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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. Y
by 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 agoThanks 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 agoI'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 agoA 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 agoSo 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!"
- limedaring 11y agoIt was more like having 50% of the book already known, and knowing that the book wouldn't be great without another 50% on top of it.
- gknoy 11y agoHow did you find a subject that you felt you knew 50% about? :-) Given how much I've learned from other people, and the web, I have difficulty feeling like an _authority_ on any technical subject.
- limedaring 11y agoI think beginner books are easier to get to that 50%. The subject I'm teaching really isn't that hard, it just needs to be explained differently. So, that said - maybe it's not feeling like an authority, but more feeling like you have an alternate/interesting/different take on a subject.
- thisisit 11y agoNot 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.