7 ms·

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

288 points by limedaring 11y ago

limedaring 11y ago
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.
- mastahype 11y ago
  I'll bite. What motivated you to do this? What was the process like? Have you considered making instructional video for Udemy or other MOOCs as another resource?
  - limedaring 11y ago
    I taught myself how to code about 5 years ago and while I eventually figured it out (and launched weddinglovely.com), I was really annoyed at the process and how every tutorial seemed like it assumed I came from a comp. sci. background. I decided I wanted to write a learn-to-code book aimed at people who have previous experience with front-end development and how websites work, but no programming experience. The process was long... took me about a year. It could have been much shorter if some personal and startup events didn't interfere with the process, especially since it's such a small book (~140 pages). Another book that size would probably take me about three months. I ended up doing all of the design myself as well, which slowed me down, but it was enjoyable as I was able to use some of my design background and editorial design knowledge – a nice break from writing and programming. I have thought about making instructional videos, since the ones that I sell in the "complete" package have been doing well. The biggest issue is time, since I'm still running my startup solo. Second biggest is potential revenue, since my salary for WeddingLovely is currently at $0 (long story) so I'm supporting myself completely on what Hello Web App is bringing in. Thanks for the fun questions!
    - mastahype 11y ago
      Nice to hear yet another non-CS degree holder taking the dive (CS degree holder here). I think keeping tech books like that short is key to success. We don't have the time or attention span to pour through 300-500 page books on tech stuff. I think 140 is in the sweet spot for sure. Keep it up and get on with the videos - I hear there's money in them there hills.
- mijustin 11y ago
  What was the most difficult step in the self-publishing process?
  - limedaring 11y ago
    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 designing an actual book is really fun.) I almost went with a local printer, as I wanted to support a local business... but their cost per book was ~$10, and going with a China-based printer (PrintNinja.com) dropped the book cost to $3.60 — I pretty much had no choice since I wanted to sell on Amazon (anything over $5 would kill my profit.) But being that it was printed in China, it added two months between submitting the print order to getting the books in hand, and I had a lot of people waiting for their books for about a year since the Kickstarter. It was really stressful, but at least now I know and can plan for this delay in the future. Oh, and a shout-out to marketing, which this blog post obviously is. Of course I wish I could release the book and get revenue without effort, but that won't happen. Self-promotion is really hard, and I'm learning how to market my products better but it's really not that much fun and very stressful. Necessary though.
    - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
      Besides HN, what promotion did you do?
      - limedaring 11y ago
        I detail that in the linked post - the biggest was product hunt, and reddit was huge too.
    - lkrubner 11y ago
      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?
- panorama 11y ago
  Thanks for the writeup! I have a book coming out shortly as well. What are your plans for keeping up book revenue moving forward?
  - limedaring 11y ago
    It's been dropping pretty steadily so I'm leaning towards releasing an intermediate book with more web app exercises. Makes a great upsell, I can bundle it with the beginner book, I can do another kickstarter (maybe). So expanding the empire and trying to get more reach.
- joshvm 11y ago
  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 microcontrollers for a while, since most of the information online is horrifically fragmented. I'm tempted to go down the website route and then publish it separately as a cohesive ebook, but it looks like leanpub may be a good option if you can publish individual chapters as you write them.
  - limedaring 11y ago
    > How did you support yourself while writing the book? And if you were working another job, how did you find time? 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.
- WalterGR 11y ago
  How many hours did you spend on the book to get to this point?
