Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

hellowebapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 108 posts

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#11

Post by limedaring »

wernercd wrote: post #10
lquist wrote: post #8

Congrats on writing a book and launching it! That said, for me, this is just one more data point that you don't write a book to make money off of book sales. You do it to establish yourself as an authority and earn from that new position.

I've always found that some of my best learning... is teaching someone else. Its amazing how far back into basics I have to go when I start talking to other people about programming. Some of the most fun I've had was helping my brother through his "Intro to C" class. God I hate pointers...

A few chapters in the book I knew nothing about before writing them (Heroku, pieces of others) and the review process also pointed out a few places where my knowledge was actually wrong. As a whole, it's been a huge learning process, and that's pretty much been the best part.

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#12

Post by lifeisstillgood »

limedaring wrote: post #7
mijustin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the most difficult step in the self-publishing process?

Editing was hard, I didn't pay for a professional editor and I still wonder if the book could have been better had I paid for a professional to go through it. I did recruit an army of testers and volunteer readers though, which helped. Fulfillment slowed me down a lot, especially since I released a paperback book rather than keeping it all digital (I really wanted to have something physical to take to events, plus de…

Besides HN, what promotion did you do?

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#14

Post by lkrubner »

limedaring wrote: post #7
mijustin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the most difficult step in the self-publishing process?

Editing was hard, I didn't pay for a professional editor and I still wonder if the book could have been better had I paid for a professional to go through it. I did recruit an army of testers and volunteer readers though, which helped. Fulfillment slowed me down a lot, especially since I released a paperback book rather than keeping it all digital (I really wanted to have something physical to take to events, plus de…

How did you design the book? Did you use Adobe InDesign or something else? Whatever you did use, what was your reason, and was it difficult to learn?

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#16

Post by limedaring »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #12
limedaring wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Editing was hard, I didn't pay for a professional editor and I still wonder if the book could have been better had I paid for a professional to go through it. I did recruit an army of testers and volunteer readers though, which helped. Fulfillment slowed me down a lot, especially since I released a paperback book rather than keeping it all digital (I really wanted to have something physical to take to events, plus de…

Besides HN, what promotion did you do?

I detail that in the linked post - the biggest was product hunt, and reddit was huge too.

Re: I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders

#18

Post by limedaring »

lkrubner wrote: post #14
limedaring wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Editing was hard, I didn't pay for a professional editor and I still wonder if the book could have been better had I paid for a professional to go through it. I did recruit an army of testers and volunteer readers though, which helped. Fulfillment slowed me down a lot, especially since I released a paperback book rather than keeping it all digital (I really wanted to have something physical to take to events, plus de…

How did you design the book? Did you use Adobe InDesign or something else? Whatever you did use, what was your reason, and was it difficult to learn?

I have a graphic design degree and room editorial design at university, so I definitely had a leg up there. I indeed used indesign, a lot of stuff I remembered but I also touched up on it by taking some skillahare classes on laying out books.

Indesign is very powerful, and ergo a little intimidating. For a newbie though, it shouldn't take that long to get a handle on it (by doing some tutorials and whatnot) but harder would be learning about typography and getting an inmate feel for good editorial design. Not something that can be taught in a day, unfortunately. Still, I recommend skillshare, they have a lot of great design tutorials.

Post reply on HN