Ask HN: Have you written a book? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?

#51

Post by ninjaa » Mon, May 02, 2011, 5:05 AM UTC

cstross wrote: post #17

I write books for a living. Mostly fiction: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap... Which is not to say that I haven't written technical books, back in the day: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Architects-Handbook-Charles-Stross... I'm not self-published -- I've got Ace (aka part of Penguin USA), Orbit (aka Hachette) and Tor (aka Holtzbrinck) as my publishers. Yes, I do this for a day job.

"Rule 34" is a great title.

Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?

#52

Post by kirpekar » Mon, May 02, 2011, 4:33 PM UTC

Me --> http://amzn.com/3836474948

Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?

#53

Post by nhangen » Mon, May 02, 2011, 6:22 PM UTC

nbashaw wrote: post #3

nhangen wrote: post #2

Back when I was heavily into blogging, I co authored a book called Beyond Blogging http://amzn.to/mBHONG and self-published it via CreateSpace (for Amazon and BN.com) and Lulu (for iPad). The idea was to create a Think and Grow Rich type of book for bloggers and writing types, but I'm not sure we executed as well as I wanted to. I think it reads well and a lot of people have enjoyed it (Sold around 750-1k copies to d…

Congrats! Sounds like a success to me. How'd you make the decision to self-publish? Did you try and shop it around to literary agents first, or go straight to the readers?

Thanks. We chose to self-publish because it was faster, and because we originally launched it as an ebook only, hoping that a publisher would bite later. That didn't happen, so we just pushed it to print on our own.

Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?

#54

Post by peterarmstrong » Wed, May 04, 2011, 5:57 PM UTC

nikcub wrote: post #15

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #7

Agile/Kanban without the Bullshit For folks who have suffered under various Agile, Kanban, and other improvement regimes and know that it's not supposed to be like this. I'm about 80% of the way through the first draft. I have a few prominent community members that are going to review (and recommend, if they like it) but it's more of a personal statement than a commercial venture. It's a topic I have a lot of experie…

What are the best current resources for self-publishing and the epub maze?

My startup Leanpub (http://leanpub.com) lets you create and sell EPUB (as well as PDF and MOBI) ebooks. You write in HTML or Markdown, save files in Dropbox and publish with 1 click. Assuming you're writing a technical book, if you use Markdown you can even keep code samples in their own files and include them like you'd insert an image. Ping me at peter@leanpub.com if you have any questions...

Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?

#55

Post by jasonb05 » Sat, May 07, 2011, 11:36 PM UTC

I wrote a book on AI: Clever Algorithms: Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes http://www.CleverAlgorithms.com

It's about algorithms drawn from the fields of Computational Intelligence, Metaheuristics, and Biologically Inspired Computation and is intended as a reference for research scientists, engineers as well as a bootstrap for interested amateurs. Each algorithm has sample code in Ruby. I wrote it out of frustrations I had as a PhD student in not having a consistent "little black book of algorithms" for my field.

Re: Ask HN: Have you written a book?

#56

Post by fakelvis » Wed, May 11, 2011, 9:15 AM UTC

Not yet, although I'm just starting the process for a non-fiction topic I find fascinating: the intersection of wine and psychology.

I'll soon be starting to blog on the topic at http://winepsychology.com (subscribe if it's something you might like) and will be using that format to structure my thoughts and the material for the book.

I have no ideas of grandeur (i.e. making money or even being traditionally published), just a desire to create a long form collection of information that is hopefully accessible and enjoyable to a wider audience.

I'll look at self-publishing closer to completion and how to market and track my progress throughout. Hopefully this will spawn some good HN-worthy posts, too. Wish me luck!