management since that's what I was doing with a bunch of side projects, but
it's a very quicksand topic.
[https://leanpub.com/u/imrehg](https://leanpub.com/u/imrehg)

In the meantime, trying to help a friend to turn his paper-book into ebook,
which comes with its own can of worms. How to Start a Business in Taiwan
[https://leanpub.com/startabusinessintaiwan](https://leanpub.com/startabusinessintaiwan)

------
MattStopa
That's pretty impressive. I wrote one of the better selling Ruby books on
Amazon and it would take over a year to make 5k for sure.

~~~
nathanbarry
That's why self-publishing is awesome. Control of pricing and owning the
customer list can make a huge difference.

~~~
MattStopa
Yeah I agree. Exposure though is the issue, you'd presumably have to do a lot
of self promotion otherwise. Or maybe posting to HN and reddit is enough. Not
sure.

~~~
nathanbarry
Did Amazon really give you that much exposure? I haven't sold on there, but my
friends who have drove the entire audience. They didn't get a lot of sales
from Amazon directly.

~~~
MattStopa
I think it has yeah. I haven't driven any traffic there, nor have I promoted
the book much at all and it moved up the charts to where it's generally in the
top 5 books in it's category, sometimes higher.

Over time it seems to be selling more and more. The first month was pretty
slow in sales though.

------
marc0
Interesting to see the tools used to make the book. It wouldn't come to my
mind using anything but LaTeX.

------
spencerfry
This was a great read. Funny timing in that I just announced that I've been
writing a book earlier today: [http://spencerfry.com/i-m-writing-a-
book](http://spencerfry.com/i-m-writing-a-book)

------
mathattack
An old friend wrote a book on Cisco technology. He said it was a great
experience, and helped his non-writing career along, but unlike a startup you
shouldn't plan on a financial return on the investment.

------
mattjaynes
For my technical book, I was getting frustrated with the page breaks
interrupting the code sections in weird places.

There's a bit of a hack you can do to create a continuous single-page PDF if
you're generating your book from html/css:

    
    
        @page {
          size: 216mm 17600mm;
        }
    

That tells the PDF printer to make the page 8.5 inches wide and really really
long.

It's dirty, but it works!

Derek Sivers said this about it when I sent him a copy:

"I love that continuous-page PDF format. Never seen that before, but it's so
much handier than artificial pages."

For my upcoming book, I'm releasing both a page-breaks and a continuous
version of the PDF.

[http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-
stack-a...](http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-
ansible.html)

The continuous PDF doesn't work well in some PDF readers, so unfortunately I
have to also provide a version with page breaks.

## Full Setup

For the curious, here's the rest of my setup:

I'm using Jekyll so I can just do everything in markdown/html/css. It uses
pygments for the syntax highlighting and I'm using my own customized syntax
coloring styles. Then I use PrinceXML for generating the pdf.

It makes for a nice workflow...

First I start the jekyll server with the --watch flag so it will auto-
recompile the html:

    
    
        jekyll serve --watch
    

Then I use PrinceXML to generate the pdf:

    
    
        prince http://0.0.0.0:4000/breaks-no.html -o breaks-no.pdf
    

If I want to have the pdf auto-generated too, I use fswatch (OSX utility
similar to inotifywatch):

    
    
        fswatch dir_to_watch_for_changes "prince http://0.0.0.0:4000/breaks-no.html -o breaks-no.pdf"
    

Jekyll is handy since I can have multiple versions of the book, but still keep
things DRY via includes. For example, I have the book version with page breaks
(breaks-yes.html) and a continuous page version (breaks-no.html).

I tried several other pdf generation utilities, but none came close to the
quality and consistency of PrinceXML.

The pro license for the server version of PrinceXML is pricey - $495 (
[http://www.princexml.com/purchase/](http://www.princexml.com/purchase/) ).
So, I'm only using the pro version for development and for the final versions,
I'll be using their SaaS product which is only $15/mo:
[http://docraptor.com/plans](http://docraptor.com/plans)

Anyway, that's the process so far!

## Book Launch Tomorrow

Manage servers? One of the biggest wins for making your systems more awesome
is to use a configuration management tool like Puppet, Chef, Salt, or Ansible.

If you want to make sure your systems are fast, scalable, and secure, the
first step is having full control and power over them.

Tomorrow, Sept 4th, I'm launching my book "Taste Test: Puppet, Chef, Salt,
Ansible" which is designed to save you the days or weeks of research when
picking one of these tools.

In the book, I implement an identical project with each tool so you can see
what each one is like to work with. You may be surprised at which ones were
super easy and which ones were really difficult to work with.

To get a discount for the book release, just sign up on the mailing list:
[http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-
stack-a...](http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-
ansible.html)

~~~
zrail
I hadn't ever thought about a continuous PDF, that's a good idea, and should
be a snap with Docverter.

Looks like a good book, good luck on your launch!

~~~
mattjaynes
Thanks :) Docverter is new to me, I'll definitely check it out!

------
it_kraut
hmmm,

2 weeks => 8 work hrs. per day. 5000$:80hrs. = 62,50$

1 $ = 0,7592$ = 47,4479€ = 47,45€ \---------------- total: 3796€ in two weeks.

50€ per hr. is a german student designer/programmer (first uni year) price.
nothing special. the most work for 70-120,00€ p. hour.

~~~
rly_ItsMe
> 50€ per hr. is a german student designer/programmer (first uni year) price.

I've definitely doubts about that price for a german first semester student.
As a student in first semester you'll be a non payed trainee in germany.

~~~
crazypyro
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that was stupidly high for a college
student...

