The Leanpub Blog

Leanpub's Print-Ready PDF and InDesign Export features are now free

2013-03-05T19:00:00-08:00

Recently, we decided to give away both our Print-Ready PDF and InDesign Export features for free.

This decision was about us being more ambitious, not less ambitious.

Here’s the logic of the decision:

We want to be 100% aligned with our authors’ interests.

So, this means making Leanpub be the best way in the world to…

a) write a book

b) publish and sell an in-progress ebook

c) publish and sell a completed ebook (non-exclusively, since all completed ebooks should also be on Amazon and Apple)

d) market a book through features like bundles, affiliates, etc

e) get reliable feedback about the viability of an unpublished book idea

We want the above to be true for both self-published authors and for publishers.

I think we have made a lot of progress on (a) and (b). I think we’re getting there on (c), and that features like the Team Edition should help. I think we’re getting there on (d), and an affiliate program will help. I think (e) needs improvement, and I have a very specific and ambitious idea about how to fix that. More on that later.

If we can accomplish the above and ensure the world knows, Leanpub will be successful beyond my wildest dreams.

Now, the most straightforward way to ensure that Leanpub is the best way in the world to write, publish and sell a book is to focus our available Leanpub time on making Leanpub the best way in the world to write, publish and sell a book.

Not on stuff like “can we charge authors $49 for this feature?”

Features like Print-Ready PDF and InDesign Export are things we are building because we think they will be valuable to authors and publishers.

Since this is the case, we should just make them all part of what Leanpub is, just like everything else. This way, Leanpub is one thing, which provides lots of value. Not a mishmash of confusing pricing and optional features.

(As a Canadian: compare Apple’s approach selling phones to that of RIM, ahem, BlackBerry. If I have to write an email explaining pricing, I have already lost. This is especially true if it’s more than 3 sentences, and I am incapable of writing 3 sentence emails!)

If we are not charging enough for Leanpub, we can fix that for NEW AUTHORS ONLY in any number of straightforward ways (taking a larger percentage and/or flat fee on every sale, or by just charging a per-book fee either once or yearly). None of those approaches would be so confusing that they would require long emails to explain :)

Now, obviously we would grandfather all existing Leanpub authors forever, of course! And no, we don’t have any of the above ideas planned: I think that we have arrived at a very fair price for what Leanpub offers. We’re more expensive than DIY or Gumroad, but not if you value your time and what Leanpub does. As a result, Leanpub is growing nicely.

So, to make a long post longer:

We want every Leanpub author to be really happy about what Leanpub does for them. We don’t want Leanpub authors to think “is this Leanpub feature worth the amount of money they are asking for”.

So that’s why those features are free now :)

Thanks

Peter

Leanpub Podcast Interview #9: John Hunter

2013-01-22T21:00:00-08:00

John Hunter is the author of the Leanpub book Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability.

John is currently Senior Facilitator at The W. Edwards Deming Institute. His work focuses on management and software development consulting. He blogs about management improvement on his website at http://curiouscat.com/guides/.

John has worked in various capacities at the Office of the Secretary of Defense Quality Management Office, the White House Military Office, and the American Society for Engineering Education

This interview was recorded on January 17, 2013.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml.

Epp: I’m here with John Hunter, who is the author of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability, a book on Leanpub. We’re going to talk today about John’s book, about John’s experiences as an author, and what led John to try Lean Publishing with Leanpub.

So, John, thank you for being on the Lean Publishing podcast!

Hunter: Thank you for having me, I look forward to it.

E: Great. Before we start discussing your book and Lean Publishing, I’d like to find out a little bit more about you and your background. So if you could tell me a little bit about what you do, and whether you’ve published a book before, things like that.

H: OK. I have not published a book before. A really quick view of my background is I’m actually right now, the closest thing you could call it is a sabbatical, it’s not actually a sabbatical, but that’s the closest thing I can come up with. I’m in Joho Bahru Malaysia, and as I sit in my condo, I see Singapore out my window. When I was a little kid, my Dad was teaching in Singapore, and we were living there, and he was teaching on the stuff that I basically now do, which is management improvement, and helping organizations improve their management, improve their results. That’s basically what my career path has been about. Over time I moved into doing technology, largely because I was frustrated with the technology departments I would need to get service from. I found it easier to do the things myself, and then I eventually moved into being in those departments.

E: So have you worked as a consultant then, or were you working within the department itself when you were doing this kind of work?

H: Sort of both. During my career I started out, I was doing it myself, and I was somewhat doing it in a consulting relationship, because I was doing things outside of my official duties, and helping other parts of the organization. Then I went to the Secretary of Defense Quality Management Office, where we would largely help the huge Department of Defense get things done with consultants, and we would do some consulting along those lines.

E: Quite a challenge I imagine, the Defense Department.

H: Yes, it’s huge, it’s enormous, it’s impossible to appreciate. But they did lots of great stuff. They’re huge. Then I went to the White House Military Office for a few years, and then I went to the American Society for Engineering Education. During that time I did a little bit of consulting, and some seminars, and talking. Now on my sabbatical, I’m doing some consulting and some seminars and some writing during this time.

E: It sounds like you’ve had a wide range of experience all around the world. Can you tell me then a little bit about the subject of your book Management Matters and what you’re addressing in it?

H: The book is my look at a system of management. I have a blog that I’ve been publishing for seven or eight years, and one of the troubles I have when I’m trying to write a post is I have all sorts of connections that I want to make, and so I love hypertext, because I can link over to all these things, but my plan was actually to write a specific book on a specific tool or practice. I figured that would be small, a good place to start, it would be targeted, and it would probably be easier to market. But I thought about it and I could never get myself started, and one day I decided I really need this full management view that I can then stick everything else to. So then if I write a second, most likely smaller, targeted book, I can refer to this book for how it fits into the bigger context. So my goal with this is to try to have a book that has management as a system.

E: So you’re ideal reader would be, say, people who are already working as managers and have some training in that field? Or them, and also people who are new to management?

H: This is one of the problems with the marketing of this particular book, compared to my other one. I don’t have a specific answer to that. I think you’re sort of right, but it’s really people who want to improve results. The thing that I’ve found is, software developers have, by far, the most success with the thinking that I have - the thinking that Deming had, with process improvement, with systems thinking - of anyone I’ve worked with. Much better than managers, overall.

The truth is that software developers could very well be a better target audience, in that they’ll be able to pick it up more easily than many managers.

E: On that note, you mentioned Deming, and I know the theories of William Edwards Deming play a big role in your book. Can you tell us something more about him, and why his work is so important to you?

H: I was talking a little earlier about living in Singapore. We also lived for a year in Nigeria. I write the W. Edwards Deming Institute blog, and in the first post I did on that blog, I talked about Deming’s background and what I see as very important, that I think a lot of people miss. That is, that he grew up, he was born in 1900. There’s World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and then post-World War II recovery in Japan. That was a bunch of bad stuff! He also travelled extensively throughout the world, so he was in Asia and other places. As I grew up, I saw first hand that there was a lot of people that were not nearly as rich as pretty much everyone in the United States. What Deming had as his personal vision was to foster prosperity, commerce, and peace. I have that same notion. What is needed for improvement of humanity’s life, is commerce and prosperity.

E: I read a little bit about Deming in preparation for the interview, and I came across a great line that goes something like, ‘Although Deming is something of a hero in Japan, he’s still in some ways obscure in the rest of the world, including the United States’. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about what he achieved in post-war Japan, and what he’s famous for there.

H: That’s a difficult question to summarize quickly. Essentially he went there and helped them understand how to look at the organization as a system. The biggest example of Deming’s ideas is Toyota. Deming’s ideas are not very prescriptive. He has a system of thinking, a system of management, but it’s not prescriptive, like ‘you must do X, Y and Z’.

E: And he was behind a lot of the improvements to manufacturing processes that Toyota is so famous for now?

H: Yeah. What Toyota did was they took his ideas, and they did what Deming wants, which is you take the ideas, you institute them in your organization. Inside your organization, there are specific adaptions and improvements you’ll make that work best for you. So Toyota took the base and then added to it.

E: So, to go back to before I interrupted you, to get a bit more detail about Deming - you were talking about your idea that increasing commerce increases prosperity and the human good. Was this also an idea of Deming’s, that you’ve developed further, or carried on in the tradition of?

H: Yeah. It’s also something that Deming didn’t talk as much about. I mean, Deming had the idea of commerce, prosperity, and peace, but mostly he talked about what we can do for the organization. But I think behind him was this idea, that he saw all these suffering people throughout his whole life, and he saw that what was needed was prosperity. When I was growing up, you had billions of people who don’t have electricity, billions of people who don’t have running water, billions of people who don’t have a secure future. It’s not some minor little thing. And what they need is prosperity, that’s what’s going to make it so that everyone’s doing better. And it’s happened in the last forty years, there’s been a lot of improvement, but there’s still a lot more to go. It’s hard for people in the United States or even in Europe to understand that prosperity is not about having the fourth new car. In most of the world, prosperity is about having, you know, shoes. Those are different ideas.

E: That reminds me of an interesting article in The Economist recently in which they talked about this worry that there’s an end to innovation coming, and they in particular seemed to define innovation as adding new things - you know, there will never be another invention as fundamental as the toilet - and so we’re kind of at the end of progress. But what you’re saying reminds me that this is a very prosperity-centric point of view, because there are a lot of people who don’t have toilets, even though they have been invented.

H: Right, yeah, hundreds of millions!

E: So from their perspective, and to tie it in to what you’re saying, what’s at stake for you in management, and improving management, isn’t only improving the functioning of businesses in order to make more money, but actually fundamentally improving the world, and that that kind of innovation is something that we’re still, in the dark on, and need to improve dramatically.

H: Yeah. One of the things that I really like, and my father was involved in, is appropriate technology. I’m talking about technology that really works where it’s needed, which is very similar to the whole ‘lean’ way of thinking. You know, you don’t need some big, complex solution, you can find the simplest solution that works and is reliable. And so I continue to do work there.

Another way that this ties is, a lot of people think of Deming as sort of a statistician, which he was: his management system uses statistics. But that is far from the core piece, or the central peice; it’s one piece. A huge portion of Deming’s management system is what he called understanding psychology, and it relates to psychology, but it really relates to managing human systems. In the lean thinking world, they essentially call this respect for people, which I think has more power than just saying psychology. Deming would also talk about joy in work -

E: Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I was interested in your book, where you write about the importance of respecting people in the workplace as good strategy.

H: So, if you look at the bigger picture, of what Deming is trying to do, I think there’s a lot of what I was talking about, increasing prosperity. Another piece of it is, in the United States, we’re extremely prosperous, but people were by and large miserable in their jobs. To some extent that’s still true. Respect for people is about the idea that our focus needs to change to having people enjoy their lives. And, this will benefit all of us who have our lives to live, but it also benefits the organization.

It’s very easy for knowledge workers to think this way. So in the software development workforce, or in the medical workforce, or in the engineering workforce, the workers demand it. If you try to treat your Ruby developers poorly, they’ll leave, there’s no question. So, in large part, you give them foosball tables, and you let them bring their dogs to work, and you let them do whatever they want. I think most of the managers that allow that to happen are not necessarily doing it because they believe in the intrinsic goodness of treating people well. They do it because they can’t figure out how not to do it. But, there is the segment of people who manage knowledge workers well, who understand that this is how you get the best work.

One of the things that I’ll do on my blog is I’ll put a post where I can draw links to more detail on a bunch of things that I say, but there’s a lot of work on it. Dan Pink is very popular right now, and he talks about it. Clayton Christenson is very popular.

E: Can you tell me a little bit more about your blog, the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog? I seem to remember you started that, you had your first website in 1995, and your blog has been going for almost ten years now?

H: Yeah, the website was 1995, and then I started the blog in 2004. The blog is on my ideas on management, and it was what formed the basis for the book. One of the nice things I was able to do was import my blog into Leanpub as the start of the book. So what I was able to do was take all the blog posts into the book, and then, there are a bunch that don’t really relate, that are sort of off-the-cuff comments. So I got rid of those, and organized it into something that makes sense for a book. So that formed probably the basis for fifty or sixty percent of the book, that then I had to build on. So the blog is about largely the same thing as the book.

E: Did you find that going through that process focused your mind on your work at a higher level, when you had to curate your posts and see, you know, what have I actually been writing about?

H: The reason I wanted to do it, and the thing that it did require, was that focus on the system, of how everything ties together. So I would do that a lot, and I use far more hyperlinks than almost anyone I know, because I’m trying to link all these things together. But I knew that in writing the book, that’s the focus, is how these things all link together. Curating that and making that work, and then writing all the pieces - there are big sections that I’ve thought about writing for the last several years, but I just can’t get my head around for a blog post. So then I had to do that stuff, which is generally harder and more complex, and write that. So yeah, that made you focus and think about it more.

E: Before we go on, I’d like to - obviously I’d like to talk about this more, maybe in the second half of the podcast, about using Leanpub, what brought you to it and what worked for you, and what didn’t - but I do have one question I’m very interested in asking you about. In your book you talk about how executive pay is a big problem today, and I know you’ve been asked about this in another podcast recently, but I would like to know what solution you propose to the problem of executive pay that’s too high. Do you think shareholder activists will take care of it? Or should there be explicit regulation?

H: Well, my solution is not an answer separated from all the other factors in the system. So, I think, if we say, take the broken system that we have, and all of these broken pieces, and what can we do to make that work, what band-aid can we put on there and have it stick? I don’t think any band-aid is going to be particularly effective, and any band-aid, given all the other factors, will cause huge problems. It is a solution that requires mane more underlying things, but, I think my solutions would be, yeah, probably have some regulation around the deductibility of bonuses.

But I think a bunch of it would come down to more moral and ethical pressure on organizations so that it’s just not tolerated. I mean, one of the things I find frustrating, is these people who choose these policies that are not - this high pay is one thing, but they also do things like risk the future of the company in order to get high bonuses, and then when it fails, thousands of people lose their jobs. When that happens, that person still has forty million dollars sitting in the bank. They give two million to Stanford or some other school, and then that school gives them publicity, and puts their name on a building or whatever. The school that I went to, Davidson College in North Carolina, has an honour code, and those kinds of things would just not be tolerated. You can’t, you know, make a huge amount of money from unethical behaviour, and then buy your way onto boards and buy your way into country clubs, and buy your way onto, you know, the opera board. People should not accept unethical behaviour by rewarding it with all sorts of accolades outside -

E: I think I see more clearly what you were saying before, that it’s a society that’s rewarding this kind of behaviour that is part of the problem, and so merely changing some laws around, or rules around particular organizations won’t change that underlying factor.

H: Yeah. One of the hopes I have on how things will change is if other countries can withstand the pressure that US and US business schools are putting on moving in this direction which I think is wrong, because they don’t ridiculously overpay their executives. They still pay them a lot of money, but the top twenty executives at Toyota, together, don’t make what senior vice presidents at the large US firms -

E: Including options?

H: Yes, including options and everything, because they don’t really give that many options.

E: Is the golden parachute, do you think that’s largely an American phenomenon as well? And perhaps British?

H: Basically, what’s happened is, a lot of these things are American. The thing is that in 1980, executives were paid a ton of money, and there were plenty of people who were complaining. People like Drucker, at least a little bit before 1980, said look, the executives deserve a lot of money, they have hard jobs, they do things, they make a difference, they should be paid a lot of money. But as the abuses got so ridiculous, Drucker said, this has to stop, it’s bad. It got to the point where Drucker said this is unethical. I can’t remember if he said it’s immoral, but he came pretty close -

E: So we’re talking about Peter Drucker, the famous management guru?

H: Yeah, and it wasn’t that he’s against paying a fair wage, he supported it when it was reasonable. It got to be so bad. But we’ve gone ten or twenty times beyond THAT! Beyond what was already not just bad, you know, management - unethical. And it’s not just that they’re taking money that belongs to someone else, it’s that they subvert the organization in order to have this happen. They take huge risks that everyone else must pay for, and if it doesn’t work out, well fine, they still walk away with a huge amount of money. And if it does work out, well then they say, I deserve this huge amount of money, because I was successful.

One of the big pieces that I have is that, you have to build up the capacity in the organization for critical thinking. And part of my idea, the reason I’ve come in the last five or six years to building enterprise capability as the key, is, it isn’t about what we can do in one day. It’s about what we do over the long term. And so when I’m looking at how we need to improve today, I’m not just paying attention to, this one project is going to solve this problem and be very effective; I’m looking at the way that I can solve this problem. I can build this organization’s understanding of critical thinking, I can build an understanding of variation, I can build an understanding that the results are not the only thing that matters. Results matter, but results matter within a context.

E: And do you see any movement towards these kinds of ideas in management schools, or management programs, in the United States?

H: I haven’t paid much attention to management schools. But they weren’t very good before. I don’t think they’ve got tremendously better. There are tons of professors who have great ideas, but the focus ends up being on, essentially, financial management, and working with spreadsheets, and the rest of it is not given much focus.

E: I see, so getting people away from the spreadsheet is part of your idea.

H: Yes.

E: What else do you think people should be focusing on?

H: Well, with the spreadsheet, it would be twofold. One, yeah, getting them away from it, but two, having them actually understand data, instead of being able to be fooled by people that can manipulate data. Building this capacity for critical thinking, building the ability to understand what is actually a cause and what is just correlated to good results. That’s one of the big keys. So in Deming it was understanding variation, which is important - understanding that results vary, and humans, this goes to psychology things from Deming, humans happen to think that there’s a lot less variation than there is in the world, and humans happen to have brains that were evolved for pattern-matching. So we’re very good at seeing patterns. We think that there’s less variation. Our brains can see patterns, so we can find variation that exists in the data, and we can then tie that to some cause that we believe is there. So our brains can create this pattern. And what we do is we believe all sorts of things that just are not true because we don’t understand how to accurately interpret the data.

E: So if you were brought into a corporation, say, and you were given an - let’s say you had your own office or budget in order to try and make this a reality within that organization, how would you go about doing it? Would you set up courses internally for employees, would you try and change the way they fundamentally interact with data?

H: I’m a bit different in my style of change from most people. I talk about some things in the book, but, my basic idea is, building the capability in the organization. So it isn’t mainly about what’s the role I would play or anything else, but what do we have today, where can I see to build things? So, do we have a good, a somewhat good understanding of data, and I can build on that to make things stronger? Do we have a culture that totally disrespects the employees and we need to change that before we can move forward? So basically what I would do is I would look at the organization I have specific things where I talk about all the details. You need it to be things that people will notice, and also at the very beginning, I’d pick things that I believe I can win on.

You need to build some trust that this stuff works, before you can keep growing, and especially do some of the things that don’t have as direct ties that you can see. So, I would take the projects, I would take the things that people really care about, I would take the opportunities, and it might be that it’s training these people on design of experiments, and having us do some design of experiments, and make that a focus for a while. One of the things I talk about is to have some focus with your initial efforts. So there’s lots of things you can do, depending on the organization. Pick five or six things, and really get to be really good at those five or six things, and then keep adding in a few more pieces over time.

