As promised, today I would like to write a bit about the making of The Hacker's Guide to Python. It has been a very interesting experimentation, and I think it is worth sharing it with you.

The inspiration

All started out at the beginning of August 2013. I was spending my summer, as the rest of the year, hacking on OpenStack.

As years passed, I got more and more deeply involved in the various tools that we either built or contributed to within the OpenStack community. And I somehow got the feeling that my experience with Python, the way we used it inside OpenStack and other applications during these last years was worth sharing. Worth writing something bigger than a few blog posts.

The OpenStack project is doing code reviews, and therefore so did I for almost two years. That inspired a lot of topics, like the definitive guide to method decorators that I wrote at the time I started the hacker's guide. Stumbling upon the same mistakes or misunderstanding over and over is, somehow, inspiring.

I also stumbled upon Nathan Barry's blog and book Authority which were very helpful to get started and some sort of guideline.

All of that brought me enough ideas to start writing a book about Python software development for people already familiar with the language.

The writing

The first thing I started to do is to list all the topics I wanted to write about. The list turned out to have subjects that had no direct interest for a practical guide. For example, on one hand, very few developers know in details how metaclasses work, but on the other hand, I never had to write a metaclass during these last years. That's the kind of subject I decided not to write about, dropped all subjects that I felt were not going to help my reader to be more productive. Even if they could be technically interesting.

Then, I gathered all problems I saw during the code reviews I did during these last two years. Some of them I only recalled in the days following the beginning of that project. But I kept adding them to the table of contents, reorganizing stuff as needed.

After a couple of weeks, I had a pretty good overview of the contents that there I will write about. All I had to do was to fill in the blank (that sounds so simple now).

The entire writing of the took hundred hours spread from August to November, during my spare time. I had to stop all my other side projects for that.

The interviews

While writing the book, I tried to parallelize every thing I could. That included asking people for interviews to be included in the book. I already had a pretty good list of the people I wanted to feature in the book, so I took some time as soon as possible to ask them, and send them detailed questions.

I discovered two categories of interviewees. Some of them were very fast to answer (≤ 1 week), and others were much, much slower. A couple of them even set up Git repositories to answer the questions, because that probably looked like an entire project to them. :-) So I had to not lose sight and kindly ask from time to time if everything was alright, and at some point started to kindly set some deadline.

In the end, the quality of the answers was awesome, and I like to think that was because I picked the right people!

The proof-reading

Once the book was finished, I somehow needed to have people proof-reading it. This was probably the hardest part of this experiment. I needed two different types of reviews: technical reviews, to check that the content was correct and interesting, and language review. That one is even more important since English is not my native language.

Finding technical reviewers seemed easy at first, as I had ton of contacts that I identified as being able to review the book. I started by asking a few people if they would be comfortable reading a simple chapter and giving me feedbacks. I started to do that in September: having the writing and the reviews done in parallel was important to me in order to minimize latency and the book's release delay.

All people I contacted answered positively that they would be interested in doing a technical review of a chapter. So I started to send chapters to them. But in the end, only 20% replied back. And even after that, a large portion stopped reviewing after a couple of chapters.

Don't get me wrong: you can't be mad at people not wanting to spend their spare time in book edition like you do.

However, from the few people that gave their time to review a few chapters, I got tremendous feedback, at all level. That's something that was very important and that helped a lot getting confident. Writing a book alone for months without having anyone taking a look upon your shoulder can make you doubt that you are creating something worth it.

As far as English proof-reading, I went ahead and used ODesk to recruit a professional proof-reader. I looked for people with the right skills: a good English level (being a native English speaker at least), be able to understand what the book was about, and being able to work with correct delays. I had mixed results from the people I hired, but I guess that's normal. The only error I made was not to parallelize those reviews enough, so I probably lost a couple of months on
that.

The toolchain

While writing the book, I did a few breaks to build a toolchain. What I call a toolchain is set of tools used to render the final PDF, EPUB and MOBI files of the guide.

After some research, I decided to settle on AsciiDoc, using the DocBook output, which is then being transformed to LaTeX, and then to PDF, or either to EPUB directly. I rely on Calibre to convert the EPUB file to MOBI. It took me a few hours to do what I wanted, using some magic LaTeX tricks to have a proper render, but it was worth it and I'm particularly happy with the result.

For the cover design, I asked my talented friend Nicolas to do something for me, and he designed the wonderful cover and its little snake!

The publishing

Publishing in an interesting topic people kept asking me about. This is what I had to answer a few dozens of time:

• "Who is your editor?"
• "Me."

I never had any plan for asking an editor to publish this book. Nowadays, asking an editor to publish a book feels to me like asking a major company to publish a CD. It feels awkward.

However, don't get me wrong: there can be a few upsides of having an editor. They will find reviewers and review your book for you. Having the book review handled for you is probably a very good thing, considering how it was hard to me to get that in place. It can be especially important for a technical book.

Also, your book may end up in brick and mortar stores and be part of a collection, both improving visibility. That may improve your book's selling, though the editor and all the intermediaries are going to keep the largest amount of the money anyway.

• "Oh, you will publish it yourself, great. So you will print it and sell it to people?"
• "Not really."

I've heard good stories about people using Gumroad to sell electronic contents, so after looking for competitors in that market, I picked them. I also had the idea to sell the book with Bitcoins, so I settled on Coinbase, because they have a nice API to do that.

Setting up everything was quite straight-forward, especially with Gumroad. It only took me a few hours to do so. Writing the Coinbase application took a few hours too.

• "Oh, you will sell it only as an ebook? That's too bad. You need a paper version. Many people will want a paper version."

My initial plan was to only sell online an electronic version. On the other hand, since I kept hearing that a printed version should exist, I decided to give it a try. I chose to work with Lulu because I knew people using it, and it was pretty simple to set up.

The launch

Once I had everything ready, I built the selling page and connected everything between Mailchimp, Gumroad, Coinbase, Google Analytics, etc.

Writing the launch email was really exciting. I used Mailchimp feature to send the launch mail in several batches, just to have some margin in case of a sudden last minute problem. But everything went fine. Hurrah!

I distributed around 200 copies of the ebook in the first 48 hours, for about $5000. That covered all the cost I had from the writing the book, and even more, so I was already pretty happy with the launch.

Retrospective

In retrospect, something that I didn't do the best way possible is probably to build a solid mailing list of people interested, and to build an important anticipation and incentive to buy the book at launch date. My mailing list counted around 1500 people subscribed because they were interested in the launch of the book subscribed; in the end, probably only 10-15% of them bought the book during the launch, which is probably a bit lower than what I could expect.

But more than a month later, I distributed in total almost 500 copies of the book (including physical units) for more than $10000, so I tend to think that this was a success. I still sell a few copies of the book each weeks, but the number are small compared to the launch.

I sold less than 10 copies of the ebook using Bitcoins, and I admit I'm a bit disappointed and surprised about that.

Physical copies represent 10% of the book distribution. It's probably a lot lower than most people that pushed me to do it thought it would be. But it is still higher of what I thought it would be. So I still would advise to have a paperback version of your book. At least because it's nice to have it
in your library.

I only got positive feedbacks, a few typo notices, and absolutely no refund demand, which I really find amazing.

The good news is also that I've been contacted with a couple of Korean and Chinese editors to get the book translated and published in those countries. If everything goes well, the book should be translated in the upcoming months and be available on these markets in 2015!

If you didn't get a copy, it's still time to do so!