  - limedaring 11y ago
    Urg, that might be impossible to estimate. Hundreds on the various tasks (writing, editing, designing, researching, etc.)
    - WalterGR 11y ago
      Could you... round to the nearest hundred?
      - toelva 11y ago
        Of course, I can't answer for limedaring but I write software ebooks too. For each ebook, it's between 200 and 300 hours for writing, editing, designing, researching, etc
      - limedaring 11y ago
        What toelva said! I definitely added a week or so of work by doing all the design myself. Writing... if I focused, I could write another book in two weeks of full-time work (maybe less) but the issue is getting distracted, or taking the time to research, etc. Since the work was spread out over a year with a lot of my time focused on my startup or personal stuff, it's really hard to estimate, apologies.
- avinassh 11y ago
  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 :)
  - limedaring 11y ago
    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 yes, the code is available on Github: http://github.com/hellowebapp http://github.com/hellowebapp
    - avinassh 11y ago
      Like Pinterest app? Cool! Where can I buy this book in India?
      - limedaring 11y ago
        You can buy from http://gumroad.com/limedaring http://gumroad.com/limedaring though if you buy the paperback book, ~$14 US is added for international shipping.
deleted 11y ago
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lquist 11y ago
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.
- limedaring 11y ago
  Thanks for the congrats! Yeah I agree that other perks can outweigh the money; see also the comment below about marketing being one of the hardest parts about writing a book. Getting more known now will help future books I write (Nathan Barry is a good example). I am reaping some rewards of having expenses covered to do workshops abroad. It's not a source of income, but it does make travel a lot more affordable which is great. Ultimately, I hope that there will be some long-term passive income from the book (and possibly other books). We'll see. :)
- wernercd 11y ago
  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...
  - limedaring 11y ago
    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.
    - jacalata 11y ago
      So how did you get to the point of writing a book on topics you didn't know about? I always thought the process was more like "well, I know this shit backwards in my sleep, I should write a book!"
ingend88 11y ago
I bought your book on Kickstarter! I love it and would recommend anyone starting out.
- limedaring 11y ago
  Awesome! Apologies again for the delay in fulfillment. :)
ElectricFeel 11y ago
very impressive what you've done!
alex_g 11y ago
'Learn by doing' - did you go to Cal Poly?
- limedaring 11y ago
  Yup!
  - alex_g 11y ago
    Nice! I'm a current student :)
peterarmstrong 11y ago
Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work. Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days in store credit, etc. (Right now we have a 100% "happiness guarantee" where readers can get a refund with 2 clicks, but this only works for 60 days, so we set our refund policy to be 45 days.)
- limedaring 11y ago
  Yay! Leanpub is my top recommendation for anyone self publishing a book, the platform is really great. Hope it gets even bigger!
  - kriro 11y ago
    It seems very geared towards non-fiction. Is there an equivalent for fiction writers or would you recommend going with them for fiction as well? The platform looks excellent but I'm not sure if it's the right fit. I love that they recommend exploring other options (excellent company philosophy) Fantasy has one entry, scifi has no entries and fiction has a total of three entries.
    - mdpopescu 11y ago
      What's wrong with Amazon?
    - peterarmstrong 11y ago
      We want to improve our support for fiction a lot in the months ahead. We're mostly computer programming books right now because Leanpub used to be so hard to use you needed to be a programmer to figure it out :) Most programmers already know Markdown, whereas the idea that you should write in something other than Word is something that we need to explain to people, and that opportunity only comes with traction. To support fiction properly, we need to add support for paying for instalments, so that you can buy a chapter at a time, etc. Serial fiction used to be a big deal in the 1860s, and it should be a bigger deal now because of the internet. Also, we're working on a new version of our in-browser editor which will be more friendly for people who don't like writing in Markdown -- which probably includes many fiction authors...
