[dmd149]

I self-published a book about becoming a solo 1099 federal sub-contractor.

It's about 60,000 words, full of typos, has a boring cover, and is on an ugly looking shopify site. Oh, and it costs $100.

BUT, I knew if I waited to catch all the typos, add in additional material that would be useful but not necessary, and build a beautiful website, it would never launch.

So I published it and just mentioned on the website that you shouldn't buy it for all the reasons I listed above and described exactly what was in it.

I've only sold about 50, but the feedback is good and already people are implementing the strategies and techniques in the book with successful results.

If you have something of value to offer, it's also easy to forget that someone else is potentially NOT getting that value now if you decide to perfect it and keep procrastinating on launching it.

The "About the book" page is below in case you want to see how I described the book and all its flaws:

https://1099fedhub.com/pages/whats-in-the-book

[Gordonjcp]

I think people would prefer to watch the 1:45 Youtube video that shows in wobbly greenish mobile phone video exactly which bolt you need to remove to get the thing apart and how, than a slick 10:07 video shot in 4k with lots of "don't forget to like share and subscribe" that only mentions it for about a second.

Your book sounds kind of like that.

[dmd149]

Yea I've learned when people have a specific problem they want the solution now and appreciate when they don't have to dig to find it.

[toomanyrichies]

Thanks for your post! I’m also starting the self-publishing journey this year. Trying to keep in mind the old Reid Hoffman quote, “ If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”

I love that you’re a) charging a premium ($100 for a beta version), and b) explicitly calling out all the shortcomings you foresee so prominently on your “About” page. That combination of transparency and chutzpah is inspiring.

[dmd149]

Thanks for the kind words!

I’m a bit allergic to marketing that tries to cover up weaknesses and I feel much better just telling the truth. Then people can make their own decision.

As far as the price I agree it is premium but with such a niche audience and focused value proposition I thought it was worth it.

It is a barrier for some though but no one who was initially worried about the price and then bought it regretted it.

What’s the topic of your book?

[toomanyrichies]

> As far as the price I agree it is premium but with such a niche audience and focused value proposition I thought it was worth it.

I hope my comment didn't sound like a back-handed compliment. I genuinely think you're making the right move charging a premium. I read a lot of posts from Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN), and he's always urging folks to charge more. It feels like very few people take his advice, so props to you for doing so!

> I’m a bit allergic to marketing that tries to cover up weaknesses

100% agree. I'm actually planning on releasing my full book in blog form on my site, a bit like Michael Hartl's "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" [1], so people can judge for themselves whether it's worthwhile to pay for premium features like a PDF copy or video screencasts.

> What’s the topic of your book?

The plan is to do a soup-to-nuts walk through of popular, lynchpin open-source codebases. I'll take newbie developers from "this codebase is too intimidating, only 10x engineers would grok it" to "oh, that's all there was to it?". I'm a software engineer from a non-traditional / bootcamp background, and I want to help people who are suffering from impostor syndrome to feel like they too can become 10x engineers. I'm starting with a Ruby version manager called RBENV and progressing toward open-source codebases from unicorns like Gitlab, and eventually even the Ruby codebase itself.

I've already walked through the entire RBENV codebase on my own, and written 500+ rough pages in a Google doc (over 100k words that I wrote during COVID lockdown). I'm slowly but surely editing it into something that I can show people, but my immediate issue is that a) I don't know anything about the skillset of launching a product, and b) I feel like I only have one shot at a launch, and if my thoughts and words are disjointed, people will write off not only my idea but also me as an engineer and teacher / mentor, and I won't get a 2nd shot at launching. My head says that's BS, but my heart isn't so sure.

The first launch is always the hardest.

1. https://www.railstutorial.org/

[selecsosi]

I've always appreciated the approach taken by https://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html which has different depths of analysis and scope and gives the user the option of diving into different types of programs. I usually recommend it to friends /colleagues as a foundation when they've had to write networking or other tight performance applications. Evaluating design decisions and process of app evolution is just as important as where a modern piece of software is because it can help provide similar context around getting the product out there now, rather than perfect later.

Also the world is constantly changing so trying to make a perfect product is partially an evaluation of how long your solution will even be relevant or how isolated it is from external change.

[toomanyrichies]

AOSA and POSA both sound right up my alley. Thanks for sharing!

[tonyarkles]

I'm sad that grad school got really busy and I had to drop out from being an editor on POSA, but it was absolutely fantastic to work with so many fantastic developers and get into their heads a bit. I think Tavish might be hanging around HN too.

[ishvanl]

> a soup-to-nuts walk through of popular, lynchpin open-source codebases

This sounds fantastic. I'm a self taught developer in largely the situation you describe and this book sounds like something that would be amazing for someone like me. Please post it on HN when it's presentable!

[toomanyrichies]

I will, thanks for the positive feedback!

[dmd149]

Ambitious and cool project! Over my head as I’m not a coder but I think one bullet you should emphasize is the impostor syndrome part. I think that would resonate strongly.

You might like Rob fitzpatrick’s write useful books:

http://writeusefulbooks.com/

He takes a very product development focused approach to book writing (he wrote the mom test book) and discusses how to find beta readers and such.

Best of luck!

[toomanyrichies]

Hahaha I'm already half-way through "Write Useful Books", and "The Mom Test" is one of my favorites. Great minds think alike.

> Best of luck!

Thanks, same to you.

[herbertl]

This is so cool, thank you for sharing! Do your readers mostly find your book through search?

[dmd149]

Some do! But the more typical route is people find me through a few articles I wrote for another website (job boards for folks with security clearances).

I tried Google ads but the terms I wanted to use had such low volume that I literally got 0 traffic from those.

[herbertl]

Excellent, thanks for sharing!