Over the weekend, I gave my “How to (not) Get Rich Writing Books” presentation at the 2013 Pittsburgh TechFest. I’ve posted my slides at SpeakerDeck, with my presentation notes. My notes are essentially my verbatim script, which I first write out, then memorize, and then try to forget sufficiently to make the actual presentation feel more natural.
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I’ve been catching up with watching, or listening to, presentations and speeches that I’ve bookmarked over the past year. (It ends up being a “two birds with one stone” situation, as I watch/listen to them as I exercise. I’m also exercising to MIT’s “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming” course at iTunes U, but who doesn’t?) One such speech that I just listened to was “Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll” by James Burke.
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When it comes to running a business, a lot of the discussion and effort goes towards getting new clients. Getting new clients is important, of course, especially when you’re just getting started, but I believe that many business and people don’t focus enough on the clients they already have. As happy as you are when you get a new project and client, how long is it before your eyes start to wander to that next possible job? This is natural, and certainly I’ve been guilty of it myself. But I would argue that you should put at least as much thought and effort into treating your current clients right as you put into getting new clients. Let’s look at the why’s and how’s…
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To be as frank and clear as I can, if you’re interesting in self-publishing at all, you must buy the book “APE: How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch”. No, I have not read every book on self-publishing that exists, but I doubt there are any as good and as thorough as APE, let alone better.
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My first book, PHP for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide, came out about 12 years ago now (it covered both PHP 3 and 4!). In the dozen years since then, I’ve written 22 more books (including revisions), with three different publishers. About 2-3 years ago, I first started thinking about self-publishing a book, and as of Fall 2012, am finally doing so with The Yii Book. I occasionally get asked, probably by people that also want to self-publish, about the tools I’m using for writing and self-publishing this book: technically speaking, how am I doing it? The introduction to the book does discuss this, but as not everyone has purchased the book, I thought I’d write up my process.
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