Andaith 11y ago
I'm sorry to wander off topic, but your website just automatically redirected me to some squarespace url( https://tracy-osborn-ic34.squarespace.com/config?frameUrl=/news/how-i-launched-my-learn-to-code-book-and-made-nearly-5000-in-pre-orders https://tracy-osborn-ic34.squarespace.com/config?frameUrl=/n... ). I'm assuming this isn't normal? I really like how transparent you're being with the sales per platform, that's rather interesting information to be sharing. I've also never heard of gumroad before, so I'm really surprised by how it stacks up against amazon.
- limedaring 11y ago
  Oh squarespace. That's my "actual" url, guess the custom domain stopped working. Looking into it, thanks! Gumroad is great, except that they don't market your book like Amazon does, so they're kind of apples and oranges. Most people don't do both platforms and it's been an interesting experiment trying both the hands-off let-Amazon-take-care-of-it vs. more money yet I have to do all fulfillment Gumroad side. I'm actually traveling right now and had to hire someone off of craigslist to ship books for me while I'm gone, it's been kind of a PITA.
hsnewman 11y ago
Congrats on your marketing on ycombinator? Did it work?
- limedaring 11y ago
  I've sold 1 ebook package and 1 complete package on Gumroad with about 5,000 page views so far. :P But sharing information is fun too, revenue generation isn't the #1 goal.
danso 11y ago
Cool, congrats, and thanks for the writeup! I just bought your book on Amazon though I'm a fellow Leanpub publisher...organizing non-Amazon documents on the Kindle is just a pain. I'm assuming publishing to Amazon was pretty straightforward since Leanpub generates a mobi version? The paperback fees/revenues don't seem too promising...I'm going to take that as another excuse to never publish on paper. Another datapoint...a few years ago I published a draft manual on how to use regular expressions. I've never finished it, but to date, I've accumulated $1,200 from Leanpub revenues...even though I set the book's price to $0. Once I have more time I'll finish it up...I was pleased to see that Leanpub made the publishing workflow even easier by hooking into Github...I've been trying to set up a system that simultaneously publishes via Leanpub while publishing a free web version using the same files via Jekyll. tldr: Leanpub is great...I haven't used other self-publishing platforms but I can't imagine how much better something could be than Leanpub for those who like hacking/writing in Markdown and in their own text editors.
- limedaring 11y ago
  Yup - Leanpub made Amazon publishing super simple. I'm not a fan of their PDF designs though so I still needed to do that on my own for the rest of my digital files on Gumroad. :)
TheGRS 11y ago
Congrats on the book sales! I did not know about your book beforehand and have been looking for something like this, so I think I will give yours a shot.
- limedaring 11y ago
  Awesome. I also made a forum at discuss.hellowebapp.com for questions if you need any help. :)
cardeo 11y ago
Thanks for your post. I've also written a few code book but only have sold on gumroad. I'm going to try out amazon and leanpub as other sales channels to. Question... did you have a large email list when you were selling your pre-orders? How did you get the word out? Just product hunt?
- limedaring 11y ago
  Kickstarter helped a ton, promotion of the campaign helped me get to 800 email subscribers by launch day. Not huge, but not tiny either. Reddit (a mentioned in the post) was also almost as big as product hunt.
  - cardeo 11y ago
    800 is pretty good to have out of the starting gate. The number one hardest thing I've found in self-publishing is to build a good following or email list. I'm around 500 subscribers at this point. That's after about a year of working to build the list. Kickstarter is a good idea I hadn't really considered. Thanks again. oh and if you want to check out my books, head over to mattlambert.ca
    - limedaring 11y ago
      Yeah, Kickstarter is a LOT of work but it's great at both building up an email list as well as getting an "advance" for your work before it's released (of course, only if the KS is successful.)
capex 11y ago
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?
- limedaring 11y ago
  It's offered in the 2nd package on Leanpub for an extra $5. :)
philfrasty 11y ago
Jeeeeeeez that conversion rate is almost criminal....from someone selling physical products online :-) (732 views / 102 sales) Huge congrats on the launch!
