I have a lot of programming books on my shelf about various topics , but I don't have one called "make a shitton of money with your text editor".

It would feel a bit like those ebooks that promise to make it easy to generate effortless income on the stockmarket or get highly attractive women into bed with you.

I have no doubt that such books sell, but I wouldn't feel confident writing something that might not necessarily do exactly what it said on the tin for everyone reading it.

"Make a shitton of money with your text editor: a genius stockpicker's guide to bedding the women of your dreams."

Advance praise from Armando Montelongo.

The books on your bookshelf are meant to improve your lifestyle - they teach you new skills that you can charge for. Some books, however, do that on a higher, more general level.

Maybe I should raise my rates further...

There is nothing wrong with marketing. Marketing is how honest people get paid for doing honest work. (Both Jim and Nathan are honest. I've exchanged email with them both.)

In that case you'd never write it. The discussion isn't over some magic book of spells here.

It's about an honest product offer that with a modest amount of work the reader will move from point A to point B. Now you as writer could promise to refund the reader's money if it didn't work out, whether because the work was too much or the results didn't materialize.

That way everyone wins.

Luckily for saturnflyer, nathanbarry, bdunn, and me, plus many others, that problem isn't a generalized one. A few folks obviously agree with you, but it doesn't seem to be impacting our sales or our customers' happiness.

That opinion is a minority.

I guess I should have included that you should know something about the topic you choose to write about. Being able to demonstrate some level of expertise is important. But that doesn't mean you should wait until you are speaking at conferences before you start teaching on your blog.

How did you go about marketing it?

1. Start by writing one or two really useful blog posts on the topic. Use a provider like MailChimp (free up to 2,000 subscribers) to embed a signup form at the bottom of the post. Just something simple that mentions the product and tells them to signup to hear more about it.

2. Promote these posts on Twitter, HN, Reddit, mailing lists, etc. If it is valuable content than people will share it. I wrote an article on UX lessons from the new Facebook iOS app (http://nathanbarry.com/ux-lessons-from-facebook-ios/) that was shared over 100 times on Twitter. That article alone got me 300-400 subscribers to my book launch list.

3. Put together a more official landing page for your book. It should have information on the topics the book will cover, link to your blog posts, and have a signup link. Pick a launch date as early as possible.

4. As your email list grows continue to write blog posts to promote it. Occasionally send out useful tips, tutorials, and updates related to your book to the subscriber list. This will keep the book on their minds. The last thing you want is your book to be released and the pre-launch subscribers to have forgotten who you are. But keep the emails useful.

5. A couple weeks before launch get review copies to a 5-10 experts in your industry. If you don't know anyone, start with smaller blogs and work your way up. Give them a free copy and ask for feedback. Often this will turn into book reviews published on their site or testimonials you can use on the sales page.

6. On the day of the launch send out an announcement email to your pre-launch signup list. You should also give them a discount or special offer of some kind to reward them for signing up early (and to motivate immediate purchases). I like to have guest posts go live on related sites the same day as the launch. For my book launch on September 4th I had 5 guest posts go live that day.

That's basically all I did. To give you an idea of my influence online (hint: not much) 2 weeks before the launch my blog had 150 RSS subscribers and I had ~700 Twitter followers. Not a lot.

By launch day I had a pre-launch list of 800 subscribers + about 1,000 on my iOS Design Weekly newsletter. I was able to leverage that small subscriber base to $12,000 in sales in the first 24 hours. Even if you do a tenth of that it is still decent money. Plus my blog subscribers have doubled (still not many) and my Twitter followers have gone up to around 1,100.

Seriously, try launching a product. You will learn a ton and you won't regret it.

Edit: that's not to say you won't make mistakes. Here is a post on a few of the mistakes I made during launch: http://nathanbarry.com/product-launch-mistakes/