61–70 of 108 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Urg, that might be impossible to estimate. Hundreds on the various tasks (writing, editing, designing, researching, etc.)
Could you... round to the nearest hundred?
Nice book, I will recommend it to my gf that I've been trying to introduce programming for. Your book seems like a good starting point.
Happy to answer any questions about the process of writing a book! It's been a surprisingly fun side-project that brings in some money too.
How many years of Django experience you had, before started writing this book? Does this book come with any example apps? Is that code available on Github? Thanks for the sharing the numbers :)
The book comes with a template app — I call it a "collection of things", which should work with a lot of different unique ideas, like building a directory of django programmers, a store, etc.
And yes, the code is available on Github: http://github.com/hellowebapp
Congratulations! The inside pages of the book seem to have a custom design, not what leanpub gives you by default. Its great and adds to the appeal of the book. Have you applied that to your leanpub edition as well?
Happy to answer any questions about the process of writing a book! It's been a surprisingly fun side-project that brings in some money too.
Firstly congrats - as a recent HN submissions showed, half the battle is simply finishing the damn thing. A couple of questions, if you don't mind. How did you support yourself while writing the book? And if you were working another job, how did you find time? Did you try any other marketing like giving away the first chapter or blogging/newsletters? I've been toying with the idea of writing a book on programming AVR…
I am lucky that I have no rent, so the income from WeddingLovely (when I was paying myself $20k/yr) as well as income from the Kickstarter (I raised $13k) helped a ton. As for time, that's one of the main reasons why it took me a year — I couldn't work on it full time.
> Did you try any other marketing like giving away the first chapter or blogging/newsletters?
I give away a sample to every subscriber to the email list, which includes the first four chapters, I believe. There has been mentions on podcasts and some newsletters, but nothing has matched the results from Product Hunt/Reddit yet. Still working on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Urg, that might be impossible to estimate. Hundreds on the various tasks (writing, editing, designing, researching, etc.)
Could you... round to the nearest hundred?
Congrats! How do you manage the inventory for hard copies? Like how many copies do you pre-order for printing? (Sorry I have no knowledge in this space)
When I'm home, I do all the fulfillment myself, which took a lot of trial and error to find the best packaging solution. Now I use sheet of bubble wrap around each book, then put that in a cardboard mailer and tape it up, then I use a custom script that uses EasyPost to generate labels (I really need to write a post about that script, it's pretty awesome and has made my life so much easier. Before I was using USPS.com and Paypal and both services are terrible.) At the moment though I'm traveling abroad, so I hired someone off of Craigslist to fulfill books, paying $1.50 per book.
No need to apologize! It took me a long time to figure out the above process. Happy to answer more questions.
You can actually add videos to your Kindle book and sell it for a higher price. Note however that the video version is supported only for Fire devices. Checkout - Kindle Textbook Creator - https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002998671
This article prompts a thought:
I want to sell a price study we did as a startup (in Germany) to businesses. Study is in PDF and price is around $300. Primary targets would be businesses.
Any suggestions on where to sell?
Probably best if the website offers also invoice payment and knows how to sell to businesses? Some kind of personalization of the PDF (Buyer name etc.) would be nice for 'copy protection'. Not sure about mobile? DIY?
Thanks :-)