[GMoromisato]

[Self-promotion warning] My blog that nobody read turned into a published book. An editor for a small publishing firm happened to come across my blog and thought that it might be good as a book. He contacted me and after about a year of work (more than I expected) I finished the book and got it published. It's not that popular, but I'm very happy with it.

My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can reach one person and make them laugh, or teach someone something new, or give someone hope when they really needed it, then your writing will be worth it.

[rpunkfu]

Looking forward to post about writing a book nobody reads ;)

[moron4hire]

I have a friend who used to complain about wanting to publish a novel, not being able to finish, blah blah blah. So I made a bet with him that I would self-publish a book before he did. That night, I packed 3 years of blog posts into a PDF and pushed "submit" on Kindle Direct Publishing. It was the kick in the pants he needed to finally finish his manuscript.

[EdwardDiego]

I am now intrigued in your blog, if it's still online?

[GMoromisato]

It was my old astrophotography blog: https://neurohack.com/Astrophotography/index.html

And the book it led to is 101 Amazing Sights of the Night Sky: https://www.amazon.com/101-Amazing-Sights-Night-Sky/dp/15919...

Neither is very popular, but it was a lot of fun.

[tristramb]

It always pleases me to see pictures of NGC 4216, the edge-on spiral galaxy with a star beside its nucleus. I used to use it as a pointer to the short-period contact binary star CC Comae Berenices back when I used observe eclipsing binaries with my Celestron 8.

[GMoromisato]

Nice! I was never much of a visual observer--I never had the patience.

[nivethan]

Picked it up :) The look inside was great, it reminds me of an old astronomy book that I was obsessed with a long time ago.

[GMoromisato]

Awesome! Let me know what you think.

[a_c]

Did not expect to see a book about night sky in this post. The book looks great. I'm getting one for my sons.

[GMoromisato]

Hope they like it! Let me know what they think!

[ablob]

Its probably the Archive if you follow the link

[purplecats]

congrats! fun little story. how much did you make from it?

[GMoromisato]

Not very much. Maybe $10K over 10 years. Do not quit your day job!

But I'm hoping to make $2K from the Anthropic settlement, so I got that going for me.

[DANmode]

What’d they do to you, since you brought it up?

Thanks.

[GMoromisato]

It's from the recent class action settlement. Anthropic used a pirated book database for training and got sued. The settlement awards some amount of money to each book in the database. Mine happened to be included.

And because I love irony, Claude can tell us more: https://claude.ai/share/4ee7f444-e296-48ce-85eb-15d50dbd6c93