One of the inspirations for writing this book in the first place was reading some of the 'Show HN' experiences over the years of other self-published authors, so thanks for that!
Something I am still annoyed by is the way editions work with traditional publishers and with Amazon—even if you update the content of a book on Amazon, it remains at the old published date for your first version of the book, with no way to change that.
So you pretty much have to use editions to alert readers the content of your book is not outdated. But doing so incurs the cost of giving up store rankings, reviews, etc., effectively resetting your book to 'zero' on Amazon.
Am I missing something in that process or is that just how it is for 2nd editions? It seems like I'm going to have to spend some time trying to get people to purchase the 2nd edition copy, review it, link to it, etc. to be able to get it to show up in search results with similar rankings to my 1st edition.
> …Something I am still annoyed by is the way editions work with traditional publishers and with Amazon.
I created a pair of tools [1][2] to address exactly this issue, but I kinda left developing it midway.
One way to solve this issue is by publishing your manuscript like a website. I know that while it solves the issue of releasing the most updated edition/version of your book, it probably does not exactly solve the perception held by the readers of 'what is a book' vs. a website–and therefore, only a few would be willing to pay you for it.
The other solution, imo, is to bring a book-like experience on the web, but that is a whole another beast altogether.
KDP phone support is shockingly helpful. I call them frequently and they're often able to accomplish stuff for me which doesn't have any sort of DIY interface. I call them at least once a month for something or other and am always impressed.
One of my friends just released a new edition and was able to it up and set the new version as canonical, which preserved the ratings, reviews, etc. I haven't done it myself and may be muddling the details, but I'd definitely call KDP support before throwing in the towel.
Congrats! I wish more authors try out self-publishing and hope that they find success.
>Putting it in perspective, $200,000 over five years averages $40,000 per year. It's definitely something, but that revenue would not be enough to replace my salary, nor do I think my other book projects will match its success (though I'd love to be surprised!).
That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you in top 1% richest in my country. My case is an extreme corner case, but my yearly expense is around $1500-$1800 (which looks likely to be earned with my ebooks this year).
>You can buy Ansible for DevOps, 2nd Edition on Amazon, LeanPub, or iBooks.
Any reason you aren't using https://gumroad.com/ as well? That is much better than leanpub with fees being
My guess would be that leanpub is more "full stack" (formatting, layout, website, etc) whereas gumroad is just a storefront. I use gumroad and like it, but you need a bunch of other tools in your pipeline.
> That depends on where you live I suppose. $40K per year will likely put you in top 1% richest in my country.
Exactly. It only scales up to a point, but that point can still be meanintful.I live in Spain with fairly low cost of living and my (self-published) books have been generating >10k/month profit for several years now, which is several times more than I can spend.
Plus, books are completely zero-maintenance, pure passive income, which is a massive relief compared to any sort of tech product. Would recommend it to anyone who has the interest in writing. (And if you are one of those people, feel free to email me -- I'm happy to help.)
But as OP mentioned, it needs to be a good book. There are a million titles self-published per year and most of them sell approximately zero copies.
I just edited my comment to make it clearer. I wanted to convey why not use gumroad as well, not instead of leanpub. Sorry for the confusion.
Personally I use pandoc [0] to generate pdf/epub from GitHub style markdown. I use both leanpub and gumroad, with leanpub giving me paying customers more than double the share of gumroad.
>books are completely zero-maintenance
That depends on the type of the book I suppose. I just spent about 4 months to update all my books recently - and I expect to update them again to add new content, changes due to new software version, feedback from readers, etc.
And I agree, for success you need a good book. I'll add that it will depend upon how many users would need the material, able to reach said users in the first place, etc.
> people who buy digital copies should be able to take advantage of the fact that ebooks can update the contents of a book over time, and authors should be able to update their books easily (if they choose to do so).
The important caveat that needs to be explicitly mentioned here is that readers should be able to consent and opt-in to these updates. Authors should be able to release updates, but they should not be able to push them, overwriting the purchased version of the book without the reader's consent. The keystone example of the outfall of giving an author/publisher the ability to tamper with a purchased book is of course the infamous Amazon 1984 fiasco [1].
For kindle, at least, authors can do an "optional" update or a "forced" update.
The forced one is pushed to every device automatically, and Amazon strongly warns against this when you attempt to do it, becaues it deletes all the readers' notes, comments, and bookmarks. It's basically suggested to only use it for book-breaking issues where the current version is essentially worthless.
The optional one adds a little update marker to the book in kindle (similar to a phone app) and lets the user grab it at their own leisure, or ignore it. It's highly unreliable, but is the best practice for any updates which aren't fixing a book-breaking issue.
This is awesome. Thank you for making this, I will be buying a hard copy. I have recently had to learn DevOps due to being on a project setting up infrastructure, and have now been exposed to Ansible and Terraform. These are extremely powerful tools. Do you use Terraform at all, or do you do your provisioning with Ansible? Is Ansible able to do the things that Terraform would be used for? Just curious for your thoughts. Thanks!
Terraform excels at provisioning resources, and Ansible excels at configuring resources, but can also provision most things as-needed.
For simpler things (eg small infra where I might need to configure a route 53 domain, a few EC2 instances, and something in RDS), I would stick with Ansible since I can do everything from AMI build to provision to reconfigure/deploy with it.
But for a lot of more complicated things, I do use Terraform. I'm working on a good example of using Terraform with GCP for Kubernetes in my next book, and will likely also show how I still tie things together with Ansible.
For provisioning, Packer + Ansible seems like a great combination.
I used both recently to setup a Discourse site and associated Postfix mail server. Packer spins up the machines and then calls Ansible to handle the actual provisioning. Once that’s done, Packer takes a snapshot of each machine, so you end up with images that are ready for deployment with, e.g., Terraform.
Granted, this was just a toy project for me to try these tools out, so any advice would be appreciated!
Oh god. The guy studied liberal arts and theology and he's doing top notch work in his published computer related works. I have met engineers with master degrees who could not write a report succintgly to explain what the hell they build. Keep up the good work Jeff. You are No1 in relation to many other so called expert "engineers" out there.
Great work on the book, and thank you for writing about the self-publishing process [1]. I'm in the process of writing a book, and your writing has addressed several things that have been on my mind.
Your book list on Amazon is a bit confusing since the first and second editions are both listed with the exact same title. If they can't be consolidated as one entry, maybe add "Second Edition" to the title of the latest one?
Also when visiting the old listing for your book, you should try to get one of those "There's a newer version of this book available" boxes that I sometimes see on Amazon.
Ha! Well, hopefully a good guide on automating Kubernetes, at least! Now that this second edition is done, I’m re-focusing on finishing the first edition of Ansible for Kubernetes. You can get the book in progress on LeanPub, of course!
Something I am still annoyed by is the way editions work with traditional publishers and with Amazon—even if you update the content of a book on Amazon, it remains at the old published date for your first version of the book, with no way to change that.
So you pretty much have to use editions to alert readers the content of your book is not outdated. But doing so incurs the cost of giving up store rankings, reviews, etc., effectively resetting your book to 'zero' on Amazon.
Am I missing something in that process or is that just how it is for 2nd editions? It seems like I'm going to have to spend some time trying to get people to purchase the 2nd edition copy, review it, link to it, etc. to be able to get it to show up in search results with similar rankings to my 1st edition.