So you want to self-publish books and courses on programming

Re:So you want to self-publish books and courses on programming by codazoda on Thursday July 29, 2021 @07:40PM (#28002879)

Just to add some contrast to this $20k figure and Watham's comments about the upside, I've published several small books that get very good reviews but haven't sold a lot of copies. I self published on Amazon as an eBook and then Print on Demand. My profits have totaled less than $1,000 in a couple years. My problems are likely that I don't have an audience built and Amazon rank is terrible until you have sales.

If you're not in it _just_ for the money though, go for it. It's extremely satisfying.

My most popular book is actual a book about how I self published. Publish Your Ebook by Joel Dare.

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Re:So you want to self-publish books and courses on programming by omgitsabird on Thursday July 29, 2021 @08:47PM (#28003261)

It seems like a lot of communities are built up with the explicit intention of being in it just for the money. There seems to be a lot of hype generation and releasing for-profit educational materials alongside eachother.

In my opinion, there is a strange marketing game around web frameworks and web frontend development especially.

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Re:So you want to self-publish books and courses on programming by xmprt on Thursday July 29, 2021 @11:50PM (#28004237)

The best advice I got was to focus on the topic way more than on the actual content. Great quality content about a topic that is super niche won't make much revenue compared to an average book that reaches a wide market.

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Re:So you want to self-publish books and courses on programming by xmprt on Friday July 30, 2021 @08:23PM (#28014018)

That's not to say that you should write average books. It's more that people usually underestimate the amount of time it takes to come up with a good idea. And then they keep investing time into a bad idea due to sunk cost fallacy.

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