A Practical Guide to Web App Success (2011) – now free and CC licensed

by spxdcz • 12 years ago

112 17 12 years ago

gabemart2• 12 years ago

Could you talk a little about the commercial performance of the book, and what led to the decision to release it under CC?

And thanks!

spxdcz6• 12 years ago

Sure! Though I don't actually have much in the way of commercial performance details - it's all split between many quarters of receipts over the last few years, that I'm too lazy to aggregate...

I'd guess that I didn't profit more than a couple of thousand (British) pounds (of both paper and digital sales), after all the publishing costs had been paid for. I think there's still quite a bit of paper stock; I'm still waiting to find out how much is left (though I'm unlikely to try to sell it - I'll probably give them away at conferences, etc).

The parent company that owned the publishing company was acquired by Monotype, and they made the difficult decision to close down the publishing arm as part of the acquisition. The contracts with all the authors were nullified, and all rights returned. As the book was a few years old, and some of it out of date, I figured the best thing to do with it - especially as I'm 100% focused on my startup, and it was never going to make me rich - was to "give it away" to see if it could have any extra life.

It's about 80,000 words and I wrote it over the course of a full year (of traveling; I was also doing some consultancy, so it wasn't full time). So I'd rather that effort was 'available' for other people to possibly use.

gabemart2• 12 years ago

Thanks very much!

vineet• 12 years ago

Hmmm... wondering if it will be a good idea to put the book on a wiki so that the community can update it and improve it.

boothead2• 12 years ago

You might as well put a "buy the dead tree version" link on the site - it's a potentially useful resource for start ups to buy and put on the shelf, and it might make you a few extra quid?

What are you working on now?

notastartup• 12 years ago

Any particular chapters that contains the really important lessons?

spxdcz6• 12 years ago

Surprisingly, at least to me, I think the chapters on marketing are some of the more interesting ones for the HN audience, and have aged pretty well.

It's quite a high level book, so doesn't go into anything in TOO much detail, but instead is supposed to give an entrepreneur - even non-technical - a good understanding of most aspects of building a web app (or at least, what that consisted of a few years ago).

The dev chapters probably won't hold much interest to HN visitors (as they'll know much of the advice), but the marketing ones, maybe some of the design ones, might have some new insights if you've been focusing mostly on tech in your day to day work.

spxdcz6• 12 years ago

Also, I forgot to mention, the last chapter - the marketing case study - is an interview with everyone's favorite HN user, patio11 !

seriocomic• 12 years ago

Given the breadth of information covered, I think you did a remarkable job on providing one of the better, succinct and balanced introductions on the Search Engine Optimization chapter (#23). If I could make one suggestion - your alternate text attribute markup for the images is non-descriptive at best.

sandywilkinscr• 12 years ago

Does the CC license allow me to update and sell it? The license itself isn't clear on this.

spxdcz6• 12 years ago

Yes, you certainly can do that. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

You may adapt it for any purpose, including commercially. The only terms are that you need to credit the original source (the website will do) and indicate if any changes were made. There are no other restrictions. Have at it!

quadrangle• 12 years ago

The CC-BY license used is clear on this. It most definitely permits both updating and selling. Cheers

atmosx• 12 years ago

I read a couple of paragraphs and I liked it. Will read it, even if it's not up-to-date :-) Thanks.

chintan39• 12 years ago

I have just started reading it.And I am excited to read it all. Thank you @spxdcz / Don Zambonini

A Practical Guide to Web App Success (2011) – now free and CC licensed

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