- limedaring 11y ago
  To be fair, that was Product Hunt, where people are primed to buy. My conversion rate is normally ~1-3%, and right now is a fraction of that since most people are visiting for the article only.
plicense 11y ago
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 https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002998671
- limedaring 11y ago
  Huh, had no idea. Thanks for the tip!
  - limedaring 11y ago
    FYI I just chatted with Amazon and unfortunately I can only do one version of a Kindle book, so I'd have to get rid of my natural Kindle book in order to sell an eTextbook version with videos. They said they're looking into allowing creators to sell both though so fingers crossed that happens soon. I would love to be able to sell a version of my video package through Amazon.
arikrak 11y ago
Very informative post! I just finished creating an online course on Ruby on Rails and I'm thinking of creating an ebook from it. I'm also looking for authors who would want to publish their programming books or posts on my site [1], where they could include programming challenges and other exercises. [1] https://www.learneroo.com https://www.learneroo.com.
whitenoice 11y ago
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)
- limedaring 11y ago
  I ended up ordering 1,000 because I needed to fulfill the Kickstarter orders (~300). I probably have about 400-500 left at this moment from my order in May. 1,000 was a nice round number that also gave me a good bulk discount on PrintNinja.com. 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.
alajarvela 11y ago
The cover looks like it was formatted in CSS. Just kidding, congrats on the book :)
- limedaring 11y ago
  You wouldn't believe how many hours I spent on cover design. >_<
aladine 11y ago
Great article. Congrats on your successful ebook and how you analyse sales through out different channels. I guess your next hacker news article will be like: "I published an article on hacker news of how I get nearly $5k in pre-orderes. And I got another $1k pre-order after the 10k visitors to my site. "
staticelf 11y ago
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.
- limedaring 11y ago
  Thanks!
JustOneQ2 11y ago
OT 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 :-)
- limedaring 11y ago
  Gumroad does PDF personalization. You'd still have to do your own marketing though!
walterbell 11y ago
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.
- limedaring 11y ago
  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!
  - walterbell 11y ago
    Yes, I was referring to the code on GitHub.
    - limedaring 11y ago
      I'm assuming/hoping that most paperback readers will still have a computer in front of them when going through the book since it's a tutorial, so hopefully opening up the GitHub code isn't that much of an inconvenience. If they're ideally reading without a computer, then missing that chapter shouldn't be a problem.
erikano 11y ago
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 (), Purchased (2015-07-08), Last known update (2015-05-08), Catalog Page (http://leanpub.com/hellowebapp http://leanpub.com/hellowebapp), Read duration (). As you can see, I was unable to determine what to put in the Published field. I would like to have information for this on the form Month Year. Could someone -- preferably Tracy or a Leanpub employee -- tell me what to put there? PS: If you'd like to see my eBook library list, you can find it at http://www.erikano.net/eBooks/purchased.htm http://www.erikano.net/eBooks/purchased.htm. Note that some of the books at the bottom of the list are ones I am not so interested in reading any longer.
- limedaring 11y ago
  2015-05-04 would be the published date.
  - erikano 11y ago
    Ok, thanks :) Just to confirm, though, that's May 2015, right? (And not the 5th of April 2015.)
    - limedaring 11y ago
      Yes :)
- kfk 11y ago
  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.
  - erikano 11y ago
yitchelle 11y ago
The cover design is always an interesting part of a book. Did you got through a A/B testing phase before settling on this design? Congrats on the launch!
- limedaring 11y ago
  LOL I wish. I never feel like I have time to do A/B testing. I just went with my instincts.
misslinda 11y ago
I must be the only one who can't load the web page. ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH A secure connection cannot be established because this site uses an unsupported protocol.
- limedaring 11y ago
  Try again now? Looks like Cloudflare was having issues for a bit.