E: Before we move on to the second part of the interview, I do have one final question: you mentioned experiments. I think that for people who are familiar with Steve Blank and lean philosophy and things like that, the idea of running experiments within an enterprise might be familiar, but it might not be to everybody. Can you give me an example of what you mean by doing experiments in that context?

H: Yeah, one of the things is, I believe that most of these good ideas have been talked about for a long time, by people like Deming, and Ackoff, and others. The basic core idea is you pilot an improvement, or you pilot a change in a small scale, you get results, you see how it worked, and then you expand. And a neat way that that’s been talked about recently, especially with all the software people, is minimum viable product, and fail quickly. It’s wonderful, and it’s sort of like what Toyota did with Deming’s ideas, in my opinion. It’s taking the basic core idea, which was been around for a long time, and giving some really nice implementation to it that adds that value.

E: So an example might be, we want to improve the quality of our dashboards, or something like that, and so let’s actually implement a change, clearly, in one place, and then actually set targets, and watch to see what the results are, to see if our idea actually worked. Is that an example of what you mean by experimenting?

H: Yes, although, I believe that a big huge strength with agile software development is, get working software in place quickly. I totally, completely support that idea. The quibble that I have with where a lot of this stuff ends up going, is, people try to make it too measurable. And sometimes it is. It’s very easy for companies like Google and Amazon to make things measureable because they have millions of users; you can see what goes on. When you have a lot smaller organizations, there’s huge amounts of variation, and if you’re totally focused on the data, numerical data and that’s the only way you’re going to judge things, I think that can cause problems. But the basic core idea I totally agree with: get a working model in place, have people actually using it, have people tell you what they miss. It’s like, this is great, except it kills me that this one feature is missing, and if fifty people say that, it’s like, ok, we better build that one next feature.

E: I think that’s a great transition to the second part of this interview, where we’re going to carry out that process. I was wondering if we could talk a bit about what it’s been like for you using Leanpub as an author, and indeed a first-time book author. What do you really like about Leanpub, and what could we do to improve it?

H: I had no interest in the traditional publishing method, for several reasons. One, my personality is one where it’s very difficult for me to finalize and ship something off. One of the reasons I like this continual improvement idea, which is a central idea for Deming, is it fits with my personality. I think things should always be continuously improved. My entry into the technology world was essentially with web-based apps, even if they were internal to the organization, so they were on an intranet.You know, basically web technologies, where you didn’t have this release thing of sending out a disk. It’s like, now we’ve locked our software in place! So I’ve never had to have this idea that, ok I’m done, print it. So I didn’t want it for that reason.

Also, I’m a first-time author, I don’t know anyone would want to publish me, but I know plenty of very successful business and management- improvement-type authors, and the troubles they get from their publishers, it’s ridiculous. The lead time that it takes to get stuff done. So I had no interest in that. For an ebook, I looked around, and like I said, for a couple years I was throwing the ideas around in my head and trying to see where to go, and I would look at what options there were, and I found Leanpub and I liked it. I had looked at some other ones, but one of the things that I really liked about it was not specific features or specific anything, it was, they used ‘lean’ in the name, but they also had lean thinking behind what they were talking about. So I saw that they have a mentality that matches my mentality. And I think it’s an effective and good way to manage. I want to be associated with organizations that are like that.

E: That’s very interesting - so the ability to continuously deploy your book, both fits with your needs, which is to get your work out there, without having to go through the titanic struggles that authors sometimes engage with with publishers, but it also suits your personality, perhaps in another way, in that it encourages you to overcome that struggle within yourself at the same time. So there’s a kind of attitude that’s reflected in the ability and the encouragement of just getting your book out there.

H: I didn’t really get the second point, but the first point I totally agree with. And the idea of being able to publish early and often was definitely part of what I liked. So with Leanpub there is the idea of publishing before you’re finished. And I really like that idea. Give people a chance to try it out and see what they like, and then keep going. And I knew when I was contemplating this idea that I wanted to continuously update it forever, but I didn’t know exactly what form that would take. It’s very easy, the way Leanpub does it is very easy for me. I don’t have to deal with anything, essentially.

E: When you first clicked the ‘Publish’ button, how finished was your book in your mind? Were all the chapters there, was there more improvement that you wanted to do?

H: I did have all the chapters, but several of them were pretty sketchy. And there’s still a piece that I’m not totally sure about. I have a couple things where I don’t know where to fit them. And so, I still have those things sitting out there. But yeah, I had maybe sixty percent done, or something like that. And I decided - it’s artificial in a sense, I don’t have to push a ‘Print’ button or anything - I’ve decided that now it’s release-ready, although it definitely isn’t something I could print. I still have four or five places where I say ‘To Do’.

E: That’s great, we’ve seen authors using Leanpub for that, and personally I really like the straightforwardness of that. And as a reader, that would draw me in, an author being that straightforward, that this is something left to do, and don’t worry, you’ll get it when it’s done.

A very specific technical question: Leanpub books are written in Markdown, and I was wondering if you’d ever used Markdown before you came to Leanpub?

H: No, I had not. But it was really quick to pick up, and I like it. That goes to my philosophy versus personality. My philosophy is very much with the agile software development: keep it simple. If you have to cut features, fine. And I like that. But my mentality is also, I want it to be exactly how I want it to be. So I get frustrated with - it isn’t so much true today, but like ten years ago you would use a word processing program, and it wouldn’t do what you wanted it to do, and you couldn’t go in and see the code and just make a little change very easily. Or if you’re using a visual HTML editor. I would just go in to the HTML itself and make it do exactly what I wanted.

With Markdown, the biggest limitation I’ve had, and it’s not huge, but it’s the only thing that really caused me any frustration, is there are places where I would like to be able to be more specific about what it does exactly, and it’s like Markdown just isn’t specific enough to do that right now.

E: Can you give me an example of that?

H: Well, this isn’t a perfect example, because it’s dependent on other variables, but you can put in a link to another part in the book, and the way that that gets done currently in Leanpub for a PDF-generated document, it puts it below the title. So if you link to the section on PDSA cycle, it puts it below the PDSA cycle, so all you see is text.

E: Right, instead of also seeing the title of the section. Actually that’s something that’s been on our backlog for quite some time, so this is definitely a big vote in favour of getting to making that fix, so thanks for that.

H: That’s one I can remember, but there were a couple things. Oh, putting in white space was another that I was having difficulty with, and I’ve come up with some things that seem to work most of the time. I think what I do is fake like I’m going to have a block text, but it’s blank, and that’ll throw in some white space.

E: Right, I see, that’s clever! Another little Markdown trick we’ve seen people use is an empty table.

H: Oh, ok, yeah.

E: So you just put two pipes with nothing in between them, and then you’ll actually get a blank line. Thanks for that, that’s one of the limitations in Markdown that we’ve had people ask about from time to time. For us, it’s always a difficult thing, because in a way we want to have some limits on features out of principle. We don’t want authors to be spending too much time worrying about formatting. In other words we don’t want to invent - you know when you were describing earlier, the sort of troubles one can have working with these complex text editors. I’m sympathetic, I’ve spent a lot of time shouting at my computer when I’m using Word. We’re totally open to adding features, but for us it’s a philosophical thing when we do it, because that means it’s something we deem more important than spending that time thinking about your writing - that piece of formatting.

I was wondering, if you think back to when you were actually importing your blog on Leanpub, did that work well for you, or were there any weaknesses or things we could improve, in that part of the process?

H: I forget totally, I think it worked very well, but I can’t remember whether there were some things that I had to manually deal with or not.

E: Well that’s good, because if it had been too bad, I’m sure you would have remembered somthing!

H: Actually I remember there was something, it had trouble with if you had a ‘More’ tag - I remember a bunch of my posts ended up being clipped, and I think it might have been where I had a ‘More’, so that it sort of separated the post into what would be displayed and what would be the total post, but I can’t remember if that was it or not.

E: You may have, because that’s a known limitation that we have with importing. Because of people like you telling us about this, we’ve added some wording to that import page, where we explain that, if you’re blog has settings with ‘More’ or ‘Read More’ links, it means that it’s only showing our importer partial posts. The solution to that is unfortunately not something we can really do on our end, but we are trying to make that part the process a bit more transparent.

H: For me it didn’t matter, because I was drastically editing everything, so it was simple for me when I ran into those to just pull in text.

E: I wanted to ask you about our variable pricing feature, the sliders on our purchase page. Have you been experimenting with your minimum and suggested prices?

H: I have not been experimenting, but I’ve been using. I like it, I think it’s a cool idea, and so I use it. I have it set right now for five dollars as a minimum price someone can pay, and fifteen dollars for the suggested price. People pick prices all the way around. For me, I would much rather have people reading my book. The pricing matters much less to me than that. Now at the same time, I think if it’s just totally free… basically I want people reading my book. Getting my book or downloading my book I don’t care about, I care if they read it. If I could, if there were a thousand people in Nigeria that said they wanted the book and didn’t have any money to pay me, I’d be perfectly happy to have them get the book. But if I had a bunch of people get it that don’t read it, I’m not interested in that.

E: On that topic, is there anything that Leanpub could do to help you market your book more, or spread the message about your book in a better way?

H: Probably, but I just don’t know. My opinion of myself on management and process improvement is very high, my opinion of myself on marketing is very low. I don’t even know what are the foolish things that I don’t do! So my guess is that there’s probably stuff that would be useful, but I don’t even know what many of those things probably are.

E: Our approach towards that is we’d like to ask everybody if there’s anything we can do to help them so we understand the challenges better, but it’s mostly, start a blog, which obviously you’ve had for a long time now, and tweet about it. If one’s doing those two things - oh and using coupons, to send out free or discounted copies of books to potential reviewers and potentially influential readers. Have you been using coupons for your book?

H: Yeah, and I like that. I’ve used it for friends, to give them the opportunity to get the book, and also, like you say, for people who might review the book, or people I know who have blogs on the topic who might be interested and might review the book. So yeah, I’ve been doing that.

E: Just before we sign off on the interview, I was wondering if there’s any final thing you’d like to take the opportunity to say, either about the subject in your book, or about Leanpub?

H: There should be, but I can’t really think of anything off the top of my head!

E: OK, well that’s about it for me then! John, thank you very much for being on the Lean Publishing podcast, and for being a Leanpub author.

H: Great, thanks a lot.

Leanpub Status Tumblr

2012-12-22T20:00:00-08:00

We’ve had some hiccups over the past couple of days with book previews and publishes, as well as new user and book creation.

This is related to some issues with our code that interacts with Dropbox. We’re not as resilient as we should be.

Furthermore, we don’t have any kind of status page indicating what the current state of Leanpub is.

Well, now we do: Leanpub System Status

It’s on Tumblr. We’ll keep it updated.

Currently this will be manual, but we’ll end up also providing automatic updates of the health of Leanpub services in future.

Long Overdue: Welcome Len Epp to Leanpub!

2012-12-17T20:00:00-08:00

If you’re a Leanpub author, chances are you already know who Len Epp is: he’s the helpful person making videos explaining how to use Leanpub, helping authors on the Google Group or the mailing list, etc.

Len has been working throughout 2012 on Leanpub. As Leanpub is growing, we’ve decided to make it official: Len is now a full-time Leanpub employee (Employee #2, after Ken).

Len’s official title is Head of Customer Development, which means that besides doing all the stuff he does to ensure that our authors are happy and productive, he’ll also be doing lots of work in the months ahead building out our new Leanpub for Publishers program! More on that soon…

So, welcome Len officially to Leanpub! We’d say make yourself at home, but you already have :)

Leanpub Royalties & The Startup Chef Charity Book

2012-12-10T18:00:00-08:00

Recently, Hunter Walk from YouTube and Maya Baratz from ABC News launched a co-authored book on Leanpub called The Startup Chef. The book is comprised of 75 favorite recipes from leading entrepreneurs, investors, writers and other members of the startup/tech community. Proceeds from the book’s sale will go to charities devoted to feeding the hungry, including people affected by Hurricane Sandy. (The two charities are Save Our Strength and the Rockaway Plate Lunch Truck.)

Some people have been (naturally enough) curious about the exact numbers, so here’s a brief explanation:

Leanpub’s Standard Royalty Rates

At Leanpub, we’re committed to paying authors really high royalties. Our royalty rate is 90% minus 50 cents per sale, which is, to say the least, very competitive. (The 50 cents is to cover a portion of transaction costs; the rest of the transaction costs are paid from our portion of the sale).

Another way we have of maximizing author royalties is our variable pricing model, reflected in the cool pricing sliders you’ll see on every Leanpub book’s purchase page. Simply put, the variable pricing model lets customers pay what they want for a book. The author sets a minimum price (which can be as low as zero) and a suggested price, and then the customer chooses what to pay by dragging the slider up or down. Here’s a screenshot showing what that looks like:

So in this example, if someone were to pay $20.00 for Brian Marick’s book, Brian would receive $17.50.

You probably noticed there are two sliders there: one on top for how much you’re going to pay, and one on the bottom for how much the author is going to earn. One thing we’ve found is that customers often use the bottom slider to set the price, which means they’re more interested in figuring out how much they want the author to get, than they are in the overall price they’ll be paying. This, of course, only works because our royalty rates are so high that customers can basically ignore the difference between what they’re paying and what the author is getting.

The Startup Chef Charity Royalty Rates

Now, since The Startup Chef cookbook is a charity project, we do not want any profits from it. This means we’re just subtracting the transactions costs (which go to PayPal, not us!) from each sale, and passing on everything else to the charities.

That means the ‘royalty’ from each sale is 97.01% minus 30 cents (because the transaction fees are 2.99% of the price plus 30 cents). That means that if you pay $20.00 for The Startup Chef, the charities receive $19.10 (alternatively, if you pay $10.00, for example, the charities get $9.40).

Here’s a screenshot of what that looks like:

Since any donation you make will inevitably have some kind of transaction costs associated with it, this is pretty much like giving to the charities directly - only in this case you (or someone you’re giving the book to as a gift) get a bunch of cool recipes to try!

7 Reasons We Helped With The Startup Chef Charity Cookbook

2012-12-07T20:00:00-08:00

Today, we published https://leanpub.com/startupchef, edited by Hunter Walk of YouTube and Maya Baratz of ABC News. The book is made up of 75 recipes from members of the tech community, including engineers, entrepreneurs, and writers, with proceeds going to charities aimed at ending hunger (including families affected by Hurricane Sandy).

Here are seven reasons we were excited to help Hunter and Maya with this fantastic project:

We think the charities are doing great things, and we can ensure a really high percentage of the sales goes to them: At Leanpub we’re genuinely committed to paying authors and organizations great royalties. Normally our royalty is 90% minus 50 cents per sale (so an author gets a royalty of $17.50 on a $20.00 sale). While that’s already a great rate by industry standards, for this project we went even better, subtracting only PayPal’s transaction fees. That translates into a 97.01% royalty minus 50 cents per sale, which means the charities get $19.10 on a $20.00 sale. That’s a higher proportion of revenue than charities generally get from efforts of this kind. Quick production plus global distribution at almost no cost means Leanpub is an efficient platform for supporting these charities through an ebook project, especially since any online donation will have transaction costs subtracted from it anyway.
Easy collaboration and incorporation of multiple contributions: Using a Google Docs spreadsheet, we were able to incorporate recipes, bios, stories about the recipes and images from dozens of authors quickly and easily. Combined with our plain text (Markdown-formatted) + Dropbox workflow, this meant we could put the content together, create ebook previews, add new stuff and iterate quickly, producing edits easily.
Streamlined ebook production: Our commitment to simplifying the ebook process means we take formatting largely out of the writer’s hands, so they can focus on writing, not layout. This means that using Leanpub you can produce a large 250-plus page book quickly - which is essential if you’re responding to or covering a current issue, like a disaster such as Sandy.
In-progress ebook publishing works: Hunter and Maya sent out lots of invitations to members of the tech community and knew they wouldn’t get recipes back from everyone in time for our December 7 launch. But because of our in-progress ebook publishing workflow, we can easily add recipes from more contributors as they come in, and existing readers will get free updates as we expand and improve the book. And yes, interesting in-progress ebook projects can get blogged about at the New York Times and build interest online long before they’re done.
Variable pricing is great for raising money: Our pricing sliders not only let you set both a minimum and a suggested price; they also let your supporters pay what they want. (We’ll update you in a couple of weeks to let you know how things turned out for this project). This lets you raise funds from people at a level they’re comfortable with, and so reach out to a wider base of supporters.
Easily creating a whole platform for an ebook project is a powerful way to raise awareness: Using our combination of easy collaboration, one-click previews, in-progress publication, and landing pages (with embeddable videos!), we were able to bring together lots of disparate content in a coherent way, efficiently. Whether we’re putting together a fun book of recipes for a preschool or for leading tech company founders, our workflow let us make an effective contribution to the project without losing weeks of work time.
We love the startup scene: We’re a bootstrapped startup, so we are part of the broader startup community. We love helping people come together to do cool stuff.

In-Progress Gifts!

2012-12-07T01:00:00-08:00

Just in time for the holiday season, you can now give Leanpub books as gifts!

There’s a new checkbox on the purchase form. If you select it you enter the email address of the recipient and a gift note.
Your gift purchases that you have given show up on a Gifts tab on your dashboard.
Gift purchases that you have received show up as normal purchases.
The gift recipient does not need to create an account: they can download the book in all 3 formats directly from the page they are taken to on receiving the gift. But if they do create an account they get updates.
And, finally, if you already have a Leanpub account (like everyone here) and you receive a gift, you just click the link in the gift email and when you go to the page it’s added to your account.

So, hopefully the ability for your books to be given as gifts means everyone has an extra-happy holiday season :)

Unfinished Books, Finished Books, Book Launches, Storytelling and Fiction

2012-12-06T14:00:00-08:00

Percent Done

We just launched a small feature, where you can show how done you are on the landing page.

It is set on the Settings > Landing Page tab.

This is intended to be an optional self-report estimate. If you don’t believe in estimates, leave it at 0 and it will not be shown.

If you set it between 1 and 99, it will look like this currently: “The author considers this book to be about 80% complete!”

If you set it to 100, it will be: “The author considers this book to be done!”

An example of where it lives on the page is at: https://leanpub.com/lean

Obviously, instead of showing just a number we should show an elegant looking progress bar. Coming soon.

Finished Book Launch Page

Recently there have been a few tweets comparing how a book launch by random publisher x compared to Leanpub. We have huge respect for the author and respect for the publisher, but there are a few things being deliberately conflated here. And besides untangling them, it provides a clue for a good Leanpub feature…

a) There is a certain category of reader who buys in-progress books.

b) There is another category of reader who buys completed books. Within this category, you get a significant % of your sales within the first few weeks of having launched your finished book.

For typical books, our guess is that (a) represents between 10% and 40% of the market for the book. This is just our intuition from our own experiences, it’s not Big Data :)

So, the other 60% - 90% of the market for the book is for the finished book.

Now, if a book launch goes really well, you can capture a meaningful chunk of these sales in a short time.

