How I Self-Published a Technical Book

Daniel Godoy
9 min readMay 17, 2021
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

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…

--

--

Daniel Godoy

Data Scientist, developer, teacher and writer. Author of "Deep Learning with PyTorch Step-by-Step: A Beginner’s Guide" https://pytorchstepbystep.com