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A comment on I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k in pre-orders. Parent comment

Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by dmlorenzetti on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @07:51PM (#9848926)
Off-topic comment on Leanpub -- Judging from the "best sellers" list, you handle a lot of software-related titles. Yet the categories pulldown in the bookstore has only two obvious software-related topics: the rather specific "Agile", and the rather broad "Software". I wonder whether you might not help browsers discover books of interest, by providing more categories and sub-categories (e.g., distinguish programming from data science, and under programming have separate sub-topics like Javascript, Python, and web).
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Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by peterarmstrong on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @08:36PM (#9849064)
That's a very good point. Adding to backlog :)
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Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by jtwebman on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @08:49PM (#9849102)
It is nice to see people from the tools we use daily watch Hacker News and actually listen to what we talk about. Thank you and I will be using you guys for my first book on Functional Programming soon!
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Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by peterarmstrong on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @06:50PM (#9855129)
Great! Brian Marick's book on Functional Programming (https://leanpub.com/fp-oo) has done really well; looking forward to seeing more of them!
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Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by darkmarmot on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @08:53PM (#9849124)
I second this. Also you seem to have more erotic/unusual titles...
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Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by bencollier49 on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @02:04AM (#9850048)
I think that's because vanity publishing is typically very popular amongst programming and "romance" authors.
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Re:I self-published a learn-to-code book and made nearly $5k... by peterarmstrong on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @06:54PM (#9855148)
We like to think of what we're doing as Lean Publishing (self-published in-progress ebooks), not vanity publishing. We only earn money if the author does, unlike most of the scum that prey on authors who wish to self-publish and spend thousands of dollars to get a box of books that sit in their basement.

The Leanpub workflow is totally free to use, and we're making it better all the time.

Now, frankly, I'm a programming book author myself (I've written 3 programming books) and we have tons of programming books on Leanpub -- but I really wish we had a lot more romance and other "genre" books than we currently do. I even went to Brisbane to speak at GenreCon Australia (http://www.genrecon.com.au/) in 2013 to try to jump-start this, but frankly our usability wasn't there yet. We'll get there.

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