So, you can say things like “I made more in x weeks with publisher a than on y months with Leanpub”. However, this is conflating “in-progress” with “finished book launch” (which includes being front and center on the publisher’s homepage) and “Leanpub” with “pubilsher”. A more valid comparison would be to compare average in-progress on Leanpub vs. average in-progress with the publisher, and finished book launches on Leanpub with publisher book launches.

Oh, wait.

There currently aren’t any Leanpub finished book launches!

Clearly, if you believe the above, that’s a big problem.

So, we’re going to fix that.

And the first step in this is for everyone to self-report how done they are. That way, when a book goes from 90% done to 100% done we can jump up and down, hype it, give it a proper launch on its own tab of just-finished books plus featured section on our own homepage, etc…

Storytelling

…and then maybe there will be legitimate comparisons for interested parties, about how Leanpub finished book launches go vs. the competition and how Leanpub in-progress goes vs. the competition. Until then, well, I like storytelling too.

The story I would tell is about how the author kept almost all the money while the book was in-progress, unlike any alternative. And about how this is fair since the author’s own brand was what was doing the marketing.

The story would be about how Leanpub has zero lock-in, so the author can happily take his or her book wherever he or she wants when it’s done. No contract to break, no negotiation, no BS.

The story could include how publisher of this nice, good quality book could, hypothetically, say that the book was previously self-published without saying where (since Leanpub obviously is something the specific publisher is afraid of).

And if the advance buzz on the internet through Leanpub helped in some small way to give the publisher a successful book launch, the story could include how we were totally happy for the publisher to tweet nice things about Leanpub. (This is fiction remember.) Or we could go with the version where the author tweets about how much better the publisher is.

At Leanpub, we love storytelling and fiction too!

This is why we sponsored NaNoWriMo.

Update: Clarification of Misconception

This post has caused a bit of reaction. This is good. However, it has also caused one misconception that we want to correct.

It is a misconception that Leanpub is unhappy if an author does a deal with a publisher after they have gained traction and made progress on their book.

We fully expect that many of the bestselling Leanpub books, and also many of the best Leanpub books that have not been marketed adequately, will be ripe candidates for smart publishers to swoop in and try to do deals with the authors. We consider this a measure of success, both our authors’ success and our success, that it happens. It’s fine.

Also, it goes both ways: many of our authors have previously written books for these same publishers. Competition is healthy and is expected. We expect that over time, many of these publishers will consider Leanpub to be one of the primary sources of lead generation.

However, since Leanpub offers authors such excellent terms, these authors have an excellent BATNA in their negotiations with publishers. The alternative to a negotiated agreement is simply sticking with Leanpub and our excellent royalty rates.

(Leanpub’s co-founder, Peter Armstrong, once got 80% ebook royalties from a publisher, since he had such strong ebook sales when the book was self-published and in-progress – like Leanpub books are today. Yes, that is 80% of revenue. Not after costs. BATNA is a real thing. Leanpub authors do not need to settle for 10% or 15% ebook royalties from publishers, or 50% after substantial costs.)

Now, one thing that we have not done well to date is launch finished Leanpub books. Launches should be done with a bang, not a whimper. However, we have been so focused on the in-progress book aspect of our business that we have not built features around the launching of finished Leanpub books. This is changing now. Watch this space. This has served as a bit of a wake up call for us, so it’s a good thing.

Once we do book launches better, then there will be a more valid comparison. Right now, the correct comparison for Leanpub sales is against the beta / in-progress / rough cuts / etc programs that publishers offer, not to their finished book launch numbers. Anything else is just spin.

So, we were unhappy about an unfair comparison. That’s it.

At Leanpub we really like all our authors. But they’re not married to us! We’re friends with benefits.

We deliberately have no contract with our authors. None. Authors should use Leanpub because we’re the correct choice, not because of any contractual lock-in.

Leanpub authors can do any deal they feel is best for them, at any time. With our blessing, in fact – although it’s not contractually needed.

As authors ourselves, this is what we would want. We are authors too.

A New Feature Inspired By NaNoWriMo: The Leanpub Word Count

2012-11-22T22:00:00-08:00

Inspired by NaNoWriMo, Leanpub has added a new feature: an optional public word count for your book.

If you switch this feature on, whenever you publish a new version of your book, anyone visiting your book’s landing page can see your word count. We hope this will help motivate Wrimos in the final push to the end of November, and give their friends (and readers) a new way to show encouragement - and to apply gentle pressure where necessary!

Publishing Your Book While You’re Writing It

One reason Leanpub is a NaNoWriMo sponsor is that we also believe receiving encouragement from others, and making your writing plans public, is a great way to motivate you to keep working on your book project. Writing is always going to be a solitary thing in some ways, but in the digital age there are alternatives to writing in severe “stealth mode”. Keeping your manuscript hidden away from the world until you’re not only merely done, but really most sincerely done, is only a cultural convention, after all.

The Leanpub motto is “Publish Early, Publish Often”. This reflects our commitment to in-progress publishing: getting your first chapters out there early, and interacting with your early-adopter readers (even if it is just your Mum and a couple of obliging friends), can be a really rewarding experience. That way you can get feedback and encouragement at a point in the writing process where otherwise you might have already abandoned your computer to clean your room for the ninth time or re-watch all five seasons of Friday Night Lights. The best antidote to procrastination is having eager readers waiting for your next chapter, even if at the beginning it’s only one or two people.

And of course, when you’re finished writing your book this way, you can still approach traditional publishers in the traditional fashion. But you’ll have already had the reinforcement that comes from having actual readers actually read your work, which is, as any author will tell you, awesome.

Why Leanpub is Sponsoring NaNoWriMo

2012-10-31T22:00:00-07:00

We’re proud to announce that Leanpub is now an official corporate sponsor of NaNoWriMo, otherwise known as National Novel Writing Month.

NaNoWriMo is a great and fun way to get started on a novel. The challenge, set up by a nonprofit called The Office of Letters and Light, is to finish writing 50,000 words of a brand new novel by the end of November. (For some of us, this might be easier than growing a full moustache for Movember).

NaNoWriMo lets you use whatever software you like for writing your novel, and we think Leanpub is a perfect fit for this kind of project. Since we’re focused on publishing in-progress ebooks, you can start getting attention for your book while you’re writing it throughout November, and also getting feedback from readers. You can even make and post a short video about yourself, and why you’re doing NaNoWriMo.

Publishing in-progress and interacting with your early readers is a great way to stay motivated and keep writing! And at the end of the month, your book will already be out there, and you can keep editing it and working on it until it’s finished.

Besides all this social stuff, there’s another reason why Leanpub is the best choice for your NaNoWriMo novel:

Distractions are bad.

Really bad.

And if you want to write a novel in a month for NaNoWriMo, distractions are really, really bad.

Everything but the words you are writing is a distraction. This is why books should be written in plain text, with minimal formatting.

At Leanpub, the way we do this formatting is something called Markdown. Markdown is a great way to write a novel, and when paired with a distraction free writing tool it’s even greater.

If you have a Mac, probably the best choice is iA Writer. For Windows, there are many choices, such as Dark Room. But you can use any text editor, such as Notepad or, if you’re a nerd like us, Emacs or vi.

With Leanpub, you can write your NaNoWriMo novel in distraction-free Markdown, for free. (Leanpub is always free for authors. We’re not doing anything different here for NaNoWriMo.) You click one button, and we make a PDF, EPUB and MOBI for you. If you want, you can even publish and sell the book while it’s in-progress.

But what if you’re shy?

Well, you can write using Markdown and just preview on Leanpub, and then submit to NaNoWriMo when it’s done. Writing in Markdown and previewing on Leanpub is also the best way to write a book in stealth mode, even though we’re big proponents of getting feedback while you write.

To learn more about writing a book from scratch on Leanpub, see:

The Leanpub help page
The How to Start a Book from Scratch video
The written instructions on how to start a book from scratch

If you want to learn more about Markdown, here are some links:

Markdown syntax page
Leanpub Markdown videos #1, #2 and #3

Anyway, NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow, so get your coffee and some noise cancelling headphones, and get ready to write!

P.S. There’s one more reason to write your NaNoWriMo novel on Leanpub: Throughout the month we’ll be featuring NaNoWriMo novels on the Leanpub homepage. (Just be sure to add the NaNoWriMo category to your book so we see it. And at the end of the month, we’re going to make the Leanpub NaNoWriMo book with the most readers be the featured book on our home page for a whole week. This will be a good way to get some extra attention!

Lean Publishing for Ninjas

2012-07-11T14:00:00-07:00

John Resig just posted about his traditionally-published book being almost done, and about his experiences writing it. This book was not written on Leanpub, but some of what John says basically explains why Leanpub exists:

I started the book in early 2008 and was actually quite productive, finishing nearly the entire book that year (with some missing gaps that I fixed up in 2009). There was some work left to do to make it a better book but, honestly, I got caught up in coding and stopped focusing on writing. I had to prioritize my time and I chose to prioritize doing more development and focusing on my personal life …

I would absolutely not write a technical book again. It’s a tedious process and unless you LOVE writing and are really good at it (like Nicholas Zakas or Dave Flanagan) then I suggest that you stick with the medium that is truly successful: Writing long-form articles/blog posts and possibly spinning them off into purchasable ebooks. (As an example, I’d point to Juriy Zaytsev and Peter-Paul Koch both of whom could get any JavaScript position in the world purely based upon the quality of their articles and sites, without ever having written a book.)

I realized at some point in late 2008 that that’s really what I should’ve done with Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja but I was already neck-deep in the book with most of it complete. Ironically working on the book (or not working on it, however you look at it) actually compelled me to NOT blog more as every time I wanted to write a technical blog post I was forcing myself to make the decision “I’m writing about 1000 works on a technical matter, shouldn’t this just be going towards my uncompleted book?” and would just end up writing nothing as a result.

Leanpub didn’t exist in 2008, but if John had been writing his book today as a Leanpub book, what would have been different?

John could have kept up his technical blogging. Leanpub makes it trivial to import a blog progressively into a book (just click a button to import your new posts). So he could have blogged all the interesting things he wanted to, and then clicked a button to import his posts and edit them into book form.
I don’t know John’s deal, but my guess is he wasn’t earning 90% - 50 cents on every PDF sold. On a $32 ebook, this would $28.30 per copy. John Resig is a big name, and any JavaScript book written by him would have a large following. We would have loved to be able to pay him $28.30 per copy. This type of money can definitely be a motivator to write more. (If you’re doing the math, Leanpub would have earned $3.70 per copy, minus about $1.23 to PayPal = $2.47 per copy in profit.)
Leanpub’s variable pricing feature lets authors charge a minimum and suggested price. A massive number of people pay more than the minimum price. (Yes, really; it restores your faith in humanity.) So John could have set a minimum price of $20 and a suggested price of $32, and captured even more of his potential market.
Since on Leanpub you can publish so easily, John could have had the instant gratification of releasing multiple versions of his book on the same day, and of getting feedback right away. This feedback loop is why blogging is so attractive.
Since the process of publishing on Leanpub is so un-tedious (write in Markdown, sync with Dropbox, click a button), John may have actually enjoyed writing more. Making authors happy makes the world a better place. So does keeping authors blogging, instead of having the book writing process derail that.

Anyway, obviously Leanpub wasn’t an option in 2008, but we hope that the next time a JavaScript ninja decides to write a book, he or she considers Leanpub as an alternative. In fact, there are a few notable examples of exactly this happening, in fact…

Leanpub Podcast Interview #8: Caitlin McDonald

2012-07-02T14:00:00-07:00

Dr. Caitlin McDonald is the author of the Leanpub book Global Moves: Belly Dance as an Extra/Ordinary Space to Explore Social Paradigms in Egypt and Around the World. Caitlin holds a PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter in England. Her findings about the international belly dance community have presented at several international and interdisciplinary conferences. She’s also an avid writer of non-fiction, and a Skirt!setter for US-based Skirt! Magazine’s website. She blogs at caitlinmcdonald.blog.com.

This interview was recorded on June 26, 2012.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml.

Armstrong: I’m here with Dr. Caitlin McDonald. Caitlin holds a PhD in Arab and Islamic Studies from the University of Exeter in England. Her findings about the international belly dance community have presented at several international and interdisciplinary conferences. She’s also an avid writer of non-fiction, and a Skirt!setter for US-based Skirt! Magazine’s website. She blogs at caitlinmcdonald.blog.com. Caitlin is also the author of the Leanpub book Global Moves: Belly Dance as an Extra/Ordinary Space to Explore Social Paradigms in Egypt and Around the World.

We’re going to talk today about Caitlin’s book, her experiences as a writer, and her experience with Leanpub. We’re also going to talk about ways we can improve Leanpub for her.

So Caitlin, thanks very much for being on the Lean Publishing Podcast!

McDonald: Well it’s my pleasure, thank you for having me!

A: First off, reading your blog, I discovered you’re not only a PhD, but also a belly dancer and a practitioner of Jiu-Jitsu.

M: Indeed!

A: So, what’s it like to do both Jiu-Jitsu and belly dance, and what led you to choose to take them up?

M: Well, I would say that the Jiu-Jitsu was a bit of a reaction to the belly dance, because when I was in the middle of my PhD, all I would do all day was write about belly dance, or read other people’s writing about belly dance, and my whole life was belly dance, and it was a bit like being in, working in the ice cream store, you want something that was a little bit different but that was still physically active and social, and that you needed to learn, and so Jiu-Jitsu was my thing that I did. And that was great, and the reason that I took up belly dance was basically it looked like a lot of fun, and I started doing it when I was 17, and it just continued from there.

A: So your belly dance predates your academic research, and then the Jiu-Jitsu happened during your PhD…. So let’s talk about your book Global Moves. How did it come about, and what’s it’s relationship to your PhD? It’s not exactly your PhD thesis, but is it excerpted from it, or how does the relationship between them?

M: It’s modified. Certainly all the research is based on my PhD, and it’s modified to make it more readable to a more general audience, certainly a very smart audiences, and I’m hoping that lots of people will find it very interesting. And updated as well: there were some, I got to speak again to several of the people that I’d researched, and update some of their stories, and talk about what they were doing in the intervening time, because it took quite a long time, because of course when I started my research that was way back in 2006, 2007… By the time I got to the point where I was finished my thesis it was already three years down the line, and then it took quite a long time to adapt the book. So it was nice to go back to that and have a chance to look at what was going on. And, of course, around the time that I was adapting the book, the Arab Spring was just starting, so there are some very small refernces to that, but it’s something that I think would be a great point to continue research to see where things are going in Egypt politically, now and in the future.

A: Yeah, I have a whole bunch of questions about that… What is your take on how the Arab Spring will impact belly dance is? Is it seen as something that’s traditionl… Is it considered a positive cultural thing for Egypt, or is it considered to be something to be reacted against?

M: It’s a really complicated cultural issue because dance is, and music, they are a very very big part of Egyptian life, in a way that dance and music are not really parts of… I mean, dance and music are really big parts of lots of people’s lives, but it’s not quite the same, there isn’t that kind of passion, there’s an embarrassment, I would say, about dance in Western culture that is not there in Arab culture, as long as it’s being done appropriately. And this is where the controversy comes in. Because if you are dancing as a woman, at home, in your house, in an appropriate space, away from men, in a tradtional setting, that’s absolutely fine, as long as you’re not out in public, doing it for money, in front of people. And of course that a lot of professional belly dancers do this, and so that’s perceived as negative and not something that should be culturally appropriate. However, belly dance shows are extremely popular, even among people who are traditional, and dance is a very big part of ceremonial life as well. During a wedding, dance is a big part of what’s going on, as a celebration of joy, but also as an expression of fertility, and there are lots of cultural connotations for dance in Egypt, and throughout the Arab world. And it’s, interestingly, because it’s so contested, because there is a sense that dance is both this wonderful positive thing, but also this slightly dangerous thing, it can also be used as a site of resistance to cultural norms, certainly in a place like Iran, where dancing is recently, they’ve kind of overturned this, but for a long time it was considered to be illegal to dance publcly in Iran. As a result of that, you can then use dance as a site of resistance, because the second that you do dance, then you are resisting the political situation, and so you’ve, by making it illegal, it then becomes a ground to become a political statement.

Returning to Egypt, certainly music and the songs that were such a big part of the protesting, and then as the announcement of the elections were announced yesterday, dancing in the streets, that was literally happening, there was dancing in the streets as people were celebrating the election of Morsi, the new Islamic president, the Muslim Brotherhood president. And it’s a complex issue, because certainly a lot of professional dancers are speculating about what will happen to the entertainment industry, whether it will be negatively impacted by the election of a president who is from the Muslim Brotherhood party. But there’s equally speculation that the tourism industry is so dependent on people, a lot of people do go to Egypt specifically with the purpose of watching dance, and so it would be very, um, it wouldn’t be a very wise move. And the other thing is that throughout history, there have been several times where dance was banned, or partially banned, or there have been these attempts to restrict dance in a professional setting, going all the way back to I believe it’s 1854 I believe was the first known ban, where all the dancers were sent out of Cairo and away up the river, because they were these creatures of, you know, iniquity and sin, and just causing all kinds of problems. But a few years later they relented and the ban was taken away, because, partly because I think it’s such a culturally important part of peoples’ lives, and also because economically it’s not very wise to ban something that generates a lot of tax revenue. And generates a lot of revenue generally, and so I think it’s a fine line to walk, and it will be interesting to see whether dance becomes part of the national dialogue, in this new Egypt that’s being built, whether dance becomes a big symbol or not, it will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.

A: Right, that’s like when you were discussing how your friend, when you did the research, your friend had been working, she was from Scotland was it?

M: Yes.

A: And she was a foreign dancer, and then there was a brief time where foreign dancers were banned, and then they removed the ban, sort of a similar type of idea…?

M: Yes, similar. I don’t believe that dancers, what had happened was that there were restrictions put in place on what foreign workers were allowed to do. There was a brief period where foreign dancers were no longer allowed to, this is another example of that kind of restriction, where foreigners were not allowed to take part in certain professions, and one of these was dancing. But, there were several ways around this. One was that you could rejig your act to become more of what’s called a ‘folkloric act’. So instead of doing specifically what’s known as belly dancing, or in Egypt it’s called ‘Raqs sharqi’ which means ‘Eastern dance’, and instead of doing that, you could do something that was a more folksy kind of folk dance. But equally there was a lot of pressure, both from foreign dancers and from Egyptian dancers, to remove this ban, partly because frankly a lot of the dancers working in the tourist trade in Egypt now are not local dancers, because as Egypt has grown more conservative, it’s become such a negatively-perceived profession that a lot of young Muslim women don’t want to go into that profession. They may enjoy dance, they may enjoy watching dance, it might be part of their private lives, but a lot of them don’t want to become dancers, and to kind of fill this gap, economically, foreign workers are used, in the same way that foreign workers are used in many professions around the world. So they weren’t able to keep the ban going very long, it was only a couple of years, and then it was overturned very quickly. But restrictions are still in place. There’s restricted movement because you have to give your passport in to the people that are managing you, and things of that nature. So there’s still quite a lot of restrictions on foreign dancers, compared to local dancers.

