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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
by 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 agoBesides HN, what promotion did you do?
- limedaring 11y agoI detail that in the linked post - the biggest was product hunt, and reddit was huge too.
- lkrubner 11y agoHow 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?
- limedaring 11y agoI 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.
- limedaring 11y agoJust saw the typo, sorry! I meant, "I have a graphic design degree and took editorial design..."
- elsjaako 11y agoDo you have an opinion on LaTeX? I'd be interested to hear about it from someone used to publishing technical work in indesign.
- limedaring 11y agoI 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.