
Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today - spatten
http://leanpub.com/dowhatyoulove
======
edw519
This is great! Raganwald is already one of my favorites, here and on twitter.
I love to see stuff like this. I guess I know what I'll be doing for the next
hour or two.

Just a reminder, my ebook is free, too:

html on my blog: <http://edweissman.com/53640595>

Or if you prefer a pdf, someone I don't even know (thank you, whoever you are)
was kind enough to put one here:
<http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf>

~~~
hieronymusN
Hi edw519 - that was me.

I also made a slightly reformatted HTML version here
<http://static.v25media.com/edw519_mod.html> \- I just added anchor links so
it was easier to navigate the sections and such.

Thanks for putting that all together, it's been an inspiration. Looking
forward to Raganwald's as well.

------
zeratul
Note to self: Leanpub.com disrupts book publishing industry, it took them just
~ 11 months (EDIT: 2 yrs - look below) to get traction. Surprisingly, their
original post got just TWO karma points:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329397>

Getting Mr Braithwaite to publish at Leanpub.com is also a sign of success.

~~~
peterarmstrong
It took a bit longer than 11 months: Eric Ries was our first customer (a good
first customer to have!), and his first sale was on April 21, 2010. So it took
about 2 years.

When we launched we were based on a hacked up version of WordPress MU. We've
pivoted a couple times, and Leanpub today is based on writing your book in
Markdown on your own computer (or iPad), and syncing with Leanpub using
Dropbox.

Along the way we had a brief period where we used GitHub instead of Dropbox,
but we felt that limited us to only highly technical authors. (We do use Git
internally still, but Dropbox is a lot more accessible and it makes our
publish workflow really nice.)

------
dmmdmm
I really appreciate Raganwald's willingness to put these essays together into
a convenient format and give them away. I enjoyed and probably learned a lot
from them.

However, the publisher has not done its job here. I'm reading the Mobi version
on Kindle for iPhone, and the constant formatting errors make it difficult to
follow the text. This includes missing punctuation, missing indentation on
blockquotes that make it impossible to see where the quote ends, random font
changes in and out of a monospace font, random spacing around headers, and the
lack of a table of contents.

If you want to call a collection of blog posts a "book" and ask for money for
it, you need to at least proofread your output files and make sure basic
standards of copy-editing hold. As it stands I will avoid buying from Leanpub
in the future.

~~~
peterarmstrong
Hi,

We'll look into the formatting issues in the Mobi version. A couple things:

1\. Leanpub is not a "publisher" in the sense of having proofreaders, editors,
etc. We're a website that authors can use to self-publish ebooks, including
in-progress ebooks. Self-publishing an in-progress ebook lets you iterate
based on feedback like this.

2\. We have an unconditional 100% refund policy. So if you're unhappy with
your purchase for any reason just email your PayPal receipt to
hello@leanpub.com and we'll refund your money, no questions asked.

Thanks!

Peter (Leanpub co-founder)

~~~
Arelius
The refund policy is pretty noble of you. Do you find that very many people
actually ask for refunds? In particular, how about months down the line? How
do you deal with refunds once the author has been paid, do you just deal with
the costs yourself?

~~~
peterarmstrong
It's equals part noble and self-interested: ebooks cost us essentially nothing
to ship, so why not refund them fully and unconditionally? It's the right
thing to do. Also, people will buy more books if we remove the risk.

This is especially true since we're a self-publishing website and we exercise
virtually no control over what we sell.

In terms of numbers, we've had thousands of purchases and only a handful of
refunds. I think we've had about 10 or 15 refunds in total. (I do the refunds
myself, manually, via PayPal's web interface.)

In terms of how we handle refunds with respect to the author: we subtract them
from royalties. We pay royalties quarterly so we don't have issues about
whether the author gets paid before a refund is requested -- if someone wants
a refund they usually ask for it within a day of purchasing!

Now, we may be lucky here, in that the quality of books sold on Leanpub is
pretty high, even though almost all the books are in-progress books that the
author is iterating on. As we grow we may have more of an issue; who knows,
someday we may even need to automate the refund process...

------
factotvm
I probably would not have bought this book, but I did get a copy because it's
free. I hope there is a way to retroactively throw some scratch to the author
should I find it useful. That seems like a good model, akin to music "piracy"
where I find music I love and _then_ buy it. Or, I guess I could "buy" it
again...