A: So are most of the foreign dancers Western, or from Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, or all over?

M: There are a variety. I would say people from Lebanon, Turkey, and Greece, Egyptians wouldn’t look at them as being quite as foreign, I suppose…

A: Right

M: …maybe Turkey. But I spoke to a few dancers that are from the UK, there were certainly dancers that are from France, but the big one is Eastern European dancers, there are quite a lot of those working in Egypt, and they’re not perceived very highly. They may be very technically skilled, but they’re often seen as undercutting the market, which I think is rather unfortunate, but I also understand that in any situation where there’s a lot of pressure, and there’s a very, in a market where everyone wants to be successful, it’s very easy to try to differentiate yourself in a way… to need a scapegoat to blame the negativity of the profession and the negative connotations of the profession on someone else. And in this case that’s become the dancers from Eastern Europe.

A: Interesting… So, your book is called Global Moves, and it’s really interesting in terms of thinking about globalisation in general, about how belly dance for Egypt is an import and an export. In Egypt, is it considered, when you look at Wikipedia you’ll see it’s kind of one of those muddled things where, you know, belly dance, people aren’t sure is it originally Egyptian, or from Turkey, or farther east, or Greece - it’s harder to pin down belly dance, compared to say, some religions, which say, well, it was founded on this day, or at this spot. Do people in Egypt see belly dance as, this is our Egyptian dance, or is this something that they see as more muddled as well?

M: I think that’s a really interesting question. I think the question of origins is always incredibly interesting because there is absolutely no way to know. There’s very little evidence before a certain period, that’s written down, about this particular style of dance, and as a result of that the idea of what the origins of this dance might be has become a really strong area where people project their imaginations to give them a sense of what they want to be. It’s become a place where people can then enact their fantasies about what they would like dance to be. And that’s resulted in a lot of interesting things. In terms of a sense of national identity for Egyptians, speaking in the modern period, definitely yes, people are very proud of dance. Certainly Egyptian dancers are. There’s a sense, it was interesting because in the most recent ban where foreign dancers were excluded from the profession for a time, the argument was that it should be kept as a part of Egyptian territory. There’s kind of a contradictory argument going on. One side of it was, Egyptian dance, this kind of dance is Egyptian, only Egyptians can do it, it belongs to Egyptians because it iss something that is in our blood, essentially. But then conversely, the other argument was, basically it’s not really a profession, it’s so easy that anyone can do it. And it’s like, well, you can’t have it both ways. It’s either that you’re born with it, or everyone can learn and therefore it’s not valuable, and that’s why you shouldn’t be doing it. And so there was this kind of converse. But certainly one of the strains is that people are very tied to dance because it’s an expression of self, it’s an expression of connection with the land, with the nation, and certainly many kinds of folkloric dance in Egypt are very evocative of rural Egypt, and living in Cairo, a lot of people will have families, or they will have been from a place that’s further, not near a city, and dance is something that connects them. In the same way that something like country music is actually an expression of longing for the country, rather than actually being usually about the country, it’s more, it’s a music that people listen to in the city when they’re away from their country background. Dance is like that for people in Egypt as well.

A: OK… Also, when you think about, in terms of authenticity, in terms of you think about costumes, like for example reading about the ‘bedlah’, about the idea that it was imported into Egypt supposedly by a cabaret owner in Cairo to meet Western toursists’ expectations about what belly dancers should look like. Is that… right?

M: Do you mean the two-piece costume?

A: Yeah, the two-piece btereotypical belly dance costume be something that was sort of a Hollywood origin?

M: Yes.

A: I forget if it was Hollywood, or Europe in the 1800s, and then imported into Egypt. Is that sort of a standard costume? Your cover of your book has like the one store, Mahmoud’s, with all the costumes. But is this, is there a sort of a standard costume, and is that the one that was imported, or is all over the map…?

M: Well, it’s an interesting one, because origins are something, I mean when you look at any performative thing that’s done for the outside world, any kind of performance that’s done where suddenly there’s an outside, there’s another culture involved, suddenly you’re no longer doing it because that’s what you would do if you were there with your friends by yourself, it suddenly becomes something that’s looked upon, and as a result it changes, and you, especially when there’s economic inequality involved, if people come along, you know, you can go back as far as the writer Flaubert, who was there in the 1850s, looking for these belly dancers, looking all over, up and down Egypt for these belly dancers, and when you consider that he was only one of many that went to Egypt on this, pilgrimages, these journeys of the self, to look for these dancers and find something, and here are all these dancers saying well, if everybody’s coming this way, you know, even people who may not have been dancers, coming along and saying, well here are all these people coming, and they want to see the dancers, so let’s show them what the dancers are like. So from their perspective, anything that they could do that would give the experience of, you know, the expected experience of this exotic dancing, to see, that they all wanted to see, you know, as far as they were concerned, it just gives them an economic way ahead. Because they’ve, you know, been asked to do something, implicitly asked to make this performance, and so, for them, perhaps that wasn’t what they would have chosen to do just by themselves, if they weren’t professionally doing it, it just becomes another aspect of the performance itself. And I think the costume is very much along those lines, and certainly the evolution of the standard expectation of what the belly dance costume is, I think is very strongly influenced by Hollywood, and you can kind of trace back–but the other aspect of that is, even if you look at older images, if you trace back these older images and look at things and say, they weren’t wearing two-piece costumes, they were wearing your regular-style galabeas, which is long dresses, or they were wearing Western-style clothes, a lot of the old lithographs just show women in basically what like 18th-century women’s clothes, with wide skirts and the bodice tops. Then even all of that is in many ways constructed, because the images were created by artists, certainly a lot of the Orientalist imagery, is very constructed, it’s very posed, it’s very much a fantasy, it’s not a documentary, it’s a fantasy. And you know there are lots of writings about how problematic that is as an approach to culture. I mean, I think you can certainly take away that lots of the images are beautiful, whether is that an accurate representation of what that culture was like, I think is a much bigger question, which is why authenticity is such a troublesome word in my book.

A: Yeah… That’s what I think is so interesting, is that there’s so many thorny questions around authenticity, but if you think about yourself, in terms of feminisim, like, you described yourself as a gender theorist…

M: Yes.

A: …so what’s your, I’m sure that belly dance is not without controversy in feminist circles also….

M: Yeah, I think that’s definitely very true. But equally, I think that it’s a dance, you know, there’s a part where I’m talking about the difference between belly dance and burlesque, because a lot of belly dancers don’t like to be, even if they like watching burlesque, they don’t like to be associated with burlesque, because they think that there’s a very different ethos, and a lot of people will ask, when you talk about belly dance, they’ll feel that it’s a very one-sided transaction, that for them, if they’re not familiar with, you know, the variety of belly dance that I’ve come into contact with, they might assume that belly dance is only ever a female dancer in front of a male audience, a primarily male audience, and my experience has been the complete reverse of that. I mean it often is a female performer, but usually it’s in a context of other women. Men tend to get very uncomfortable at belly dance shows because they are not, the kind of belly dance shows that I go to, they’re not for men, they’re for women, they’re something that women do to socialize with one another. And I think that it can be a very empowering experience to have a kind of feminine sensuality that is not restricted, or not being, um…

A: …held down…

M: …held down, or equally, that’s not being, there’s no expectations, I suppose, is one way of looking at it. I mean certainly there are, there’s always expectations, with gender, that’s one of the points that I raise, is that gender is always something that you do for someone else, it’s never, it’s rarely something that you do just for yourself. But equally, there’s a very different level of expectation when you’re in a situation that’s outside of your ordinary life, and for a lot of women, this kind of dance was a femininity that they could engage with, that was perhaps more exaggerated than they would normally have in their regular lives, but equally not exaggerated in a way that meant that they felt they had to have sexual expectations put upon them, I guess is the best way of describing it. And I wouldn’t say, I mean I think that there are a lot of modernist feminist interpretations of burlesque as well, but that dance does come from a very different background, and that dance is primarily about, you know, the female display for a male audience, it is, it’s not as, I mean, belly dance has a history and roots in homes, in mothers and daughters, in aunts and nieces, in female societies. And while, when you take the dance out of that context, when you take it outside the Arab world, and then you’re in classrooms and you’re at festivals, and it’s no longer a family activity in the truest sense, in the sense of family members doing it together, I think that for a lot of people the appeal was that here was something that you could do that was sensual, but equally was still something that you could bring your family to and not feel uncomfortable about this, something that you could go, you know, certainly I’ve seen plenty of mother-daughter teams going to belly dance classes together and finding this to be a really relaxing experience, to have time that they could spend together exploring femininity, I think that’s something that does carry over. So I think that that’s certainly there are valid feminist critiques that you could bring to bear, but equally, I think that on the scale of things, it’s also a feminist activity, as well.

A: Right. My assumption would be that, do you think that the critiques are something that is probably more old school, and that the sort of reaction that would be more focused on empowerment, or in terms of something that women do, for each other, is a more modern way of thinking about it, compared to like a cardboard-cutout caricature?

M: Well, interestingly enough, I think that in fact a lot of the, much of the popularity of belly dance, certainly in the States, came about with new age feminism, with new wave feminism in the 1970s, as people were starting to explore and become more comfortable with their bodies, as women, specifically, were starting to explore and become more comfortable with their bodies, this was perceived as a way that women could engage with themselves physically, to break out of this mold where they were only ever being enacted upon in a sexual way, and that they could kind of explore things without having to feel like they were transgressing their usual gender boundaries. Because you’re in this whole different world, you’re in this whole different space, you’re dressed in a completely different way, you’re doing things that you would never do, and so therefore you’re allowed to break the boundaries a little bit, and so I think as a result of that a lot of feminists, it was very appealing, and that’s where some of this imagery, goddess imagery has come out of, and I think now in fact some of the feminist critiques would be not so much about the male gaze issue, as it would be about feminism as a… the globalness of feminism I suppose, because there have been a lot of critiques recently about whether feminism actually has the same aims in all countries and in all nations and in all walks of life, and whether feminism that speaks to people in the United States, the needs of feminism there, are the same as the needs of feminism in Egypt, are the same as the needs of feminism in Hong Kong, or sub-Saharan Africa, or all around the world, and whether women really have the same needs, and whether those needs can be addressed using the same tools. So that would be a kind of critique of feminism now of belly dance would be, not so much about the male gaze, but it would be more about whether using this dance as an expression of feminiity and sensuality is in some way impacting on the women that use this dance in the Middle East or in other parts of the world, and whether that’s challenging, or whether it’s helpful or whether it’s not helpful for other women who are exploring feminism in different ways.

A: That’s interesting. On a sort of unrelated, well kind of related note, you mentioned on your blog you were going to do a paper about belly dance in Second Life…

M: Indeed, yes!

A: So tell me about that.

M: I did write a little bit about it in Global Moves as well, but now I’ve kind of updated it, it’s going into an anthology of chapters by many authors about belly dancing globalization, and I found out about belly dance and Second Life through a conversation that I was having with one of my research participants who lived in Florida. And she just happened to kind of casually mention it as we were having this conversation about wide-ranging topics, and I really became fascinated by this, mainly because I just could not get my head around the idea that you would want to do something like dance in a virtual scenario. Because, I mean, I understand the appeal of virtual reality on many levels - it allows you to communicate with people, it allows you to try on things that you wouldn’t otherwise get to do.

In fact, in a lot of ways it’s parallel to things like dance. You know one of my arguments about dance is that it is a space outside your ordinary life where you get to do things that you wouldn’t ordinarily get to do, and virtual reality is much like that. You can explore things that you wouldn’t ordinarily get to do, and it allows you play to around with bits of yourself that you don’t normally get to engage with. But, belly dance, any kind of dance, or sports, or anything that’s really physical, I just could not understand why you’d want to do it. Or like, baking cookies - would you really want to do that in a virtual environment? You don’t get a cookie at the end, I just don’t understand!

A: You don’t get the calories either, I guess!

M: That’s true, well exactly. So I was just fascinated, and completely couldn’t wrap my head around it at first, so obviously I had to go try it for myself, and see what it’s all about, and interview a few people, a few avatars in Second Life and figure out their, why they were doing it, what they got out of it. And the other thing I learned in the end was it’s not so much that belly dance is a big phenomenon, as dancing as a whole is a really big phenomenon on Second Life, it’s one of the main activities that people do. You know, anywhere you go, often when you go into like a bar in Second Life, there’s like a glowing ball that hangs above the floor, and then you click on that and it makes your character dance. And you can also download little animations that will make your character dance when you play them, and things like that. And it just became, it became apparent that it wasn’t so much about belly dance, although of course for a lot people - really what I learned was that people really weren’t doing things that were that different from what they did in ordinary life. I mean they might lead a slightly enhanced life, or they might have a different shape, or they might have built something, like an island, that they really enjoyed, or, you know, they may have constructed things slightly, but mainly people did a lot of the same activities that they did in real life. And as a result, of starting down this road of conversations and speaking to people and interviewing people I eventually found out, someone pointed out to me that some of the moves that they were seeing in one of the videos that I was sharing with the research community, somebody emailed me and said, Well, that’s a routine that my teacher taught to me, my real life actual teacher, taught to me, and I know that she did some motion-capture animation for this company. And so then I interviewed the company, and I interviewed the dancer, and I talked to them about what they thought about dance in a virtual world and things like that, and in the end the conclusion that I had was that people like to do things that are a little different bit from themselves, but they want to, you know, most people, certainly there are people who really push it to the extreme, but a lot of people, you know, they don’t, people would ask me, is everyone that belly dances, is it like an old, you know, 40-year-old man who’s sitting in his basement and lives at home with his mom, now he’s having this fantasy of being this amazing belly dancer, and the answer is no - a lot of times it was people who really were belly dancers in real life, and who either had stopped taking classes for a while, for whatever reason, or realized that it was much cheaper to buy a costume online, than it is in real life, or, there were a number of reasons, but they weren’t at all what I was expecting. And so that was really interesting, to find that it was really not so different from real life. I thought that was fascinating.

A: Interesting. So, moving on from Global Moves. You’re planning another book on Leanpub, it looks like you’ve started another book on Leanpub, is that something that you’re going to publish in progress, or are you going to wait until it’s finished as well? Do you want to talk about that book?

M: The new book is called We Dance Around In A Ring And Suppose: Travel Memoirs Of A Belly Dance PhD, and it’s, it is what it says. It’s all the kind of stuff that I couldn’t put in the research book, because even though they were really fun and lovely and exciting stories that happened to me while I was doing the research, they weren’t really about belly dance, they were about things that were going on in Egypt while I was there. And I just think that, you know, I really enjoyed my time in Egypt, it was a really intense time, but I had so many stories at the end of that time that I really wanted to share with people, and I would like to publish this one in a different way. The reason that the first book was published in the way that it was, is that I’d not actually planned to go down the Leanpub route at all. It was sort of, it was something that was suggested to me much later, after the PhD was done, so all that, that book was already completed anyway, whereas with this one, I have a bit of more of a chance to play around with things, and let it develop a little more organically. A lot of the material I have already because I was keeping a blog in the time that I was in Egypt, and so there’s some organization to be done, but certainly this book, I could take a much different route, and kind of explore the way that I want it to be structured, and release things slowly and do all the things that Leanpub is known for.

A: How did you discover Leanpub?

M: I discovered it through a software developer that I know who suggested Leanpub as a publication option when I was looking around, because initially, the first book I’d wanted to publish an acadmeic book, with an academic publishing house, and have it, you know, hardback copies and all that, and I’d had some interest from publishers, and then because I was no longer in the world of academia, I knew that I wouldn’t have the time to do the revisions that they wanted, and I wanted to get it out quickly, because in academia, and certainly in publishing, everything moves very slowly. Like, even if I’d done all the revisions in the way that they wanted it to be packaged, it would still be another year, and I could see that things in Egypt were moving so rapidly, that I really wanted the research to be available quickly. And, so I found out about the site, and I decided that it would be a really good way of doing it, because it just looked very straightforward, and not as… I’d looked at some other self-publishing options as well, and this one, I think for me, the big thing was it would allow me to have a lot more control over the material than any of the other options that I’d explored. So, even though I wasn’t doing the slow release of material, it was still something that would allow me to do things in the way that I really wanted them to be done, and, you know, just that, things like, release it at a price that I was comfortable with, and things like that, which you wouldn’t really get in a lot of other places.

A: Right… Excellent. So, do you think that, in terms of books that originate as, I think your book is our first book that originated as a PhD thesis, Global Moves. Do you think it’s something that other people who’ve done a PhD thesis and are looking to - because I don’t know how copyright works. I assume the university owns the copyright for the thesis itself, but that the work is something that obviously is yours, and you can adapt; do you think this is something that other people doing PhDs should look at if they want to make their work more available to a more global, a more broad audience, or, is there anything we should try to do to improve, to make that easier to get started?

M: Sure. To start with the copyright issue, I’m not sure how it works in the States. It depends in part on what kind of research you’re doing, and things of that nature. I would need to look again at the copyright page, but I believe that I still own the copyright for my thesis. The issue weasn’t so much that the copyright would belong to the university, as it was that the university also publishes a copy. So, it’s also available on their website. But if someone else wanted to publish it, it would be available, it’s just that there would already be a competing copy out there. And with Leanpub that wasn’t an issue, whereas with a lot of traditional publishers, and even self-publishers, they’re going to say, Well, why put this content out there, even revised content, why should I put this out there when there already is an existing, the research can be accessed somewhere else. And so this was one of the appealing things for me, was that there wouldn’t be that issue, I could still do it, and I think it is actually a really appealing model for young researchers to go this route.

The risk that they would take at the moment is that if you are still working in academia, then it’s not as prestigious, because you won’t have the pedigree of an academic publisher. However, lots of people graduate with PhDs, and there are only a limited number of academic positions in the world, so plenty of people move on from academia and they go on and do other things, and then their research, there might be one copy languishing in a library somewhere, or it might be online; lots of universities have moved to that model, where they make the thesis available, usually as a PDF, which can often be hard to work with, and I just think that, there is, it’s underused, the technology at the disposal of universities to disseminate reasearch is really underused, and something like this, it allows people to download in many formats, it allows you to market things in a much more interesting way, I think it could be much easier to find as well, because if it’s just on the university website, then you’d have to know who the researcher was, you have to know which university they went to, it can be very difficult to find things when they’re only limited to that arena, and with this, you have a little more flexibility.

I also think that for a lot researchers, it would be really interesting to not publish all at once, but to publish results as things go along, which is kind of the way that journals work, traditionally, is that you have a small amount and then you publish and then you have a little more, and then you publish, and at the end, maybe you put it all together and you get one big book. But this, you could kind of replicate that idea by using the Leanpub model and publishing you know, a chapter at a time. And certainly lots of researchers are really fed up with the way that academic journals traditionally work, because, you know, you write all of this stuff, and you send it off to the journal, and you do that for free, and then the journal charges you money to, not you yourself, but when you want a copy of the journal, you then get the, the university gets charged exorbitant fees to subscribe to the service. So basically, in the end, the only people making money are the journals themselves, and all the researchers contribute the content for free, and then review the content for free as well, because everything in academica has to be peer-reviewed. So all this stuff is done out of the goodwill of their hearts, and then at the end you just feel like, well, it’s nice to have the prestige, which is important in academia, because having the recognition of your peers is really how research gets vetted. But equally, it would be nice if I had a few more pennies to support the research that I was doing. Not just from grants, and not just from salary, but also to have the sense that the research is getting used, and downloaded, and nobody’s missing out. So, I think that was an appealing thing for me as well, because when I looked at some of the other self-publishing models, certainly they were not as, the percentages were not as good, and certainly in academia, if I’d gone down the route of publishing a print book, I wouldn’t have expected any money out of it at all. So, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at my royalities so far, and even though that wasn’t the reason to do it, I was pleasantly surprised by that.

