Highlights Why am I making slower progress than I’d like on my book? I optimize my Asciidoctor write and preview workflow. I’m working on a side project to track Hacker News performance in real-time. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Write a blog post about lessons from Kickstarter Result: Published My $6k Advance as a Self-Published Technical Author Grade: A I originally set out to write a guide that focused on Kickstarter, but the more I wrote, the less I felt like Kickstarter was the interesting part. I was more excited about crowdfunding as a path for self-published authors, and Kickstarter is just one way of crowdfunding.

I just received $5,947 in advance sales for my first technical book, even though it’s only 25% complete, and I’m self-publishing it. The book is called Refactoring English, and it’s a guide for software developers to improve their writing. In March, I ran a three-week pre-sale for the book on Kickstarter. The pre-sale raised $6,551 from 191 customers. After Kickstarter’s fees, I get $5,946.92, or 91% of the total. Proceeds from my pre-sale on Kickstarter

Suppose you host your podcast on a platform like Libsyn or Podbean. What happens if you decide to switch podcast platforms? You already gave everyone a RSS URL that pointed to your old platform. For example Libsyn gives your podcast an RSS URL like this: https://feeds.libsyn.com/12345/rss When you submitted your podcast to Apple Podcasts and shared your RSS URL with your listeners, you pointed them directly to your podcast platform.

Highlights My book’s pre-sale succeeded (just barely). I wrote a bunch of blog posts, and I was bad at predicting their performance. Now, I need to pick a markup language for writing my book. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Reach my $5k Kickstarter goal for Refactoring English. Result: The Kickstarter reached $6,701 from 196 backers. Grade: A+ The Kickstarter did better than I expected, making a last-minute comeback.

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. I didn’t want to spend a year writing the book only to find out that nobody wants to buy it, so I ran a one-month pre-order sale on Kickstarter. I structured the project so that if I didn’t hit $5k in pre-orders, the project would be canceled, and I’d walk away with nothing.