What I did at first is I bought stuff from competitors or similar products. It was easier for me since I considered it market research in my head :) But now of course it's a lot easier to spent the money I've made online on other products. I feel like I give back when I do so. This is all just a story you tell yourself.

Sorry about that, I think I fixed it. My english is not as good as it should indeed. You can see I "translated" valorizing straight from French there...

Great presentation! Some exciting new stuff in Eventmachine.

1. I did everything myself, except reviewing

2. Sorry the old page is gone, it was a very crappy 2 colors page w/ a box in the middle w/ bullet points. My idea was, if I get decent CR on this, I'm guaranteed to sell some. I don't remember the CPC and the bid, but I spent 50$/day for 2 days on just a few keywords (about 10 iirc).

No I'm not worried. I'm just trusting people buying the book like they are trusting me by buying it. I hate penalizing everyone for what some people might do.

Also, it's a pretty small niche and it got good exposure when it came out. I think it would be hard to copy and sell it to the same market again.

Thx a lot! I'm also surprised by the low quality of most products on ClickBank & other sites. That's why I'm talking openly about it, I'm sure most geeks here could do way better then everything on those sites.

In the 'Creating Passionate Users' sense, you made something that helps your audience be awesome - which is the best possible thing to create. Communicating that properly helps, but the product is king.

PS. I'm interested in buying your book now too, because I believe it will personally make me awesome.

The landing page is really sweet. What do your adwords ads look like?

Based on other similar package/eBooks around at that time and the price it cost me to run AdWords for 1 day. The initial market research w/ AdWords can also help choosing a price. According to my tests, I guessed I could sell one book per day w/ ads, which cost ~50$/day. I thought $50 was too much, so cut it back to $40.

Aww yes I need to learn LaTex :/

Yeah unfortunately there's a steep learning curve, but worth it for anything math-related.

Here's a sample chapter laid out with LaTeX: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://betterexplained.com...

The #1 rule is to not use the default styles unless you want your book to look like a master's thesis.

Quick, Someone write an E-book on LaTex ;)

1. I've been interested in language and VMs about 1 year ago, built http://code.macournoyer.com/tinyrb/ and a couple other languages.

2. No, it all started w/ a passion for languages. I had the idea to write a book after reading 4 Hour Work Week

3. What do you want to know exactly? I used the keywords "create programming language" iirc

4. Yes, I think it helped a lot. The only "marketing" I've done is on Twitter and my blog (also recently on my site http://refactormycode.com). I was surprised by the success, but I'm now convinced that OSS can pay in a way or another.

I've heard ppl selling a lot more then I did in a lot less time. Self-publishing is probably less glamourous, but surely more profitable.