A: I really liked how you reached out to the people on the Leanpub Google Group. What was that one email, like “hey, software developers!” It was really cute; I thought it was awesome. It was a really good email, I liked that.

M: Thanks.

A: Is there anything you’d want us to do? Like we talked about journals. In general is there anything you wish we’d improve or make easier, and then specifically around the idea when you talk about journals and research, people coming from acaademia where there’s this notion of peer review, etc. Is there anything that you wish Leanpub made more… like, enabled?

M: I think there’s two things that I think would be really helpful. One is that when I tried to convert my thesis from Word into the Leanpub format, it was a bit of a shambles. It did work in the end, and you guys were really helpful, and really responsive, and I appreciated that a lot. But the only thing that worked was saving it as a web page, and then redoing it, and I think a lot of that has to do with the way that when your managing a long document like a thesis in Word, it just happens to be that mine was already in Word. If somebody were coming into their thesis, were entering their Phd for the first time and saying OK, I’m not going to write it in Word, I’m going to do it in Markdown, then they wouldn’t have had this problem. But I think it’s going to be a while before that happens, and it would be nice if there were an easier way to manage long documents, conversion of long documents from Word. And I also had that one very strange issue where all of my offset quotes, which are a big thing when you’re quoting long quotes, because of the way that code examples work in Markdown, everything that I quoted from someone else was showing up in a really weird format, and it took me a while to work out why that was happening. And again, it was fine, but it would be nice if there was ‘The Academic’s Guide To Converting Your Thesis From Word Into Markdown’, because I think some specific issues about having a really long existing document, that could be better addressed. But the one thing that wasn’t an issue at all, which surprised me, was that I use kind of a program to keep track of all my references, it’s just like a database program, and I expected that the tags that that program uses were really going to screw up, and that it wasn’t going to work, and that it was going to break everything. It didn’t, it worked fine, so I was pleased by that because that will make it easy for a lot of people who are using that same program to convert their theses into Markdown, that will make it a lot easier. In terms of other things that you could think about, I spoke about peer review. It’s a difficult one. There’s some really good guidelines about setting up an academic journal, that include things like best practice about peer review and things like that. I think that the thing that you struggle with is that when you’re doing that kind of thing, you need a big enough set of peer reviewers. Because in my case, for instance, I would need people that were in the humanities, you’d need other people that were academics, but if someone comes along who’s a biologist, you can’t peer review them, so you’d need a whole community for that separate group of people. But, equally, they wouldn’t all have to be Leanpub authors, you could have a group of, you could set up a program where people could become Leanpub peer reviewers. They wouldn’t have to be, you could have a database of reviewers people could use, set up some kind of affiliate, academic affiliate program.

A: Is this something where the peer reviewer is known, where the author goes out and gets the peer reviewers, because like obviously at Leanpub we don’t have the type of editorial thing that a journal does, but if you went and found top experts in your field and said “Hey, I’ll send you a Dropbox sharing request, and you can do a peer review of my work”…?

M: The answer is, if you’re working with a journal, then you send your article in, and they have a board of reviewers that they already have set up, and it’s normally done blind. If you were working, if you are producing an academic book, like for instance when I was shopping my manuscript around to different academic publishers, often times they will ask, Who do you think would be a good reviewer for this, and you just, you mention some big names in your field, depending on how close a relationship you have with them you may have turned around to someboday and said, Hey, I’m shopping, I have a manuscript, I’ve sent it off to these publishers, and they may come to your for a peer review, would you have time for that, is that something that you’d be interested in doing? So the answer is yes, you can certainly depend on authors to provide a list of people that might be good peer reviewers, it’s certainly something that would be in their interest to do, and to have a community, because that’s how it works. You peer review someone’s book, and then they turn around and they ask you to do it a few years later.

A: Right, a “favour model” economy.

M: Yeah.

A: Obviously since in terms of the program that you mentioned, that you used to keep track of your research, if this is helpful to someone else, what program was it?

M: Yes, I used one called EndNote. I think that there are other ones, but that was the one that my university supported, so that’s the one that I used. EndNote is a very… it’s great program when it works, but it also does some very funny things at times, so I was very pleased that it was able to convert the tags easily. Basically, it just keeps a database of all of your references, and you either enter those manually, or in an academic library, normally when you check a book out, you can download a file that contains the bibliographical information from that book, and so then you can keep that, you just add that to your list of references, and then as you’re going through and you’re writing your book or your paper, you just kind of insert a little tag that says, Please put so-and-so in this point, and then it will automatically do your bibliography for you as well at the end. And it just kind of keeps track of everything, and it really, really makes things much easier than doing it all by hand, and you can put in a lot more references, I feel, it just, it definitely upped the amount of stuff I could include as references. There were issues that I had, but none of them were with Leanpub, so we won’t go into that!

A: OK… So what’s surprised you most about Leanpub, other than the issues around long documents that you had? Is there anything that you wouldn’t have expected, either good or bad…?

M: Let me think about that for a minute. I think the thing that surprised me in a very good way was how responsive you guys were to feedback and questions. That wasn’t something that I was expecting, I was expecting to kind of be there on my own, and furiously working away, and having problems, and just having to overcome them. And you know every time I had a question, within a few hours or within a day, it was answered, or partially, someone had said something about it that was helpful, and most of the time it was resolved, and I found that incredibly encouraging. And you know, and really supportive and really wonderful, because you don’t get that kind of treatment, as an author, as an academic, you don’t really get that kind of help most of the time, when you’re working on something that’s as big as a PhD, obviously you have your supervisors and you have people there mentoring you and helping you, but in terms of technical problems, you don’t usually have somebody to really help you sort that kind of stuff out, and so I really appreciated that. In terms of surprise, surprising things… I think we’re going to end at that actually.

A: OK. Cool. Excellent. Well I think that’s probably it for me. So, Caitlin, thank you very much for being on the Lean Publishing Podcast and for being a Leanpub author.

M: My pleasure, I’ve really enjoyed it.

Lean Publishing presentation at Northern Voice

2012-06-16T18:00:00-07:00

I (Peter Armstrong) had a great time doing a presentation at Northern Voice today. For the people who were there, these are my slides. If you weren’t there, some of them may not make much sense.

Leanpub Podcast Interview #7: Andrew Dubber

2012-05-29T14:00:00-07:00

Andrew is Reader in Music Industries Innovation at Birmingham City University. He’s a member of the Centre for Media and Cultural Research, and is Award Leader for the MA in Music Industries (which can be studied online via distance learning from anywhere in the world) and also runs the MA in Music Radio.

He is the founder of New Music Strategies, a pan-European music consultancy and strategy organisation focusing primarily on non-commercial and social projects that use music to improve lives. He is also a member of the Board of Advisors for Bandcamp.

He can be found online at http://andrewdubber.com.

This interview was recorded on May 21, 2012.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml.

Armstrong: I’m here with Andrew Dubber, who’s a faculty member of the Birmingham School of Media. He’s an internationally-renowned lecturer, author, consultant, public speaker, broadcaster anmd blogger, as well as being the founder of New Music Strategies and a member of the board of advisors for Bandcamp. Andrew is also the author of three Leanpub books, all of which have been published in 2012. We’re going to talk today about his books, his experiences as a writer, and about his experiences using the Lean Publishing approach on Leanpub. We’re also going to talk about ways we can improve Leanpub for him.

So, Andrew thanks for being on the Lean Publishing Podcast.

Dubber: Yeah, no problem at all; thanks for having me.

A: Your title is ‘Reader in Music Industries Innovation’. What’s it like being a professor of innovation in an industry that’s being violently disrupted?

D: Yeah it’s kind of weird, ‘Reader’ is a funny term. It’s one that really only makes sense over here. It basically means ‘almost but not quite smart enough to be a Professor’.

A: Oh, OK … like ‘Sessional Lecturer’?

D: Sort of. In the US I would be called a Professor. I have a full-time job, a teaching gig, all the rest of it, but here it’s like becoming a knight or a lord or something.

A: So what’s it like teaching about innovation in the music industry.

D: It’s kind of fun actually, I’ve got to say. Because you run into some really interesting conversations. But what’s really cool is the people who come to study with us. I run an MA in Music Industries and the people who come to study with us know what they’re in for. So, in a sense, the kind of people who sign up to our MA are the kind of people who go ‘Actually I don’t want to learn about how the music industry used to be, I want to learn how it is now’, which is kind of what I focus on more than anything… The music industry shifts slowly, so it’s one of those things where it’s an analysis of what’s not going on as much as it is an analysis of what could be.

A: It’s funny, I know an academic in Vancouver who does work in a Masters program in publishing and it’s the same sort of environment where publishing is in the middle of being… is going through a lot of changes, and the students who are in there are Master’s students, and they’re, they have the same sort of mindset, you have to, because there’s so much change…

D: That’s kind of the interesting stuff that’s going on, really, is getting to grips - that’s one of the good things about being an academic I guess, you get to, you can step back from it and go, what is actually going on, and what are people doing about it, and what are they saying they’re doing, as opposed to what they’re actually performing. So that sort of arm’s-length analysis can be really interesting, but also the students that I work with, they have a really hands-on approach. So most of them are actually sort of working quite substantially within the music industries as well, particularly from a kind of independent, entrepreneurial perspective.

A: So they are actually entrepreneurial? That’s good!

D: Yeah, that’s one of the things I really push. In fact, as part of our MA, there’s a kind of core module within it called ‘Enterprise’, and basically that’s what you study as part of, it’s kind of related to some other MAs that we do around creative industries, and online journalism, and various other things, but Enterprise is a really kind strong thread in our MA. I sound like I’m shilling for our MA program! Come and do our MA program!

A: I was just curious, it was funny, when I was talking to some of the students in this publishing program, there was a mixture of typical student optimism, but also massive depression about - “Well, I’ll probably never get a job in this industry.” And I’m like, “well would you like to do some freelance stuff involving Leanpub”, you sense this sort of trepidation…

D: Yeah, I always say to my students, anybody who aspires to a job in the music industry lacks ambition. Because I think the most interesting stuff is when people find their own niche, their own thing that they’re excited about. I mean nobody gets into the music business because they think it’s a great get-rich-quick scheme. That’s the wrong reason to do it. But if you’re really passionate about music, there are ways in which you can make money at it, but most of them don’t involve sitting in a basement at Universal Music putting CDs in envelopes.

A: Along that line, besides teaching at Birmingham University, you’re also involved in a lot of projects. Tell me about New Music Strategies.

D: Well, New Music Strategies actually started as a blog about five years ago - more like six years ago - when I first started studying this. Because I didn’t start studying the online music industries. I started actually studying radio, and digital radio, and online radio, but I kind of, when I shifted to the UK, about eight years ago, it kind of coincided with a shift in focus. I kind of do both now, essentially. But the New Music Strategies was a blog in which I was kind of thinking out loud about the research that I was doing, and also the music industries that I was working with, and the innovation stuff were doing. So it was just kind of, “here is something interesting, let me share it with you.” And, at the time there were very few independent music industry blogs around. And so New Music Strategies picked up a bit of a following, particularly because I wrote this–well, I put it out as an ebook, but essentially it was just a series of blog posts–and I made it as a PDF download free from the website. And people downloaded it and shared it around. There was really kind of nothing else like it at the time. Now, every man and his dog has a blog about giving advice to independent musicians. So over time, New Music Strategies doing that became less important. But I’d worked with some really cool and really interesting people while I was operating under that name. And so what I did was I approached them and said, OK, New Music Strategies doesn’t really need to be an advice blog for online music. People can find that stuff now. And I kind of feel like I’ve said what I needed to say in that sphere, a little bit. So, why don’t we just get together and do stuff when it’s cool and interesting? And so there’s five of us. There’s a woman in Amsertdam, there’s a woman in Berlin, there’s a guy in Oxford, there was a guy in London, he’s now moved to Birmingham where I live as well, and me. So the five of us, we just try and think of interesting things to do. Call organizations to partner with. And then we try and make things happen. Which is about, not about ‘How can I be famous on the Internet’, but more about, ‘How can we get more music by more people in more places?’ And that manifests itself in all kinds of interesting ways.

A: That’s cool. So, you mentioned the blog posts, around New Music Strategies, and how those led to your book, The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online. So, tell me how that evolved into Music In The Digital Age?

D: Sure. Well, The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online was just a series of 20 blog posts originally. I got asked to come and do a talk locally, and they said, just come and tell us the things you think we need to know about the online music business, because you’re studying it and we’re not, and we’re trying to make money at this. And so I wrote a bullet-point list, and I went with it, and I stood up and said the first one, and then got on to the second one, and by the time I got into the third one, they said ‘well, we’re kind of out of time now’!

So I said well, what I’ll do is I’ll stick them up as blog posts, and you can just read them as you want to. And somebody said, I don’t really want to come and read your blog, can I just get it as a PDF and you send it to me when it’s done? And I thought, well that’s actually fair enough, and not a bad idea. So that’s what I did. I wrote the ‘20 things’ as blog posts, bundled them up into an ebook, stuck it up online.

But like I say that was about five years ago. And ever since then people have been asking me, ‘When’s the update coming?’ or, ‘Is there a new version of it?’, or ‘Does it still do what you wanted it to do?’ And within about 18 months of me publishing it, I felt it needed revisiting. And I’ve had that at the back of my mind for a long time. And every time I’ve tried to address it, I’ve never really got the recipe right. I’ve tried to do ‘20 More Things’ and I’ve tried to do ‘The 20 Things Updated’ and I’ve tried different approaches to it. I even tried to do one that was turning those 20 things into actual strategies, so, ‘You should do this’, rather than ‘Here is something to know’. And it never really felt like it worked.

But then I was doing a talk in the Netherlands, and one of the guys at it said, ‘What would the book be like if you wrote it now?’ And I thought, well that’s a good question, I hadn’t actually thought about that, because there wouldn’t be 20 things, there’d only be one, and that one thing is, this idea of the Internet as a conversational medium. The way I put it in the book is, this is a conversation. And that became the starting point of, when I first started writing it, it was called The One Thing You Must Know About Music And Everything Else Online, which was a bit of a mouthful, but actually because I ended up writing, I’m writing another book for a traditional publisher, an academic book, called Radio In The Digital Age, I thought it would be nice to have that mirror image, and just call it Music In The Digital Age. So I’ve started there, and I’ve written this kind of, here is my idea about the Internet as a conversational medium, and while I’m at it, what the hell, let’s revisit the 20 Things, but within the context of a larger book, which I’m still in the process of writing. So I’ve kind of got those bits out of the way, here is what I think about the Internet, particularly as it relates to music, and here is me just going back to that book and saying, you know what, here’s what I think about that now. And now I kind of feel like I’ve removed those shackles and I can move on and publish the next bit now.

A: Going back to the shackles for a minute, actually when I read through Music In The Digital Age and I was looking and comparing that with 20 Things You Must Know, I was trying to figure out whether you think it makes sense to… So are you assuming in Music In The Digital Age that someone has familiarity with the previous one, or would you think it would be, in the part in Music In The Digital Age where you write, addressing the 20 Things and referencing what you’d previously said, whether that makes sense to go, whether you think… the best thing to do is start fresh? Or whether, like assume that…

D: I kind of struggled with that…

A: …you know what I mean? So many other things start with, Well I said this five years ago, and it kind of relates, and I was thinking, hmmm - you know what I’m saying, right? You know what I’m getting at?

D: Yeah, I did struggle with that. I thought, do I repeat myself, or, and actually what I ended up deciding was, what the hell, I’ll just put the 20 Things book up on Leanpub as well, and if people want to look, I’ve already written it, they can just look at that, and they can have it for nothing, and that’s fine. So it kind of feels like you don’t need the 20 Things book. If you have read the 20 Things book, then this will make sense, and if you want to read the - well in the original book I said ‘This is what I feel about it now’, and you go ‘Really, he said that, let’s go and see what he actually said in detail’, and you can actually read the whole thing if you want to, because it’s all just there. And I thought, in fact, one of the things that I thought of doing was 20 Things 2.0, which actually takes the individual things, the individual chapters, from the first one, and then intersperses the update version, and actually having that as a different edition if you like. I haven’t decided not to do that yet, I just haven’t done it yet.

A: Something that assumes that the other, has one paragraph saying, ‘By the way, this is an old, the old version exists here, but let’s just ignore it from now on and just go from scratch and just talk about the ideas rather than the relationship of the old ideas to the new ideas. Yeah, I know what you mean.

D: Here’s the fun bit. With something like Leanpub, I can play with these ideas.

A: Yeah.

D: And I can just change my mind about it, or I can put things up and I can experiment. And if it doesn’t work, then I’ll just kind of, you know, that’s fine to leave it there, I mean I’ve published books that I imagine nobody will ever want to read. And when people do, it’s thorooughly gratifying, and, but the thing is you’ve go the opportunity to kind of play with it and test things as you develop them.

A: Yeah, exactly, that’s the whole idea of Lean Publishing, is being able to publish while you’re writing, get feedback from actual people who are invested, like literally invested because they paid money for the thing, and they want it to be good, right?

D: Yeah, well, that’s the thing, even that thing on pricing has been a complete sandbox for me, all the way along. What is my book worth to people? And I’ve sort of come to some weird decisions about that. The less I charge for it the more people seem to want to pay! Which is kind of nice.

A: I like that we both independently came up with sliders!

D: Yeah.

A: Because that seems like the new, the slider is the new text input for how much something should cost.

D: I think so because, and actually this is, somewhere that I’ve seen, I can’t remember where I saw it, but I’d really love to do it, is, that as you move the slider to the right, there’s a frowny face that turns into a happy face.

A: Ha! We were joking about having a plate of food - you move it to the right and you get a better dish, and a glass of wine, and stuff, and when you move it to the left it turns into like a hamburger, and then a half-eaten hamburger!

D: That’s kinda cool. But my tech skills are fairly limited and I’ve got a friend who helps me out, but it’s really just kind of a favour, so I thought, just a nice simple slider would be the way forward.

A: Let’s talk a bit about some of the ideas in the book. You’ve written about the relationship of music and commerce. Tell me about that.