288 points by limedaring 11y ago

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.

mastahype 11y ago
I'll bite. What motivated you to do this? What was the process like? Have you considered making instructional video for Udemy or other MOOCs as another resource?
- limedaring 11y ago
  I taught myself how to code about 5 years ago and while I eventually figured it out (and launched weddinglovely.com), I was really annoyed at the process and how every tutorial seemed like it assumed I came from a comp. sci. background. I decided I wanted to write a learn-to-code book aimed at people who have previous experience with front-end development and how websites work, but no programming experience. The process was long... took me about a year. It could have been much shorter if some personal and startup events didn't interfere with the process, especially since it's such a small book (~140 pages). Another book that size would probably take me about three months. I ended up doing all of the design myself as well, which slowed me down, but it was enjoyable as I was able to use some of my design background and editorial design knowledge – a nice break from writing and programming. I have thought about making instructional videos, since the ones that I sell in the "complete" package have been doing well. The biggest issue is time, since I'm still running my startup solo. Second biggest is potential revenue, since my salary for WeddingLovely is currently at $0 (long story) so I'm supporting myself completely on what Hello Web App is bringing in. Thanks for the fun questions!
  - mastahype 11y ago
    Nice to hear yet another non-CS degree holder taking the dive (CS degree holder here). I think keeping tech books like that short is key to success. We don't have the time or attention span to pour through 300-500 page books on tech stuff. I think 140 is in the sweet spot for sure. Keep it up and get on with the videos - I hear there's money in them there hills.
mijustin 11y ago
What was the most difficult step in the self-publishing process?
- limedaring 11y ago
  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 designing an actual book is really fun.) I almost went with a local printer, as I wanted to support a local business... but their cost per book was ~$10, and going with a China-based printer (PrintNinja.com) dropped the book cost to $3.60 — I pretty much had no choice since I wanted to sell on Amazon (anything over $5 would kill my profit.) But being that it was printed in China, it added two months between submitting the print order to getting the books in hand, and I had a lot of people waiting for their books for about a year since the Kickstarter. It was really stressful, but at least now I know and can plan for this delay in the future. Oh, and a shout-out to marketing, which this blog post obviously is. Of course I wish I could release the book and get revenue without effort, but that won't happen. Self-promotion is really hard, and I'm learning how to market my products better but it's really not that much fun and very stressful. Necessary though.
  - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    Besides HN, what promotion did you do?
    - limedaring 11y ago
      I detail that in the linked post - the biggest was product hunt, and reddit was huge too.
  - lkrubner 11y ago
    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?
panorama 11y ago
Thanks for the writeup! I have a book coming out shortly as well. What are your plans for keeping up book revenue moving forward?
- limedaring 11y ago
  It's been dropping pretty steadily so I'm leaning towards releasing an intermediate book with more web app exercises. Makes a great upsell, I can bundle it with the beginner book, I can do another kickstarter (maybe). So expanding the empire and trying to get more reach.
joshvm 11y ago
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 microcontrollers for a while, since most of the information online is horrifically fragmented. I'm tempted to go down the website route and then publish it separately as a cohesive ebook, but it looks like leanpub may be a good option if you can publish individual chapters as you write them.
- limedaring 11y ago
  > How did you support yourself while writing the book? And if you were working another job, how did you find time? 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.
WalterGR 11y ago
How many hours did you spend on the book to get to this point?
- limedaring 11y ago
  Urg, that might be impossible to estimate. Hundreds on the various tasks (writing, editing, designing, researching, etc.)
  - WalterGR 11y ago
    Could you... round to the nearest hundred?
    - toelva 11y ago
      Of course, I can't answer for limedaring but I write software ebooks too. For each ebook, it's between 200 and 300 hours for writing, editing, designing, researching, etc
    - limedaring 11y ago
      What toelva said! I definitely added a week or so of work by doing all the design myself. Writing... if I focused, I could write another book in two weeks of full-time work (maybe less) but the issue is getting distracted, or taking the time to research, etc. Since the work was spread out over a year with a lot of my time focused on my startup or personal stuff, it's really hard to estimate, apologies.
avinassh 11y ago
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 :)
- limedaring 11y ago
  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 yes, the code is available on Github: http://github.com/hellowebapp http://github.com/hellowebapp
  - avinassh 11y ago
    Like Pinterest app? Cool! Where can I buy this book in India?
    - limedaring 11y ago
      You can buy from http://gumroad.com/limedaring http://gumroad.com/limedaring though if you buy the paperback book, ~$14 US is added for international shipping.

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lquist 11y ago

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.

limedaring 11y ago
Thanks for the congrats! Yeah I agree that other perks can outweigh the money; see also the comment below about marketing being one of the hardest parts about writing a book. Getting more known now will help future books I write (Nathan Barry is a good example). I am reaping some rewards of having expenses covered to do workshops abroad. It's not a source of income, but it does make travel a lot more affordable which is great. Ultimately, I hope that there will be some long-term passive income from the book (and possibly other books). We'll see. :)
wernercd 11y ago
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...
- limedaring 11y ago
  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.
  - jacalata 11y ago
    So how did you get to the point of writing a book on topics you didn't know about? I always thought the process was more like "well, I know this shit backwards in my sleep, I should write a book!"

ingend88 11y ago

I bought your book on Kickstarter! I love it and would recommend anyone starting out.

limedaring 11y ago
Awesome! Apologies again for the delay in fulfillment. :)

ElectricFeel 11y ago

very impressive what you've done!

alex_g 11y ago

'Learn by doing' - did you go to Cal Poly?

limedaring 11y ago
Yup!
- alex_g 11y ago
  Nice! I'm a current student :)

peterarmstrong 11y ago

Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work. Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days in store credit, etc. (Right now we have a 100% "happiness guarantee" where readers can get a refund with 2 clicks, but this only works for 60 days, so we set our refund policy to be 45 days.)

