Hey everyone! I'm excited to have my book on Product Hunt, especially after I've seen so many other great technical books here (some of them were inspirations for my own writing, too!). Please feel free to leave any questions or comments here, on the book's LeanPub page, or on Twitter. I'd love to talk more about Ansible, self-publishing a book, or whatever you find interesting!
@geerlingguy Hey Jeff - would love to hear more about self-publishing a book :)
How did you go about it? Don't be shy on the details 😉
If you were to do it all again, what would you do the same and differently? + for what reasons?
@bentossell - Happy to oblige! I actually gave a talk on the entire process at the November meetup of the Ansible St. Louis group, so the info is fresh in my mind :)
When I started writing the book, I was still thinking about pitching the book to a few publishers, and I even got in talks with a couple of the major tech publishers. However, after I started publishing a few early editions (just a few chapters and an outline to start!) on LeanPub, the ability to build a relationship with the early readers was so awesome that I tossed aside any notion of publishing through a traditional mechanism.
I had some great early success with book sales, too—I targeted a 90 page book and 200+ readers... and was already past 100 pages and 500 readers in just a couple months of writing! Part of that was due to luck/timing, because Ansible was just passing it's early adopter growth curve, and becoming a mainstream automation tool. My book was one of the earliest available, as other publishers announced books which would not be available for a few months.
Taking that reader feedback, refining the book as Ansible itself matured, and being involved in the Ansible community made the book a huge success! Including Amazon, iBooks, and LeanPub sales since late October, I've sold just over 3,000 copies, which is _far_ beyond what I'd imagined I could sell. I wrote the book entirely in Markdown, tracking it with Git (a private repo) and Dropbox, and I wrote everything in either Byword or Sublime Text.
I wrote a bit more about the publishing process on the Server Check.in blog (there are a few posts there you can look through on sales, on inspiration, the process, etc.), and I'd be happy to answer any other specific questions here!
@geerlingguy Wow such an interesting story! Don't often hear about how it is all done and the work that goes into the publishing side of it.
Thanks for taking the time :)
Seems like a great book, Jeff.
For folks looking for great online Ansible tutorials, https://hackr.io/tutorials/learn... is a great resource. Tutorials here are submitted and voted by the programming community.
Its a good tool to automate the things to deploy application in many servers at a time by using its feature of host inventory where we will mention list of ipaddress of the nodes.
Ansible for DevOps
Makerpad
Ansible for DevOps
Makerpad
Hackr.io
Callr for mobile