~~~
peterarmstrong
You can buy it again, or just overpay for one of his other Leanpub books.
(He's also got the #5 and #9 selling Leanpub books.)

------
zafka
Thanks for the book. I downloaded and read it this evening. I identified quite
well with one of the bad examples, and felt puffed up because your suggestion
for learning communication skills was just what I was telling myself to do.
Now I just downloaded Ed's book, perhaps it will help fix my procrastination.
:)

------
kabuks
My favorite quote: "The single most important thing you must do to improve
your programming career is improve your ability to communicate."

Anybody have tips on how I can improve my communication?

~~~
muhfuhkuh
The exercises I've suggested for others applies universally, I reckon.

1) Oral communication: Advertise your office/skype/mobile phone number in your
sig or any comms with colleagues. Then solicit them to phone you for any
reason. You _will_ get calls. Then talk to them instead of letting it go to
voicemail.

2) Written: Prefer e-mail over twitter/sms/irc. Never write one word or
sentence rattles unless it is a response in kind. If someone has written a
thoughtfully written, detailled and professional email to you, return the
favor.

3) When it is more convenient to fire off a quick email or text to someone
sitting across the hall, get up and go talk to them instead. This is even more
important if you don't know them personally. Introduce yourself, engage in
conversation.

4) Nerves are for the nervous. If you aren't nervous in front of friends,
relatives, or complete strangers at the grocery store, you shouldn't be
nervous in front of your colleagues or bosses. They cut and bleed just as
readily as the rest of those you know.

------
kentosi
I just downloaded this book for free because I was suspicious of the contents
and thought it'd be another airy book filled with old quotes and obvious but
encouraging sentences.

Now that I've read the first 3 pages I want to pay for it. Is there a way of
doing this from the site itself, or do I need to "re-buy" the book?

------
didgeoridoo
Downloaded for free. Read introduction. Beautiful. Paying now.

------
marcamillion
I love this line from the first essay:

>Your résumé would look better on top of a funding proposal than under a cover
letter.

------
leviathan
I wish there was a regular credit card payment option. As it stands, due to
brain dead PayPal policies, I cannot use PayPal from the country I'm in, and I
would really like to pay for the book.

~~~
mruff
Was happy to pay the asking price if not more - stopped as soon as I had to
use PayPal - dragged the slider to zero.

~~~
peterarmstrong
As a Leanpub co-founder, can you let me know which of the following would have
worked for you: a) Google Checkout b) Amazon Checkout c) Credit card (via
Stripe or similar)

~~~
pja
Google Checkout then Amazon payments for me, but either would be fine.

Like a lot of people I'm vaguely uncomfortable with giving credit card details
to companies I haven't heard of before & whilst I have a Paypal ID, I only use
it for those places insist on Paypal (eBay mainly), so I can never remember
the password and have to look it up. (Yeah, yeah, KeePass et al, I know, I'll
get round to it at some point...) I use Amazon and Google often enough that
logging in to them in order to make a payment isn't such a hurdle.

------
pavel_lishin
> (we won't spam you, we promise)

It's a nice touch, but honestly, it just reminds me to use a wildcard.

~~~
fmx
It's great that Leanpub makes it so easy to register, but it would be even
better if you didn't have to. I don't want to provide my email address to
download a file. I used a disposable one and I'm sure some others did, too.
That's just going to add (a tiny bit of) work for the Leanpub email server and
make their stats look a little better than they really are.

Also, the site creating a "profile" for me when all I did was download a book
makes me feel "sucked in" a little. I know, rationally, that there's really no
downside to it for me, but I still can't shake the feeling that this is more
than I agreed to.

