How I Self-Published a Technical Book
As I write these lines, I'm a few days away from releasing the last two chapters of my book, "Deep Learning with PyTorch Step-by-Step: A Beginner's Guide". The first two chapters were released ten months ago, in July 2020, and I've been releasing one or two chapters every month since then.
In this post, I will tell you the whole story: how it all started, how I've managed to get this far, which tools and services I used, and how it's been working for me.
Buckle up, because it's one heck of a ride :-)
How It All Started
January 2018: back then, I had already been teaching Machine Learning at a bootcamp in Berlin for two years, and I was thinking about turning one of my classes into an online course. I was pitching my idea to a good friend of mine, and I'll never forget his answer:
- My friend: "OK, cool, I know you, and I know you can produce high-quality content, BUT…"
- Me: "But what?"
- My friend: "WHO are you? Why would anyone buy something from you?"
That was spot on! The market has plenty of content creators, both good and bad, it's really hard to stand out from the crowd. It all boils down to:
Building credibility: people need to know that you know what you're talking about before they even consider handing over their hard-earned money in exchange for whatever product you're offering.
The more straightforward way of building credibility is to produce content of quality and give it away for free. It allows you to reach a much wider audience and, if your audience finds your content valuable, you're on the right path. So, I decided to start writing blog posts, and publishing them on Towards Data Science, without a paywall.
To paywall or to not paywall: different people have different opinions on this but, if you're starting your writing career, I'd advise you against placing your posts behind a paywall. In my opinion, one should aim at building an audience first, and it's easier to do if anyone has free access to your content. That's what I did.
April 2018: on April 5th, 2018, I published my first blog post on Towards Data Science: "Hyper-parameters in Action! Part I —…
