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

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

#81

Post by limedaring »

walterbell wrote: post #76

Congrats on shipping! How did you decide which code/commands to include in the book and which ones to publish online? This works well for ebooks (avoids errata), but is less convenient for readers of the paperback edition.

Do you mean the code that's on Github (like the installation instructions) and not in the paperback? The install stuff is online because I highly suspect it'll need to be updated often, and I didn't want the book to go out of date quickly. Let me know if I misunderstood the question!

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

#82

Post by limedaring »

avinassh wrote: post #80
limedaring wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About five years, but I consider myself a beginner-intermediate still. I think that helped with writing the book because I'm still very aware of how non-programmers think and how to explain things in a non-programmer-y way. 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…

Like Pinterest app? Cool! Where can I buy this book in India?

You can buy from http://gumroad.com/limedaring though if you buy the paperback book, ~$14 US is added for international shipping.

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

#83

Post by limedaring »

erikano wrote: post #77

Judging by the title, this book seems targeted at beginners. Nonetheless, I decided to buy it since I'm using Django in my current side project. I have a question (not related to my side project). I maintain a list of my eBook library where I put the following information about the eBooks I have (data for this book in parentheses): Publisher (Leanpub), Title (Hello Web App), Authors (Tracy Osborn), Published (), Purc…

2015-05-04 would be the published date.

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

#84

Post by sdrothrock »

limedaring wrote: post #79
sdrothrock wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to Leanpub because you commented here and also because OP's book was there. I was interested in seeing what else was out there about Django, but when I searched, only one result came up... and I know there's at least one other one: OP's book. Any plan for improving the search engine?

Huh, looks like my fault. I was avoiding mentioning Python/Django in favor of emphasizing "web app development" so it didn't look too technical, but I think I went a bit far and forgot to mention them altogether. Whoops. Adding now.

Oops! I hope that fixes the situation, then. I thought it was much more likely that the site had a finicky search engine than there really being only one book related to Django.

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

#85

Post by kfk »

erikano wrote: post #77

Judging by the title, this book seems targeted at beginners. Nonetheless, I decided to buy it since I'm using Django in my current side project. I have a question (not related to my side project). I maintain a list of my eBook library where I put the following information about the eBooks I have (data for this book in parentheses): Publisher (Leanpub), Title (Hello Web App), Authors (Tracy Osborn), Published (), Purc…

So you have books that are - Not started reading, not finished reading, recommended. You are missing the "finished reading, but not recommended", don't you think? Or maybe I am reading things wrong.

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

#86

Post by walterbell »

limedaring wrote: post #81
walterbell wrote: post #76

Congrats on shipping! How did you decide which code/commands to include in the book and which ones to publish online? This works well for ebooks (avoids errata), but is less convenient for readers of the paperback edition.

Do you mean the code that's on Github (like the installation instructions) and not in the paperback? The install stuff is online because I highly suspect it'll need to be updated often, and I didn't want the book to go out of date quickly. Let me know if I misunderstood the question!

Yes, I was referring to the code on GitHub.

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

#87

Post by elsjaako »

limedaring wrote: post #18
lkrubner wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 harde…

Do you have an opinion on LaTeX? I'd be interested to hear about it from someone used to publishing technical work in indesign.

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

#88

Post by thisisit »

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.

Not only that. Sometimes you just want to help.

There are times when you start learning something only to realise while there is a definite market for the approach taken by the tutorial site, you expectations were a bit different. There might be topics which the instructor thinks everyone programmer should know. And for a non-programmer it takes hours just to figure out what was the instructor talking about.

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

#89

Post by limedaring »

sdrothrock wrote: post #84
limedaring wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, looks like my fault. I was avoiding mentioning Python/Django in favor of emphasizing "web app development" so it didn't look too technical, but I think I went a bit far and forgot to mention them altogether. Whoops. Adding now.

Oops! I hope that fixes the situation, then. I thought it was much more likely that the site had a finicky search engine than there really being only one book related to Django.

Amazon actually doesn't list me for "Django tutorial" even though both keywords are mentioned on my page. It's been driving me nuts!

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

#90

Post by limedaring »

elsjaako wrote: post #87
limedaring wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 harde…

Do you have an opinion on LaTeX? I'd be interested to hear about it from someone used to publishing technical work in indesign.

I have heard one datapoint from another author that publishing in LaTeX has been nothing but pain (I think in mostly in regards to creating the eBooks). That said, the formatting in InDesign was kind of a pain on its own (it kept adding "typographers" curly apostrophes which would break the code), but I'd probably still choose that over LaTeX.
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