limedaring 11y ago
Yay! Leanpub is my top recommendation for anyone self publishing a book, the platform is really great. Hope it gets even bigger!
- kriro 11y ago
  It seems very geared towards non-fiction. Is there an equivalent for fiction writers or would you recommend going with them for fiction as well? The platform looks excellent but I'm not sure if it's the right fit. I love that they recommend exploring other options (excellent company philosophy) Fantasy has one entry, scifi has no entries and fiction has a total of three entries.
  - mdpopescu 11y ago
    What's wrong with Amazon?
  - peterarmstrong 11y ago
    We want to improve our support for fiction a lot in the months ahead. We're mostly computer programming books right now because Leanpub used to be so hard to use you needed to be a programmer to figure it out :) Most programmers already know Markdown, whereas the idea that you should write in something other than Word is something that we need to explain to people, and that opportunity only comes with traction. To support fiction properly, we need to add support for paying for instalments, so that you can buy a chapter at a time, etc. Serial fiction used to be a big deal in the 1860s, and it should be a bigger deal now because of the internet. Also, we're working on a new version of our in-browser editor which will be more friendly for people who don't like writing in Markdown -- which probably includes many fiction authors...

Andaith 11y ago

I'm sorry to wander off topic, but your website just automatically redirected me to some squarespace url( https://tracy-osborn-ic34.squarespace.com/config?frameUrl=/news/how-i-launched-my-learn-to-code-book-and-made-nearly-5000-in-pre-orders https://tracy-osborn-ic34.squarespace.com/config?frameUrl=/n... ). I'm assuming this isn't normal? I really like how transparent you're being with the sales per platform, that's rather interesting information to be sharing. I've also never heard of gumroad before, so I'm really surprised by how it stacks up against amazon.

limedaring 11y ago
Oh squarespace. That's my "actual" url, guess the custom domain stopped working. Looking into it, thanks! Gumroad is great, except that they don't market your book like Amazon does, so they're kind of apples and oranges. Most people don't do both platforms and it's been an interesting experiment trying both the hands-off let-Amazon-take-care-of-it vs. more money yet I have to do all fulfillment Gumroad side. I'm actually traveling right now and had to hire someone off of craigslist to ship books for me while I'm gone, it's been kind of a PITA.

hsnewman 11y ago

Congrats on your marketing on ycombinator? Did it work?

limedaring 11y ago
I've sold 1 ebook package and 1 complete package on Gumroad with about 5,000 page views so far. :P But sharing information is fun too, revenue generation isn't the #1 goal.

danso 11y ago

Cool, congrats, and thanks for the writeup! I just bought your book on Amazon though I'm a fellow Leanpub publisher...organizing non-Amazon documents on the Kindle is just a pain. I'm assuming publishing to Amazon was pretty straightforward since Leanpub generates a mobi version? The paperback fees/revenues don't seem too promising...I'm going to take that as another excuse to never publish on paper. Another datapoint...a few years ago I published a draft manual on how to use regular expressions. I've never finished it, but to date, I've accumulated $1,200 from Leanpub revenues...even though I set the book's price to $0. Once I have more time I'll finish it up...I was pleased to see that Leanpub made the publishing workflow even easier by hooking into Github...I've been trying to set up a system that simultaneously publishes via Leanpub while publishing a free web version using the same files via Jekyll. tldr: Leanpub is great...I haven't used other self-publishing platforms but I can't imagine how much better something could be than Leanpub for those who like hacking/writing in Markdown and in their own text editors.

limedaring 11y ago
Yup - Leanpub made Amazon publishing super simple. I'm not a fan of their PDF designs though so I still needed to do that on my own for the rest of my digital files on Gumroad. :)

TheGRS 11y ago

Congrats on the book sales! I did not know about your book beforehand and have been looking for something like this, so I think I will give yours a shot.

limedaring 11y ago
Awesome. I also made a forum at discuss.hellowebapp.com for questions if you need any help. :)

cardeo 11y ago

Thanks for your post. I've also written a few code book but only have sold on gumroad. I'm going to try out amazon and leanpub as other sales channels to. Question... did you have a large email list when you were selling your pre-orders? How did you get the word out? Just product hunt?

limedaring 11y ago
Kickstarter helped a ton, promotion of the campaign helped me get to 800 email subscribers by launch day. Not huge, but not tiny either. Reddit (a mentioned in the post) was also almost as big as product hunt.
- cardeo 11y ago
  800 is pretty good to have out of the starting gate. The number one hardest thing I've found in self-publishing is to build a good following or email list. I'm around 500 subscribers at this point. That's after about a year of working to build the list. Kickstarter is a good idea I hadn't really considered. Thanks again. oh and if you want to check out my books, head over to mattlambert.ca
  - limedaring 11y ago
    Yeah, Kickstarter is a LOT of work but it's great at both building up an email list as well as getting an "advance" for your work before it's released (of course, only if the KS is successful.)