D: Here’s the thing. I think people have this really weird idea that music as culture and music as commerce are in opposition to each other. That if you add the commercial element to something it ruins it, or if you just think about music as culture, you haven’t understood its commercial potential, or whatever. But I kind of step back from that and go, actually, music is culture, but culture is just what people say, make and do; that’s all culture means. And commerce is a subset of what people say, make and do. And so, music being commerce is part of music being culture. And it actually pays to understand the broader cutlural aspects of music in order to be able to make the most of it from a commercial perspective. Because music makes money for people to the extent that music makes meaning for people. I think the same can be said about books, too, actually. The more meaningful they are in people’s lives, for whatever reason, whether it’s identity or memory or whatever it is, the more those things will link into how many copies you’ll sell. And that’s true of music, it’s true of books, it’s true of all sorts.

A: Yeah, that’s why when you talk about things being a conversation, how you see releasing music, and then interacting with your listeners, and releasing a book and interacting with your readers - the same type of idea obviously…

D: I think the analogy breaks down a little there, because what musicians… what writers do is they write books. But what musicians do, making recordings is such a tiny part of what they do. This activity of being a musician, what Christopher Small calls ‘musicking’, isn’t reducible to locking yourself in a dark, windowless, airless room for three months while you make these idealized versions of what you think your songs should sound like. And then sort of selling them as commodities - that’s kind of a small part of it. And I think what’s really interesting about the online environment, is you have an opportunity to find other ways for people to make meaning from what you do, and find other ways for them to give you money for that.

A: In terms of interacting with your fans, how do you think the use of things like Twitter differs between writers and musicians?

D: I think Twitter’s really interesting because people think of it as a technology, but the more you use it, the more the technology disappears, and you start to realize it’s just human beings having conversations with each other. And this idea that ‘This is my online strategy, I want to use Twitter and I’m going to use Facebook’, is like saying, ‘This is my direct mail strategy, I’m going to use pens and paper’. What are you going to say, is the more important part, and how are you going to engage with people, and I think the fact that the online environment is a conversational space means, alright, well then I’ll have conversations. How do you have conversations? Well, you listen to people, you join in, you don’t stand on a chair and shout, ‘Look at me, I’m amazing’. I feel like, that as a social space, Twitter’s quite a bit like a bar, really. And you can kind of join in conversations, or you can hang back, or you can just say things to yourself in a corner - or you can stand on a chair and shout about how amazing you are! This retweeting praise thing is really interesting, it’s like, ‘Hey, did you hear about what this guy said about me? He says I’m awesome!’ You just wouldn’t do that in that social situation. It’s that kind of - when you think about the online environment as a conversational space, you actually, and this is why I said you only need to know one thing about music online, because actually all those 20 other things follow logically from there. If you think about it as being a conversational space, you’re not going to screw it up.

A: [laughter] Right, yeah, I’m really guilty about the retweet stuff about Leanpub! When people say nice things about Leanpub, it’s like, retweet! So I guess I do lots of the standing on a chair…

D: But you’ve got something to push, something to market. It’s a weird space to be in. Because being an organization is not the same as being a band.

A: Right.

D: And yeah, it’s funny, you get these bands’ Twitter accounts, you don’t know who’s talking, whether it’s the drummer or the singer or the cute guy, or whatever. And so there’s this kind of faceless, corporate entity just going ‘We’re amazing, check out our video, look at our… and there’s nothing engaging about that, and actually it turns into something quite boring, quite quickly. I think if you’re an organization, if you’re a company, there’s a reason to have a corporate, authorial voice I guess.

A: That is weird.

D: Yeah it might be different for small organizations. I kind of like the idea of ‘Peter from Leanpub’

A: Scott and I both tweet. Scott tweets stuff; I tweet stuff. We have our Leanpub one, but it’s weird, we have that for stuff like, ‘Hey, we’ve had a problem with our book generator’, or sometimes Leanpub often retweets nice stuff people say - but Scott and I tend to do things more individually as well. It’s kind of like, the account kind of functions like a tag. If you say something about @leanpub, then you know Leanpub is involved, and it becomes…

D: …it becomes part of the conversation. And there’s an opportunity to engage as an organization. I mean, we’ve got a New Music Strategies account. Unfortunately, New Music Strategies is too long to be a Twitter name so we’re @thisisnms, but the @thisisnms account almost never tweets, because we’re like Steve Lawson, and me particularly. I mean, Steve Lawson tweets more than any person alive! You follow him on Twitter and you’ve got to be prepared to balance that with other people, you have to actually start following more just so it doesn’t seem like it dominates so much. But he says some really cool and interesting stuff. But we look at the ‘corporate’ account, if you like, for New Music Strategies Twitter account, and we’re not really sure what to say there. So it’s funny, because we’re a group of individuals who happen to work together, but we have our own voice. And I guess if we were in a bar, we might have conversations with people that might be about New Music Strategies, but aren’t from New Music Strategies, if you see what I mean.

A: Exactly, and that’s what, when you’re talking in your book, Music In The Digital Age, about how the digital age compares to the electric age, right, it’s the same idea…

D: Yeah, for sure, And the electric age is all about broadcasting. It’s about, make one sell many, it’s about centralized production and then mass distribution, it’s recordings, it’s broadcasting. Whereas the digital age, I think the thing that characterizes it, is that it puts that within a conversational space. Marshall McLuhan says this thing about, the content of any new medium is its predecessor. So people think they’re watching TV on the Internet, or reading newspapers online, or whatever - that’s not TV, that’s not newspapers, that’s the Internet, and actually it’s a completely different context when it’s within there. And they become social objects, which is something I’m going to talk more about in the book. But they become the things about which the conversation takes place. So, I think the two main ingredients on the Internet are conversation and the things about which the conversation takes place. And the way that you have success with music, if you want to distribute it and get it out there, is the extent to which it makes significant meaning for people to want to take it and have conversations about it. Being shared is more important than being distributed, if you like.

A: Speaking of that, one idea when I was reading through your book is, twigged the idea for me, the notion of ‘digital native’, and that’s gotten bandied around a lot lately. Do you think that’s a legitimate and valuable term, or do you think it’s full of itself, and overblown?

D: It’s a valuable term in the sense that it distills a really simple idea. But it’s not actually descriptive of anything real in the world. It’s one of those things where you say, ‘I’m a digital native’, and it just means, ‘I know how to use computers’ - which is like saying ‘I’m a driving native’.

A: I’ve heard the stupid version, which is, people who were born after Google or after Facebook or whatever, somehow are magically, since they’ve for their entire lives these things have existed, that they somehow understand digital things better than people who, were born before Google.

D: That’s true of any technology though. There’s a great Douglas Adams line about, anything that was invented before you were born is part of the natural order of things, anything that was born between your birth and the age of 30 is something you could get a job in, and you could learn and probably become quite comepetent at, anything after that is of the devil. But that’s true no matter when you were born. I’m going to be 45 this year, so I’m not, on paper, a digital native, but actually I’ve been using computers, like immersed in computers, for the last 20 years. And I’m not a computer programmer, I’m not a code monkey, I’m not a technical person, these are just tools that I happen to have found useful, and have used over the last 20 yars. And so, I’m a digital native in the sense that, this is where I spend all my time. But, I mean, ‘digital native’ is not interesting, it’s like saying you’re an ‘electric native’. It’s like that thing about driving: you don’t just press the button and pull the lever and look in the mirror, and indicate and pull out, and turn the handle or whatever, you just drive to your friend’s place. Once the technology disappears, it just becomes the way in which you do things. So, in a sense, that kind of makes you native, but at the same time it means that the technology’s not the interesting bit. Being digital is no more interesting than being electric. It’s just, what do you do, and how do you communicate, and how do you get on with other human beings.

A: That makes sense. Speaking of tools and how you use digital tools, how did you find out about Leanpub, what made you try it?

D: Actually it was one of my colleagues at the university who suggested it. He works in the music department… well, we’ve got different departments, I teach music within the media faculty, but, there’s some really good research going on in our conservatory as well, who do the composition of music and performance of music. And there was a guy there, we were talking about online publishing, and he said, ‘Have you tried Leanpub?’, and I said ‘No’, so I had a look, and it ticked all my boxes when I went there, and it just kind of seeemed to do the trick.

A: Cool. So tell me about your third Leanpub book. How To Make Wishes That Come True.

D: Yeah, that one was kind of interesting. I’ve got a friend, Stef, who now lives in London, who’s one of the most remarkable, imaginative, creative people that I know, who is also a really amazing coder, who’s been involved in startups and so on. We did this for a while on a Friday, once a month we’d get together and we’d try to do a startup in a day - like an online, like build it and release it into the wild and see what the world made of it, and then if we got bored of it… and if it took off we’d work on it, and if we got bored with it, it would wither and die. There were a few that we did that were quite interesting, but one of the ones that we did that we liked was called “I So Wish.” And what “I So Wish” was, essentially it started out, well let’s just get people, can make wishes on the website - the end. “I wish I had a pony!’, and publish, and then it would go up, and there would be a big stream of people making more wishes. And then, people said, Well, I want to be able to do things with these wishes. And other people said, Well actually, you know what, that person who wished that, I can actually grant that wish for them! And we thought, there’s something interesting here. And so we spent a little bit more time on it, and we developed it a little bit more, and we got to the point where it was a real commununity. It wasn’t huge, but we had quite, you know, several hundred people were posting, and helping each other out, and then we were granting points for people who were particularly helpful to people - so rather than being, just sort of idly wishing things, we actually made a community where the whole point of it was to try and grant other peoples’ wishes.

It was a really cool thing to do. Like for instance, one woman posted that she wished that she lived in the US, and she was in the UK. And this guy from the States said, Well actually, I’ve got all these spare Air Miles, why don’t you use those, come over and check out some properties. Stuff like that was happening. Some of it was really moving stuff, people in tragic situations, and people coming together and really helping them. So it was a really exciting thing. Of course neither of us had the time or the money or the energy to spend on it, and it’s sad, I’d really love to revisit it later, but it withered and died.

But the really cool thing about it was, it sparked a whole lot of other things. And we were kicking around ideas about what we could contribute to it, and what we could do, and I can’t remember why, but I spent 24 hours in bed sick, but still conscious enough to write something. And so I said to Stef, Since I’m stuck here anyway, I’ll see if I can write an ebook, and we can sell that on the website. Everybody seemed to like the ebook that I did on New Music Strategies, let’s do one for here. But I didn’t want it to be this kind of wishy-washy, you know, because it’s a book about wishes, you know, very quickly you go down that really dodgy path of, if you just close your eyes and wish hard enough the universe will grant you everything you want. Which is nonsense.

But I thought, well actually, if you think about it right, wishes are just, it’s just goal-setting. It’s like, I want the world to be in this way, it’s not yet, and how do I go about doing that? And so what I did was rather than saying, Here is a goal-setting workshop, or saying, Here’s a book about wishes and fairies and pixies and whatever, it was Here’s how to make wishes that come true. And that was the core. This is like real wishing. This is the way that I want the world to be, I wish, whether it’s lose weight, or get a particular job, or have an amount of money, or write a book, or whatever it is, you know what it is you want to have about the world to be true that isn’t true at the moment.

OK so how you make wishes that come true is you start with the wish, you make sure it’s a good one, you make it’s one that’s real and practical and achievaable and measurable, and all the things that people tell you goals should be, but then you actually set in place steps that take you towards that. And in that sense it’s really kind of basic goal-seeking workshop stuff. But it is a workshop. Here’s how to make wishes, here’s how to make really cool wishes, and here’s how to make really cool wishes that come true, if you actually are a bit real about wishes, rather than just, I wish I had a pony with, whatever, pink tassels.

A: It’s funny, I just retweeted something from Tim O’Reilly; Tim O’Reilly tweeted something from Werner Vogels from way back in 2006, about how Amazon does products, and the notion of starting by writing the press release and then backing out to FAQ and thinking about that sort of company version of the same thing, thinking about what does this look like when it’s done, and describe exactly why… describe the thing completed, and then backing out to thinking, well how did it get there…?

D: That’s project management, it’s Gantt charts, it’s where do you want to end up, when do you want to end up there, what has to be true before that happens, what has to be true before that, so you can just kind of take the steps backwards, and it’s not, it’s the furthest thing from magic. But as soon as you put the word ‘wishes’ in the title, people are going to get the wrong idea, so it’s not the greatest piece of marketing in the world, and it’s not a terribly successful book either! But it’s one that I’m quite pleased with all the same, because it does actually take you through this process. There’s some friends of mine who’ve used it for things like losing weight, or, in fact one of them used it for writing a book, which was just, These are the things that I want to be true in this amount of years, and I’m going to go and set out and do it now.

A: Yeah, just working backwards; that’s nice, I like that…

Back to Music In The Digital Age. It’s been translated into a lot of languages, or been translated into a lot of languages already, and so tell me about that, and how the process is going…

D: That’s been really cool. When I put out 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, a few people approached me and said, Can I translate this into my language? And I went Yeah, knock yourself out, fine, help yourself! And so they would go away for six months, and then come back and go, I did it! And present it to me and I’d go, Cool, and put it up on my website. But what I thought would be good this time, because I want the book to almost be an experiment in the kind of things that I talk about, so, I said, well if anybody wants to translate this book, let’s translate it as we go. You’ve got the opporunity with Leanpub to publish it in progress, why can’t we translate it in progress as well? I’ll write the next bit and publish that, you translate it, when that’s ready we’ll publish that, and we’ll just kind of tick along. And I thought, I wonder how many languages I could probably do? And so I went through a list of a) the people I know who speak other languages to start with, and then b) what are the most common spoken languages in the world? And I ended up with a list of between 25 and 30. And of those so far I’ve got 20 under way, and five of them I think are already in a state ready to be published. There are some that are just people getting started now, but I’ve got a Greek version, a German version, Spanish, Portuguese, and Estonian up on the website already. Dutch is almost ready to go, there’s a few others just waiting in the wings, and as it happens. But there’s no rush - that’s the thing about this. When people are ready, we can put it up. But what I’ve done is, to try and make it worth people’s while, because I can’t pay them to go and do translations, but if people are giving me money it would be churlish of me not to share it, so what I’ve said is, if you want to translate it into your language, whatever we sell of your language version, I’ll just split you 50/50. And people seem happy with that, not because they think they’re going to make lots of money out of it, but because that seems fair.

A: Right. Actually I have a question about translations: Since it’s being translated as you’re writing it, have you found that in-progress translation has affected the development of the original, in terms of, if one of your translators asks to clarify certain ideas, or how something possibly translates?

D: Yeah, totally. In fact there’s a chapter in the book that I had not thought of writing because the way in which I describe something doesn’t make sense in translation to every language. Which is this idea of ‘media’. Because in English, ‘media’ is the plural of ‘medium’, but there’s also this thing called ‘the media’, which is a single entity. So rather than trying to explain it each time to the translators, as they came across it, I ended up writing a chapter that said, When I say ‘media’, this is what I mean, this is how I think about it. But actually that turned out to be a really helpful clarification, and in fact that’s what I’ve had the most feedback about, That was really helpful, because all of the other stuff you talked about, I kind of had a vague idea of what you meant. Because I’ve got all these ideas - I’m in a Media Studies department, I’ve been studying media for the last 12 years, and I understand what I think of as ‘media’, but I don’t explain it very well, I sort of start as this, well, the digital media are these things, and the electric media are these things, and, What to you mean ‘media’? And you have to actually answer some more fundmental questions about what that means and how that works and how to think about it. And actually that’s made me write something better, because it was essentially untranslatable.

A: Hmm, that’s interesting.

D: The other thing was, because, when I started on Leanpub, what I would do is, I’d publish something, and then I’d go back to the first bit and I would change that and republish that, you know, updated version, but of course I need the early stuff to be canonical, so that the translators don’t go, Oh, he’s changed that, I have to translate that chapter again!

A: I was actually going to ask you about that, because I ferociously, when I write, revise old stuff, and I was trying to figure out, if that had impacted what you were doing, if it was making you hesitant to revise your older writing in the book, or whether you were just going to be like, if you’re signed up to translate, then this is what you’re in for…

D: No, what I’ve done is, I’ve decided that, what I’ll give the translators, is the stuff that I’m 100% on. So I’ve published more than I’ve given to the translators to translate, but I’m 100% happy with it. At least the first half-dozen chapters of the book will not change now. Because it wouldn’t be fair to anyone that’s tranlsating it. But by the same token, the stuff that I’ve done - I just published a couple of weeks ago, and then when I was doing the audio book, I went through and noticed a bunch of mistakes, in the latest stuff - you know, typos and stuff, and little things like, a whole chapter missing, and so I had to go back and go, actually this version that I published a couple of weeks ago, that isn’t right, let me re-publish another one. But of course the stuff that I’d changed hadn’t gone to the translators yet, so they’re about six to eight weeks behind what I’m doing.

A: That’s interesting. It’s reminiscent of a lot of things. For example, in software, unit tests are a good thing, but then the more tests you have, then when you make a change, that changes what the thing does, you have all this extra work to change the tests, which you have to do, but, yeah, the more derivative things that are based on the current reality of what something is, the more inertia… You have to decide what you’ve committed to and what you haven’t, right, which makes you think harder about what you’re doing…

D: The great thing for me is that this is a really great experimental space. And nobody dies if I mess something up, or if I do it wrong, or I change my mind about something. But, what you’re doing, is this kind of, iterations of a software service. Lots and lots of people are using the service, and lots of lots of people are banking their livelihoods on it, so there’s a little more pressure on you than there is on me to get it right with each iteration. But if I publish a version of my book which is nonsense, or which is wrong, or has bits missing, or it just doesn’t work, as a book, people will barely notice. So I’ve got this kind of freedom to try and make it as good as I can possibly make it, but also go, What happens if I do this? What happens if I try this experiment? What happens if I completely change the way I price it, for instance? What happens if I ask people to translate it, can I do that? So it’s been a really interesting experimentation, with, not music obviously, but a creative practice in the digital space, that I can take lessons from. In fact, on New Music Strategies we did a podcast which was essentially about pricing, based on some experiments Steve and I had both done, Steve with his albums and me with the books. And thinking about what pricing means, in an online environment, and how people express what they consider to be value in monetary terms. And you just saying, Well it costs this, and that’s all it is, isn’t necessarily the right answer any more.

A: Right, yeah, your books all have, all three of your books have a free minimum price, and a fairly low suggested price. Can you go into the details of what you’ve found so far, and what the thinking is?

D: Well I’ve tried a few different price points, and I’ve tried a few different recommended prices as well. I really like the idea that people can get my book for nothing if they want to. It’s a digital thing. If they really wanted it for nothing, they could get it for nothing, so I might as well be the person they get it for nothing from.

A: Yeah.

D: But by the same token, I don’t want to make a presupposition that my book has value to anybody. And if it does, great, and if they want to reward that value, fanstastic. So this idea of a recommended price is kind of cool. But what was really interesting, when I first decided, you know what, I’m going to make it minimum zero, if you want it just have it, and if it means something to you you can pay for it, and if you download it and never look at it, then why would you have paid for it anyway. So zero’s cool, and it also means that if people who need my book, who need the advice, but actually can’t pay for it - I mean I do a lot of work in South America, and countries, and India, and places where people just don’t have money, who don’t have PayPal accounts, and for me to say, Well you can’t have this unless you give me money, is sort of cutting out a large proportion of people who could find what I do useful in their lives. So that was my reason for making it zero.

