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Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

leanpub.com

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Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#61

Post by StavrosK »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #35
whiletruefork wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great to have the ability to post-pay. I can imagine finishing the book and realizing that it was worth $20, and wanting to pay more. In this case if I come back to LeanPub there would be a list of books I selected to postpay, so after I finished reading them I could judge the true value and pay that (or add to what I have already paid).

That's a really good feature; we'll add this to our queue. Thanks!

I'll second that. I think a post-pay model is really useful. The only problem is getting people to come back to pay for the thing.

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#63

Post by StavrosK »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #2

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 a…

I got it for free, because I don't see me ever reading it (but I'll put it on the Kindle just in case), and I wouldn't have ever gotten it otherwise. I don't feel guilty, if I like it I'll buy some other of his books.

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#64

Post by peterarmstrong »

edw519 wrote: post #34

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

Would you like to see what your book would look like as a Leanpub book? It's trivial for us to import the HTML, which automatically gets converted to Markdown for you. If so, just reply here or email me (peter@leanpub.com) -- or try it yourself of course :)

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#65

Post by Arelius »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #55
dmmdmm wrote: post #50

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…

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 purc…

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?

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#66

Post by zeratul »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #59
zeratul wrote: post #5

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.

By the way, thanks very much for linking to that post -- you've more than tripled its karma points! I guess a year ago we were slightly ahead in our timing, or my post was too long, or (probably) I didn't emphasize Eric Ries and Venture Hacks enough...

You are welcome. I've studied what makes a story be picked up. It's mostly time of the day and the name of the submitter. Here are my partial findings:

http://hnpickup.appspot.com/hnpickup_ratio_visual_analysis.p...

More to come. Probably, this week I will get around publishing something on the "karma growth effect".

BTW, I've sent an email to "help@leanpub.com" about latex math support. So far I haven't heard back.

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#67

Post by spatten »

zeratul wrote: post #66
peterarmstrong wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, thanks very much for linking to that post -- you've more than tripled its karma points! I guess a year ago we were slightly ahead in our timing, or my post was too long, or (probably) I didn't emphasize Eric Ries and Venture Hacks enough...

You are welcome. I've studied what makes a story be picked up. It's mostly time of the day and the name of the submitter. Here are my partial findings: http://hnpickup.appspot.com/hnpickup_ratio_visual_analysis.p... More to come. Probably, this week I will get around publishing something on the "karma growth effect". BTW, I've sent an email to "help@leanpub.com" about latex math support. So far I haven't heard back.

Yes, sorry about that. We've been rather slammed today.

The short answer is that we don't support it. We could if we were just using LaTeX => PDF (which we do), but then things would blow up when doing epub and mobi.

I'll take this as another vote for the feature, though :).

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#68

Post by [deleted] »

spatten wrote: post #67
zeratul wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are welcome. I've studied what makes a story be picked up. It's mostly time of the day and the name of the submitter. Here are my partial findings: http://hnpickup.appspot.com/hnpickup_ratio_visual_analysis.p... More to come. Probably, this week I will get around publishing something on the "karma growth effect". BTW, I've sent an email to "help@leanpub.com" about latex math support. So far I haven't heard back.

Yes, sorry about that. We've been rather slammed today. The short answer is that we don't support it. We could if we were just using LaTeX => PDF (which we do), but then things would blow up when doing epub and mobi. I'll take this as another vote for the feature, though :).

[deleted]

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#69

Post by 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. :)

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#70

Post by thisduck »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #2

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 a…

Because it was asked: I downloaded it for free. No guilt was felt.
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