capex 11y ago

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?

limedaring 11y ago
It's offered in the 2nd package on Leanpub for an extra $5. :)

philfrasty 11y ago

Jeeeeeeez that conversion rate is almost criminal....from someone selling physical products online :-) (732 views / 102 sales) Huge congrats on the launch!

limedaring 11y ago
To be fair, that was Product Hunt, where people are primed to buy. My conversion rate is normally ~1-3%, and right now is a fraction of that since most people are visiting for the article only.

plicense 11y ago

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 https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002998671

limedaring 11y ago
Huh, had no idea. Thanks for the tip!
- limedaring 11y ago
  FYI I just chatted with Amazon and unfortunately I can only do one version of a Kindle book, so I'd have to get rid of my natural Kindle book in order to sell an eTextbook version with videos. They said they're looking into allowing creators to sell both though so fingers crossed that happens soon. I would love to be able to sell a version of my video package through Amazon.

arikrak 11y ago

Very informative post! I just finished creating an online course on Ruby on Rails and I'm thinking of creating an ebook from it. I'm also looking for authors who would want to publish their programming books or posts on my site [1], where they could include programming challenges and other exercises. [1] https://www.learneroo.com https://www.learneroo.com.

whitenoice 11y ago

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)

limedaring 11y ago
I ended up ordering 1,000 because I needed to fulfill the Kickstarter orders (~300). I probably have about 400-500 left at this moment from my order in May. 1,000 was a nice round number that also gave me a good bulk discount on PrintNinja.com. 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.

alajarvela 11y ago

The cover looks like it was formatted in CSS. Just kidding, congrats on the book :)

limedaring 11y ago
You wouldn't believe how many hours I spent on cover design. >_<

aladine 11y ago

Great article. Congrats on your successful ebook and how you analyse sales through out different channels. I guess your next hacker news article will be like: "I published an article on hacker news of how I get nearly $5k in pre-orderes. And I got another $1k pre-order after the 10k visitors to my site. "

staticelf 11y ago

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.

limedaring 11y ago
Thanks!

JustOneQ2 11y ago

OT 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 :-)

limedaring 11y ago
Gumroad does PDF personalization. You'd still have to do your own marketing though!

walterbell 11y ago

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.

limedaring 11y ago
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!
- walterbell 11y ago
  Yes, I was referring to the code on GitHub.
  - limedaring 11y ago
    I'm assuming/hoping that most paperback readers will still have a computer in front of them when going through the book since it's a tutorial, so hopefully opening up the GitHub code isn't that much of an inconvenience. If they're ideally reading without a computer, then missing that chapter shouldn't be a problem.

erikano 11y ago

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 (), Purchased (2015-07-08), Last known update (2015-05-08), Catalog Page (http://leanpub.com/hellowebapp http://leanpub.com/hellowebapp), Read duration (). As you can see, I was unable to determine what to put in the Published field. I would like to have information for this on the form Month Year. Could someone -- preferably Tracy or a Leanpub employee -- tell me what to put there? PS: If you'd like to see my eBook library list, you can find it at http://www.erikano.net/eBooks/purchased.htm http://www.erikano.net/eBooks/purchased.htm. Note that some of the books at the bottom of the list are ones I am not so interested in reading any longer.

limedaring 11y ago
2015-05-04 would be the published date.
- erikano 11y ago
  Ok, thanks :) Just to confirm, though, that's May 2015, right? (And not the 5th of April 2015.)
  - limedaring 11y ago
    Yes :)
kfk 11y ago
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.
- erikano 11y ago

yitchelle 11y ago

The cover design is always an interesting part of a book. Did you got through a A/B testing phase before settling on this design? Congrats on the launch!

limedaring 11y ago
LOL I wish. I never feel like I have time to do A/B testing. I just went with my instincts.

misslinda 11y ago

I must be the only one who can't load the web page. ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH A secure connection cannot be established because this site uses an unsupported protocol.

limedaring 11y ago
Try again now? Looks like Cloudflare was having issues for a bit.