But when I first put the recommended price at five dollars, just to try it out, because five dollars seems like a reasonable amount, and people didn’t really download it. Because I think they thought, and this is my reading of it, they thought that, Well, I need to pay five dollars. I’ve got five dollars, but this is not really what I want to spend five dollars on, or at least I’m not 100% certain that I want to spend five dollars on it. So I know that I can get it for free, but, I’m not going to. So a lot of people just didn’t download it when the price was five dollars. And that’s some anecdotal evidence of that. So I lowered the recommended price to $1.99. They could have put $1.99, but I put the recommended price at $1.99, which is basically a cup of coffee, or not even that, but, what it means is people go, Oh, it’s only $1.99, I’ll just, it’s that sort of impulse-purchase app thing, which is what I’ve based it on, it’s like, $1.99 is an impulse-buy app that you might use for two days and then you get bored with. And so people go, It’s only $1.99, I’ll check it out. And then they go there, and they go, Well I can’t just give $1.99, that’s really mean, I’ll give five dollars! And so what’s actually happened is, the more I move the recommended price to the left, the more likely people were to pay more than what the original recommended price was. And so, the lower, I don’t know if this is kind of, you know, if you put it at one cent, people would pay $100 -

A: We actually can’t. The floor is either zero or 99 cents, right.

D: Right, because you’ve got this PayPal account. So let’s, if you’re going to pay, I’d kind of like to give a little bit at least, so let’s not give it all to PayPal, so let’s make it $1.99 as a recommended price - you can pay $0.99 if you want, but, it’s just, you donating money to PayPal, essentially.

A: And that’s why we put the royalty slider there, is to show people what you’re getting. We’re trying to show, look, you drag it to the right and look how much better it is for the author.

D: Yeah, for sure, because it is that sort of percetage plus 50 cents sort of thing, which you know you can do the maths visually by moving the slider around, but, it’s really interesting, the number of people who, since I’ve put the recommended price down to $1.99, have paid ten dollars, has been really interesting. Nobody paid ten dollars when it was recommended five. The people who did pay, paid five.

A: Yeah, exactly. If you’re asking for something, then there’s less opportunity to be generous.

D: Exactly, yeah. And I think if you cater to people’s generosity, then that’s a really interesting, you know, situation to be in. But the other thing that I do, is, if people want to come back and pay for it, that’s cool too, and I encourage that in the book. If you start from the basis of, pay what it’s worth, you’re not going to know what it’s worth until you’ve read it.

A: Right, and so you have this thing on your website…

D: Yeah. And so if you want to come back and pay me, that’s on the website, I’ve got a thing now on my website, there’s the slider there of course, but I’ve also put, you know, Here’s my Amazon Wishlist - if you’d rather just buy me something nice, that’s cool too! And so you’ve got this opportunity to indulge people’s enthusiasms, and indulge their generosity, and I’ve had - I had a couple who produce music in the States, came to my website, moved the slider around, and ended up at $75, and gave me that.

A: Nice!

D: …and ended up getting a Skype call out of it, and we chatted, and I gave them, did consultancy with them, and that was really cool. But this sort of thing where, you don’t get to… what my book is worth is not up to me, as far as I’m concerned, as a kind of a cultural text if you like, it’s only valuable to the extent that it’s meaningful to people. And so this is opportunity to experiment with, what does that translate to in terms of an economic transaction.

A: Yeah, we’re thinking around, we’ve had a couple of people say, Hey, I’d like to be able to come to Leanpub and pay more for the purchase afterward. And so you’ve obviously just provided that functionality yourself, but, this is one thing we’ve been thinking of doing. We’ve had people ask is to build it, to let us do that -

D: Because people could just buy it again -

A: But people don’t want to do that, it’s weird. We’ve had people say, I want to be able to modify my purchase so that I’ve paid more, instead of just buy another copy.

D: It is, because it’s a discursive thing, it’s a statement.

A: Yeah, exactly.

D: And the other thing that people don’t want to do, they don’t want to donate.

A: Yeah, they want to buy the thing.

D: They want to buy the book. But they want to, they want to have bought it for more, after the fact.

A: Yeah, and some people want to let the author know who they are. Is that something you’d be interested in…?

D: Yeah, for sure. Some authors will be interested from the perspective, Well if you let me know who they are, then I can market to them, I can sell them other stuff, I can, they can be on my mailing list. And I’m less interested in that. But I actually just want to be able to say Thank You to people! You know, to say, I’m really glad you found that interesting. At the moment, people who want to, they can drop me a note, I’m sort of the most findable guy on the planet, they can go through my website, they can catch me on Twitter, they can send me a message and go ‘Hey I’ve got your book’, but I find myself going, Hey somebody just paid ten dollars for my book, whoever that was, thanks a lot, that was really cool. And I’d really love to be able to do that in person. And so from that perspective I think, it’s not about knowing who they are, but actually being able to go, to make an individual piece of communication just to say, Thanks, that’s awesome!

A: So for us - I’m doing customer development here, and I’m trying to figure out, I think there’s some feature here, we’ve had a couple of ideas and I’m trying to get a sense of your take on it. We’ve had some authors who want to see names of everyone, but we want to keep the purchase form simple, so that people don’t have to think about how social they’re being when they click the button that buys the thing.

D: And also, by the same token, every time you go into a shop, you don’t want to tell the person your name…

A: Yeah, or else you go to IKEA and they ask for your postal code, and it’s like, No, I don’t want to. But the flip side is, I can see, after the fact, people wanting to let the author know either who they are, like name or name and email, or…

D: Well, my contact details are in the book, if people want to let me know who they are, they can let me know who they are. But I just think at that point of transaction, to have something that’s a little more than just a standard automated response - “Hi, thanks for purchasing!” - that’s meaningless. But if I, because I get these email notifications from you guys that say, ‘Somebeody just bought your book, we’re not telling you who!’ - but if somebody just bought your book for X amount, to have a link on that that says, “Thank this person” -

A: That would be really nice.

D: Yeah, that would be really cool. So I could actually type a - ‘Hey thanks very much for checking it out, if you want, here’s some information about me, be glad to hear what you think of it, etc.’ - to have that as a real person interaction rather than just an automated response, I think that would be really cool.

A: And if we did that, would you be fine with that, like even if we kept the thing right now where we don’t share emails, you could just send them a message -

D: I actually prefer that.

A: Yeah, we could make the Reply-To be from you. I want to, we had that thing the other day, where someone sent, occasionally people have sent us emails, thinking they’re emailing you, and so, we could do something where we set the Reply-To header of our email, be like you, and so you could send someone an email saying, ‘Thanks a lot for buying my book, that’s really generous’, and it would come from Leanpub, but it would be Reply-To Andrew Dubber.

D: Yup.

A: That’s actually a good feature, I like that.

D: I would be more happy with that than you telling me the name and address and contact details. Because, from a privacy perspective -

A: …No, that’s why we’re not doing it. It would have to be opt-in, and if it’s going to be opt-in, it has to be after the fact, so we don’t clutter up the Buy button. But, it’s like, just because an author is like, I want this information - Well, yes you do, but you’ll also sell a lot less, and you don’t want that! And also, as a reader, I don’t want to provide that, if I’ve just tried to buy something anonymously and read it.

D: Well that was one of the central statements of the 20 Things book, which was, fewer clicks - you want people to give you money, get out of their way!

A: Yeah, exactly. I like this idea, I like that idea a lot. We should look into that closely…

Just a couple more things. So you’ve done a lot of things on Leanpub. What’s surprised you the most about using Leanpub so far?

D: You guys. Just how responsive you are, how helpful you are every time I’ve got a problem. Like, I’ve got a, the translation thing is causing you guys headaches -

A: Ha, Hebrew! Holy crap, it’s like, really, we’ve hit this point already?

D: But that’s the thing. To actually go to an online startup service that provides something that’s so incredibly useful, and you go, ‘Oh, I’ve got a problem with this’, and the guy who coded it says, ‘Well let me help you with that’ - that’s awesome! And I think for me, that’s been the biggest surprise and the biggest delight, actually, from working with Leanpub, is you and Scott just kind of getting it right in terms of having conversations like human beings.

A: That’s really nice to hear, thank you. Is there anything that you wish, is high on your list of what we can improve or fix?

D: Well, it would only really benefit me, it’s the Hebrew translation’s going to cause me all sorts of issues, because it’s right-aligned and it doesn’t play very well with Markdown language, and that sort of stuff, so figuring out a solution to that’s sort of top of my list at the moment, but it’s probably at the top of nobody else’s.

A: [laughter] I think you’re about right on that!

Well, this has been very interesting for me. Andrew, thank you very much for being on the Lean Publishing Podcast and for being a Leanpub author.

D: No problem at all. Look, if you want anything from me, just give me a shout.

A: Thanks.

Leanpub Podcast Interview #6: Amanda Taub

2012-05-17T09:30:00-07:00

Amanda Taub is the editor of the Leanpub book Beyond Kony2012. She is a lawyer who teaches International Law and Human Rights and Fordham University. She blogs at wrongingrights.com.

This interview was recorded on May 7, 2012.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml.

Armstrong: I’m here with Amanda Taub how is a lawyer who teaches International Law and Human Rights and Fordham University. She blogs at wrongingrights.com. She’s also the editor of the Laeanpub book Beyond Kony2012, which has been recently excerpted in The Atlantic. We’re going to talk today about Amanda’s blogging, about Kony2012, and about her book Beyond Kony2012, about her experiences as a writer, and about her experiences using the Lean Publishing approach on Leanpub.

So, Amanda, thank you again for being on the Lean Publishing Podcast.

Taub: Thank you for having me, I’m happy to be here.

A: First of all, I’d like to say that I really like the titles of your writing. I think one of my favourites is “Solving War Crimes With Wristbands”. Do you have a favourite title out of everything you’ve ever written?

T: You know, I’m honestly not sure if I have a favourite title. Choosing titles is one of the hardest aspects of writing for me. I never have managed to do all of the things that you’re supposed to do with blog post titles, in terms of key words and SEO, so I usually end up with really esoteric things. But the “Solving War Crimes With Wristbands” one was actually not something I can take credit for. Max Fisher, who is the international editor at The Atlantic came up with that one, and I think he did a great job.

A: Let’s talk about your blog. So you started your blog “Wronging Rights” at wrongingrights.com with Kate Cronin-Furman in 2008. How did that come about?

T: So, Kate and I have been best friends since we were very young; we met in high school. And she and I were both working at big law firms in New York City and, as you’ve probably heard, the life of a junior law firm associate can be difficult at times, and both of us had a real interest in human rights work. So, we started this blog as a way to have an outlet for our interests, and a way to kind of stay involved in that field, even though we were both doing more general litigation work. And it’s been a wonderful experience, it really grew from there.

A: Cool. The tagline for it is “Very Serious Commentary on Very Important Issues”. Obviously rights issues are very important, but I take it from the Winnie the Pooh-style capitalization and the content that you’re not too impressed with the role in the media and its typical level of commentary.

T: I think that’s probably fair to say. The very “Very Serious Commentary on Very Important Issues” was definitely tongue in cheek. We tend to take a fairly kind of humorous, sarcastic approach to the mass atrocities and other terrible things that we write about, as a way to try to avoid getting involved, getting bogged down in the sentimentality that is really easy to get lost in when you’re writing about things that are that terrible and that serious.

A: Right. You’ve also recently written a few blog posts about Kony2012, including my favourite, ‘The Definitive Kony2012 Drinking Game”, as well as a couple articles for The Atlantic, and then the Boyond Kony2012 Leanpub book. Can you take me through that series of events?

T: Sure. We had actually been writing about Invisible Children for several years. The Kony2012 video that they put out was not the first thing that they’ve done on this, they’ve been working on this issue for many years. And they’ve always taken a kind of simplified, almost pop culture-based approach to the awareness-raising and the advocacy campaigns that they’ve done, and Kate, my co-blogger and I, have always had some pretty significant concerns about that. So, when the Kony2012 video came out and became so viral so quickly, the critique of Invisible Children also went viral. So the first thing that happened was that a really old post of ours from, I think, early 2009, suddenly got more hits than almost the entire rest of the blog combined in the last year, and it happened to have gotten picked up by a couple of the sites that were doing kind of ground zero for the critique of the video, and just kind of spread from there.

A: Was that the one with the picture, with the people…?

T: Exactly. So that was a photograph taken by our friend Glenna Gordon, who’s a very talented photojournalist, and it just shows how this kind of thing is driven by media and events. She took this photo of the three Invisible Children founders posing with guns they had borrowed from South Sudanese rebels at the Juba peace talks, and no news organizations were interested in it at all, because Invisible Children wasn’t really in the news at the time, and so she ended up letting us publish it on our blog. And then, years later, the post went viral, the photo went viral, and it all of a sudden was everywhere. So, that happened, then we followed that up with our drinking game post, because you know, God forbid we be substantive, but we tried to use the drinking game as a sort of humorous way to point out some of the issues that we had with this video, in terms of who was allowed to speak, who was treated as having agency, namely the kind of young, attractive white people from San Diego. And then contrast that with the portrayal of Africans, particularly Ugandans, who… the only Africans portrayed in the video were of course the rebels themselves who were demonized, and pretty rightly so, and then this young boy, Jacob, in some footage from many years ago, when he was still a chiid, discussing his own experiences as a former child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army, and what had happened to his brother. But even that conversation didn’t put his experiences at the center, it was really about Jason Russell, the Invisible Children founder who made the video, and his sort of heroism. So he, it was about him making this promise to this child, and you know promising that they were going to stop the Lord’s Resistance Army and save the children, and he was literally interrupting this child as he was trying to tell his story. So, the drinking game was designed to draw attention to some of those things in a somewhat fun way. We definitely didn’t intend it to be an acual drinking game! I don’t think a human being could survive all of the things that we suggested.

[laughter]

A: So then, from there, what led you to the Beyond Kony2012 book and also the articles in The Atlantic, how did that come about?

T: So, the Atlantic articles developed pretty organically, we had been in touch with Max Fisher in the past, he’d kind of emailed us in the past for our perspective on some other things, but we’d never written anything for him, and he emailed us and said he’d seen the drinking game post, and would we like to write something for The Atlantic that didn’t involve quite so many swear words and dangerous activities. And we said of course, because we think that’s a great publication. And so we did that, and then we were also getting at the same time a lot of media requests, a lot of people were asking us to go on radio shows, podcasts, TV shows, and we realized that we were over and over saying the problem here is a lack of context, a lack of nuance, this is giving an oversimplified version of this conflict in a way that’s actually harmful to policy and the attempts to achieve a resolution to the conflict. But there wasn’t a resource out there to improve that situation. The information wasn’t really available in a packaged way that was accessible to people who didn’t have a background in African Studies or Political Science or something of that nature. And so I just decided to put one together. I reached out to some of the other people who were commentating on the video, and asked each of them to submit a brief essay grounded in their own kind of experience and expertise, and we put it together in about a month and then released it to coincide with Invisible Children’s “Cover the Night” poster day on April 20th.

A: And what made you choose Leanpub for the book, and how did you discover Leanpub?

T: So, you guys had been on my radar for a while, I’d actually bought a couple of your books I think. And I think the first place I saw you was through the Venture Hacks website, although that wasn’t actually a book I ended up buying, and I just thought your model was really great and it seemed like it would be a really good fit for the book that I was putting together. Because we were putting it together so quickly, I knew there was a chance that not everyone would have their essay done by the time that I was going to release it, so I really liked that you had the option of kind of adding and changing the content over time, even after the book had been published. I also really liked your flexible pricing option.

A: Cool.

T: I wanted this book to be accessible to as many people as possible. Obviously there were some costs in putting it together, both in terms of things like time and licensing photographs. And so I wanted to be able to charge for it, but I didn’t want the cost to be a barrier to anyone who wasn’t in a position to pay, and so I liked that I could make it donation-only by setting the minimum price to zero.

A: Right, so your book has a free minimum price, and it’s suggested price is $2.99, and it’s been out for a few weeks, you’ve got hundreds of readers and earned some money, some people are paying more than the suggested price - are you happy with the results so far?

T: I’m really happy. You know, I had set myself a pretty modest goal for this because I wasn’t sure what the readership would be like, I wasn’t sure how popular a topic this would be, it wasn’t clear whether people would still be interested in the Lord’s Resistance Army and this conflict after the hubbub around Invisible Children died down - especially because the narrative there started to spin off in a different direction once Jason Russell had his nervous breakdown. Which was very sad, but also not in any way related to what the book was about. And so I wasn’t sure how much of a readerhip there would be, and it’s really exceeded my expectations. We’ve just been marketing it through my blog and some of the other authors’ blogs and Twitter, and I think that as of today we have something like 750 downloads, which I’m really happy about, that’s really kind of exceeded my expectations for only a couple of weeks. My hope is that we can make this more of a classroom tool. I’m still expecting a couple more chapters to come in, but once that’s done, I’m going to put together a teacher’s guide, and hopefully that’s something that teachers can use in their classroom if they want to cover this topic.

A: Excellent. So, you’ve already gotten a lot of feedback about your blog posts. Have you gotten much feedback from readers of the Beyond Kony2012 book?

T: Not as much as I expected. I have gotten some. It’s mostly been very positive. A couple of more critical responses, but those have been made in person, from activists who I already knew, who read the book and felt that we hadn’t fully seen their perspective, or something along those lines. But it’s been really great to have it open up that kind of dialogue. And yeah, I think that so far people seem to be enjoying it. It was the first ebook I’d ever written, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

A: …In terms of the community aspect, would you want us to try to do more to enable community around your book, or do you think that the blog fills that role adequately for you?

T: I think that the blog and Twitter fill that role pretty well. I feel like I already have that platorm available to people, and I’ve made sure to put up a couple of posts on the blog so that people could comment in the comment section of those posts if they had something that they wanted to say. And same with Twitter, I’ve been happy to engage with people on Twitter, and definitely some of the other authors have as well.

A: Right.

T: And so I honestly think that you guys would have a difficult time matching that, especially for a book with multiple authors.

A: Yeah, we’re not trying to be Twitter. Twitter does a pretty good job of being Twitter. In terms of how we could make Leanpub better for you as an author, is there anything that you wish we could improve or fix to improve your experince getting started as a writer on Leanpub? I know it’s kind of rough sometimes.

T: You know, honestly you guys really exceeded my expectations. I had set aside an entire day to do the formatting on these posts, and I think it only ended up taking me like an hour and a half.

A: Nice!

T: So, you know, that was great. I always assumed that, you know, especially doing something for the first time, I always assumed that things would go wrong and it would be really complicated and difficult, and it was fine, I think I encountered one minor technical problem, and I emailed you guys, and I got a response in I think five minutes, and it was three in the morning, so that was amazing, that was great. And, yeah, it was very easy. I had used Markdown before, so that probably helped, but it’s very easy.

A: Did the other authors, did you import… did they write in Markdown, or did they write in HTML and you converted it, or how did it work?