~~~
raganwald
Part of the rationale is that this is how you can access updates: I notify my
readers when I add a new essay to the book through leanpub: I don't see your
address or any other info, but leanpub forwards my message to the book's
readers as an email.

------
code_pockets
Thank you, Mr. Raganwald.

This motivated me to publish a book I'm finishing under the same model.

------
mxu
This is the kind of business model that I like to contribute to!

------
Mz
I just tried to get it. I am on a tablet and all attempts to download it have
failed. I will chime in and note that I am in pretty dire straits financially
(homeless and my freelance work recently fell through -- I am pretty up a
creek) and was very concerned it was going to charge me. The means to request
it is not very clear in that regard.

~~~
peterarmstrong
We just doubled our number of web servers to handle the massive HN traffic
today, so please try again. If you have any issues downloading please email
hello@leanpub.com.

------
emehrkay
I bought it just because a few people on twitter brought it up. I moved the
slider so that the author received 4 bucks even.

~~~
peterarmstrong
This comment right here is the reason we have the author royalty slider. Thank
you!

------
xinsight
fyi - Trying to read the epub file in ibooks and i get this error:

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 1 at column 1: Document is empty error on line 1 at column 1:
Encoding error

Update: PDF works, but requires a lot of scrolling on the iphone.

Also, it's a 40 page "book".

~~~
peterarmstrong
Hi,

We'll look into this issue. Which generation iPad do you have?

All Leanpub books include free lifetime updates, so when it's resolved you'll
have a free update. (You also get free updates if the author updates the book
for any reason, like adding new content, etc. We believe in self-publishing
in-progress ebooks, so that you can iterate on your book like you would a
startup. We call this idea lean publishing.)

Also, we have an unconditional 100% refund policy, so if you're unhappy for
any reason just forward your PayPal receipt to hello@leanpub.com and we'll
refund your money.

Thanks!

Peter, Leanpub co-founder

~~~
xinsight
It's actually an iPhone 4S. I just updated to iBooks 2.0.1 and it works!
Thanks for the follow up.

------
ryanisinallofus
Posted free on Github <https://gist.github.com/2002310>

------
billpatrianakos
I feel guilty. I just got the book for free and I feel like I need to justify
it. I really respect Raganwald and I would love to pay and he deserves it. I
took it free because the honest truth is that business is really, supremely
bad right now. I have a total of $60 in the bank and a few grand in bills due
plus some other awful things. I justify (maybe wrongly) downloading it free by
assuming the book will help me and when business picks up again I'll buy
another copy for as much money as I can muster to the point that I'm almost
uncomfortable with the price I pay. I promise this. And I'm sorry.

Do my other freeloaders feel guilty? Or are there none? Or are there some but
don't feel bad at all?

Edit: Just read the "Why You Need a Degree to Work at BigCo" section and
already it's worth a lot more than the asking price.

~~~
brd
I agree with you on the guilt evoked by the site design.

I immediately second guessed whether or not it was worth downloading and
ultimately decided I would be willing to pay if it proved valuable. I reviewed
the table of contents and saw the chapter "The single most important thing you
must do to improve your programming career" so I decided to download it. I
skimmed the chapter, decided it wasn't worth my money, deleted the pdf,
immediately unsubscribed from the website, and then came back to HN and wrote
this comment.

Is the design good because it urges a person to pay? Probably. Is the design
dangerous because of the violent reaction people, like myself, get from the
feeling of guilt it triggers? Probably.

~~~
patio11
I've mentioned a couple of times on HN, but just one more: increasing prices
means you deal with less pathological customers. What does a pathological
customer sound like? They get something for free and then want their money
back.

They also feel as other people have a moral obligation to comport their
business affairs to the specifications of the pathological customer, and this
is a very nonreciprocal obligation, because pathological customers will do
_absolutely nothing_ to change their desired behaviors as a result of a
business relationship.