T: They just sent me text files and I did the formatting myself. People were submitting things from all over the world via various word processing and rich text formats, and so it seemed like it was going to be easiest for me to just say, I’ll deal with it, rather than them dealing with the process of them formatting and me checking it.

A: That makes sense.

T: Yeah, you guys made it so easy that that was fine. I think there are maybe a couple of small things that maybe would make it a little, you know could be fun, like I used the heading format, I put the authors’ names as a second-level heading so that they would show up in the table of contents…

A: Ah…

T: …which I think you know if you’d had some way to make that slightly more automatic for multiple-authored books, that would be great.

A: That makes sense. I never thought about that. This is nice for us, because other than, we did a project, the Uncensored project, ourselves, about a month or so, more than a month ago now, but other than that we haven’t had many books following your model of one editor and multiple contributors, so we haven’t really put much thought into the formatting, but I know what you mean. I ended up making a cover page with a whole bunch of author names, like a cover image, so we should actually think about that, you’re right.

Um, are you still fine with time? I know we got started late.

T: This is fine.

A: So, let’s talk about more about the Kony2012 and Beyond Kony2012. Who should read Beyond Kony2012? Who’s your ideal reader?

T: This book was written for people who had watched the video and wanted to learn more, and didn’t know where to start. So it’s designed for lay readers, you don’t have to have any background in anything to do with the conflict or political science, anything like that to be able to get a lot our of this book. The authors all consciously avoided things like jargon and acronyms and made sure to explain everything pretty clearly. I think it would be great for the casual reader who’s seen the video and wants to learn more about it. Also I’d love it if it was used in classrooms. I’ve been contacted by a few different teachers to ask if I think it would be appropriate for high school students, and I think the answer is yes. Especially given that they were essentially the initial targets of the Invisible Children marketing campaign, I think they’re exactly who should be learning more about it. And yeah I think it’s just a kind of great background tool for people who are interested in learning more about this specfically, or interested in thinking more about advocacy, and how we can ethically put together good advocacy campaigns, ethically use awareness campaigns to approach the issue of massive human rights violations that are happening outside of our own countries - which I think is something that we need to pay attention to more, now that that kind of activism is becoming so much easier.

A: Yeah, with the Internet. One reaction I had, in terms of the video and then the book, and the commentary, from my perspective, I think there are many flaws with Invisible Children, and the video, and people’s reactions to it, I’ve kind of seen it as kind of the Twilight or the Hunger Games of advocacy. Well, it’s terrible to reference The Hunger Games, but -

T: I loved The Hunger Games, I have to say. Maybe it’s the Twilight.

A: OK, maybe it’s the Twilight of advocacy. So, my question though is, despite all that, do you think the world is better off for the video having been done, the way that it was done, even given the way it was done etc., do you think the world’s better off for the video having been done and gone viral the way it did? With everything that was involved with it?

T: You know, honestly, I don’t think so. I think that, I would love to be able to say yes, and I think that there’s a real urge to say, “Well, people got this small amount of informaiton and it’s better than nothing.” But I actually disagree with that. I think that this wasn’t just information; this was a very specifically targeted campaign designed to provoke a political response, and to do so in what I think was a pretty irresponsible way. They were putting out this narrative which had a very, to say the least extremely narrow view of what was actually going on there. I think you could make an argument that it was actively misleading. And it’s designed to provoke a US government response. I think that you have to have a responsible attitude towards using power in that way. They’re asking for military intervention in a long-running regional conflict in a very unstable part of the world, and I don’t think they were really that honest about the potential consequences of that. Who we would be working with, what that type of military intervention necessarily looks like. When you say, Kony needs to be apprehended, what you’re really saying is you need to send an army to surround him and his army of people who were unwilling combatants, who have been forced into combat, and have a battle with them. And frankly that is in many ways the best-case scenario, because it’s not clear that you’ll even be able to track them in the area of the world where they operate. It’s very likely that that kind of military operation will provoke serious reprisals against civilians; in the past that’s exactly what has happened. And I think that the video doesn’t take responsibility for any of those outcomes. It doesn’t even hint that they’re a possibility. And I’m not really sure that that is ethical or fair, either to the people who will suffer the consequences, if that indeed does happen, or to the supporters who watch the video and are told only about the potential positive outcomes of their actions, and not about the potential negative ones. I’m not really sure that it’s fair to kind of include people in something like that, without really giving them an understanding of what you’re asking them to do.

A: Hmm. So, another idea I’d like to talk about is the idea of standing, because that’s an interesting idea, and the idea of armchair critics. So you’ve discussed the notion that people who criticize the video have been unfairly attacked as armchair critics, which is an ad hominem attack, and then the flip side though is that people for the video are also in their armchairs. And so you’re saying that’s hypocritical, right?

T: I think I had two concerns with the “armchair critic” criticism that was bandied about here. The first one was that the vast majority of people who are criticizing this video were not armchair anything. They were people who have been working in this region of the world, in many cases actually working on peace negotiations with the Lord’s Resistance Army, people had devoted significant portions of their career to trying to end this conflict, and to call them armchair critics, as compared to the people from Invisible Children, who have also been actively working to end this conflict - I think, to me, that indicated that by “armchair critic” they didn’t really mean, “We don’t think you’re doing anything,” they meant, “We want to listen to the person who is most like us and has made a heroic sacrifice.” So, these kind of young kids from Invisible Children who went off to Africa and promised to be heroes, and made this film, it’s a great heroic narrative, especially because they did have the option of just staying in the US, and leading a comfortable life, and just going to law school, like me. And instead they decided to found this NGO and devote their careers to ending this conflict. And, I think that if we focus too much on those people, and say that only people who have made those types of heroic sacrifices get to speak about an issue, then you end up really narrowing the field of who is allowed to talk, because that means you don’t listen to people who are from the region, who didn’t make the heroic sacrifices because they’re just living it, that’s just they’re lives, you don’t listen to the people who work in a quieter way, who are academics or government negotiators working on peace agreements or things like that, people who don’t place themselves at the center of the narrative, and don’t kind of trumpet their own experience in that way. And I think that that’s really unfortunate. So that was one big concern with the “armchair critics” narrative, is whose voice are you shutting down by making that criticism. And then, my second one, was just to say, look, this whole campaign is about getting people who are not professionals involved in this activism. You know, people call it clicktivism or slacktivism, and I actually don’t buy into that. I have no problem with Internet-based advocacy, I think it’s tremendously powerful, and very democratic, and I think that’s wonderful. But I think that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that we want to have this democratic movement, of people who watch the video and tweet at celebrities and sign online letters to Congress, but don’t need to have any specific professional expertise, but then insist that they’re only allowed to do that if they follow this specfic expert who’s been designated on the basis of their heroic experiences. You either get to have a democratic dialogue where everyone can legitimately speak, or not.

A: Right. But, regarding that, you wouldn’t say that we should reflexively dismiss things just because the protagonist of it is, say, a blonde-haired person from San Diego, also - they have standing as well, they just don’t have any extra standing?

T: I think that’s right. I have talked with many of the people that work with Invisible Children; their hearts ar efirmly in the right place, many of them have made very signifcant personal sacrifices, including one of their staff members who was actually killed in a terrorist attack several years ago, while in Uganda working on their program. And so I don’t doubt their commitment to this, and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to be reflexively dismissed for any reason…

A: Right.

T: …but I think that it’s important to have that attitude, rather than the flip side, which is, because of their dedication, because of their sacrifice, they get more standing to speak. That’s not something I buy into. I think that all the experience in the world won’t make you right if you’re wrong.

A: Do you think, not in terms of your reacion, but in terms of some of the critical reaction - I think, some of the critical reaction, to me, reminds me of, when I learned that the most highlighted Kindle passage of all time, was “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them”. Which is from a Hunger Games book. I was like, really? This is the most popular thing every highlighted on a Kindle, ever? So do you think that some of the backlash is kind of about, maybe either jealousy, or like, kind of thinking about, of all the causes and all the videos in the whole world, that could have ever blown up this way, that this is the one that did? Do you think that there’s an aspect of sort of resentment or jealousy toward, the, not the overnight success because they’ve been at it a long time, but about of how this came about?

T: You know, I honestly don’t think so. Because most of the people who have been making this critique are in the same position as my blog was in, which is, they’ve been making it for years, and the critique didn’t get any attention until the video got this much attention.

A: Right.

T: But that’s the only thing that has changed.

A: Oh, OK.

T: I think it’s just that both things suddenly became more high profile. And in that sense, I think that it’s been a really good thing, I think it has opened up the debate about this kind of advocacy from being something that happened only inside a certain sub-section of the aid and human rights community, and opened it up to being something that included more people, included more mainstream commentators, included more people who were sharing critiques on Facebook and Tumblr, and I think that is wonderful.

A: But for something to get mainstream it’s got to get dumbed-down though, right? Like everything mainstream gets dumbed down.

T: And that’s true. And there are a lot of people, I think Nick Kristof is probably the most notable champion of the idea that making something mainstream is itself important enough to make it worth dumbing down. And I don’t agree. Because I think that you can simplify things in a responsible way, but past a point it becomes irresonsible. You’re leaving out important information, and if you’re asking people to make a decision based on that information, especially a decision about something as important as the use of military force, which is, you know, a super big deal, there’s a minimum amount of information that I think people need to have to make a responsible decision about that. And if you are the person who is putting out the narrative, asking them to make that decision, and actively dumbing it down, actively simplifying it beyond the point where they can make an informed decision, then I just don’t think that’s the right thing to do. And that’s a losing battle for me to fight…

A: You’re an amazing optimist.

T: I am an amazing optimist.

A: So you think that I can make a viral video that wasn’t oversimplified?

T: No, I’m saying that if you have a choice to make between your video going viral in an oversimplified way, and a video that doesn’t go viral and maybe doesn’t have the policy impact that you would hope it would, but is more responsible, I’m saying I think the right thing to do is choose the second one.

A: Ah, OK. So it’s like a Utilitarianism versus Kant kind of thing. That’s interesting.

T: Yeah, you know I think there’s this idea out there that awareness is in and of itself so powerful, and has some sort of magical ability to end mass atrocities, that making a viral video is in and of itself a legitimate goal, no matter, kind of, what needs to be sacrificed along the way - and I just really question that. You know, I think that it is - no, frankly nobody is totally clear on how that’s supposed to work! But really the general theory is that you build up enough pressure among people in America and other Western countries to put pressure on our own governments to then put pressure on the governments of the places where this is happening, or do things like send troops to assist in a military intervention, or something like that. And I just really question whether that’s the right thing to do. You know, by placing ourselves at the center of the narrative, especially in the policy decision, it really changes the incentives for what types of policies are suggested and pursued. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a video like that gets a lot of traction for something like, capture him and send him to be put on trial at the ICC, whereas the people from the region of Central Africa where this army actually operates, there is dramatically less support for a military intervention; partly because they don’t trust the militaries in question, for good reason. They themselves have committed really terrible human rights abuses. And partly because it’s their own brothers and sons and daughters who have been kidnapped by this rebel organization, and they know that a military solution means that a lot of those kids are going to get killed. And so there’s much more support for a negotiated peace that would allow the lower-level soldiers to return home to their families, and that’s completely missing from this type of narrative. And I think a big reason why is that if you want something to go viral, you need your single call to action. It’s true whether you’re running an advertising campaign or a viral video advocacy campaign, and it’s hard to shape a call to action for high schoolers sitting in the United States that centers around a negotiated peace in a different country involving several different nations in the region. I’m not even sure what that would say.

A: Right, yeah, well that makes sense. Well, Amanda, this was very interesting for me!

T: Thanks.

A: I think that given this, and then the couple attempts we had getting started, I think I’ve probably taken up enough of your Monday. So thank you very much for being on the Lean Publishing Podcast and for being a Leanpub author.

T: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been great to talk to you.

Leanpub Podcast Interview #5: Manuel Kiessling

2012-05-17T08:00:00-07:00

Manuel Kiessling is the author of the Leanpub book The Node Beginner Book. He is a software developer and IT manager living in Berlin, Germany. He’s interested in Behaviour- and Test-Driven Development and Agile practices.

This interview was recorded on April 13, 2012.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml.

Armstrong: I’m here with Manuel Kiessling, who’s a software developer and IT manager living in Berlin, Germany. He’s also a Leanpub author. We’re talking today about Manuel’s experiences as a writer, about his experiences using the lean publishing approach on Leanpub, and about some of the interesting experiments he has done with marketing and bundling his book.

So Manuel, thanks for being on the Lean Publishing podcast.

Kiessling: Thanks for having me here.

A: So, you’re the author of the Leanpub book The Node Beginner Book. What’s it about?

K: It’s a beginner introduction, from a beginner to beginners, for the Node.js development platform. I started it as, more or less, kind of an experiment. I started writing it to myself, for myself, because there was, it was like about one year ago I started the book, and at this time there was a lot of information on the Internet regarding Node.js but it was really very cluttered. There were some examples there, a small tutorial here, and I wanted to put everything into one place and so I started this book.

A: So, how’s it going so far?

K: Oh, it went extremely well. I finished it about ten months ago, and it was kind of a success, because it was on Hacker News, for example, two times, and was featured there, and brought a lot of inquisitors, and right now I don’t work on it actively, only small bug fixes or answering comments on the website and stuff like that, and yet the visitors, the user numbers are still increasing week by week, and so it’s developing quite well.

A: And it has also translated been into Chinese on Leanpub. So how did that come about?

K: Well, people asked for it. At the end of the day, it’s an open source project, even if it’s not software, but text. It’s under a Creative Commons licence so people asked if they could help out, some people just forked it on GitHub and started translating and then got in touch with me when they were finished, and all I had to do was release the book on the website. And for the Chinese version, because China is quite a big market, obviously, I decided to also create a Leanpub book from this version.

A: Another interesting thing with the Node Beginner book is that you’ve done some experiments selling it as a bundle along with another book. What led to that?

K: I’m not really sure who had the idea. I think it was you guys bringing up the idea…

A: Yeah, I don’t remember either…

K: …but, you know, Pedro Teixeira, wrote another excellent Node.js book, Hands-on Node.js, and he also sold his book on his website and then came LeanBundle and it sounded like a good idea to bundle the beginner tutorial and the more advanced and reference style book together.

A: Right.

K: And it worked out fantastic. This is what really, really accelerated sales a blot.

A: Yeah, we’ve seen, as you know, that the bundle has more sales than the individual book. And actually, so much so that, as you know obviously, we’ve let people on LeanBundle know, but haven’t publicly talked about it, that what we’ve decided to do is basically shut LeanBundle down and make it into a feature of Leanpub. And the reason for that is that your experiment with Pedro has gone so well that we realized more Leanpub authors should do this. Just like, for example, with Leanpub, with variable pricing, once we realized how good that was, we thought, well, more Leanpub authors should look at doing that.

K: Absolutely.

A: With variable pricing, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on pricing. For your book and for bundles and just generally what you think about book pricing.

K: That’s a very interesting question, and to be honest I never really thought about it. It just came from my guts - so how should I price the book, how should I price the bundle. People here in Berlin that read my book and the web page said, a lot of people actually, said that I should make it way more expensive, because people read the web page, where the text is available, and if they decide to buy, they do it to say thank you, and surely they would be willing to pay a lot more. As you know, we never really experimented with different price tags, so no experience here. I think, well in my case, my book isn’t that long, so I think it should clearly be below the ten dollar line, but that’s just a feeling. I couldn’t make any experience with this.

A: Yeah, it’s interesting, with your book and Pedro’s book for example, one thing we found with variable pricing on Leanpub is that, for example, if you set a suggested price, that’s around double the minimum price, or even triple, then a whole bunch of people pay more than the minimum price. And some of them even pay more than the suggested price. Recently we’ve had a couple of books bought for 50$ and 100$ respectively, and the suggested price was like ten dollars, something in that range. People will overpay, not overpay as in they were overcharged, people will voluntarily pay more than the minimum price, it’s a really interesting phenomenon…. When we migrate your LeanBundle with Pedro over to Leanpub, we might actually want to revisit that, because, both of you might be leaving… Well pricing is hard! The variable pricing we found helps a lot, because we realized that authors were leaving a lot of money on the table with fixed price. But still, it’s an interesting experiment.

What has surprised you most about Leanpub, your experiences with Leanpub and LeanBundle, so far?

K: Well, maybe this sounds stupid, but what surprised me the most is - it works!

A: [laughter]\

K: That it works at all. You know, selling my own book, if you had asked me one year ago, I would have said yeah, maybe ten people buy this book? And it works so well, and it’s such a good user experience, especially the new page, the new Leanpub pages, are really beautiful, and it works so well, and I never thought that.

A: Interesting; thank you! We’ve got a designer, as you can tell, recently, to work on Leanpub, and so it’s not just programmer-designed anymore, it’s actually designed.

K: Yeah, design is the cheapest awesome money can buy.

A: I know. It’s fantastic… So, in terms of how we could improve Leanpub for you as an author, is there anything that you wish we’d improve or fix?

K: When we talked about pricing, I wanted to say, that the interesting thing is that as an author, like myself, you are a technical person, you are a programmer, and you aren’t into marketing or stuff like that. But, it’s changed a lot, with the release of the book, with the book sales and stuff like that. And although I didn’t get into price marketing decisions and stuff like that, the one thing I really developed over the course of the last month was, you know, working with Google Analytics, thinking about SEO, I never thought about SEO before, and now it’s like, yeah, to be honest every single day I have to go into Google Analytics and look, oh, OK, this works better than that, and if I add Google +1 then this works better for search, and stuff like that. So, I could imagine that a lot of authors experience this, once they publish their book and have the traffic and have the sales. It’s so amazing to look into these numbers and to see the relationship between web traffic, sales, pricing, texting, all this kind of stuff, so, I think this is an area maybe that could be even more integrated into Leanpub. You know, provide numbers. You already add the possibility to put a Google Analytics tracking code from the author into the Leanpub sales page, and maybe there is even more to this, you know?

A: I was going to ask you about this, because this is one area where we know we need to do more. So, you use Google Analytics, so do we, and we let you out your code in. Are you using that feature?

K: Yeah, I’m using it.

A: One thing we thought about is A/B testing the minimum price…. No, not the minimum price, I said that exactly backwards, I mean I mean A/B testing the suggested price. We feel that A/B testing the minimum price is bad because some people will get upset if they paid more than others, like if they weren’t able to pay what someone else paid, but we think that letting authors A/B test the suggested price would help a lot. Would that be something you’d be considering trying?

K: Absolutely. And I would go even further. You know, I learned a lot by, the book text remained the same over the course of the last year, I played a lot with layout and the other text, on the web page…

A: Right.

K: …and it would be cool to do this in a certain range with the actual sales page.

A: A/B testing About the Book.

K: A/B testing the price, and maybe also putting up different texts, playing around with the layout, maybe this is something that’s worth it, you know.

A: A/B testing About the Book. We’re also looking at being able to embed video onto the book landing page, letting authors put in to their About the Book and About the Author, like video as well, which gets embedded.

One other question I have is do you want, with your book, do you want Leanpub to try to faciliate more community around your book, or do you see your blogging and Twitter as filling that role adequately?

K: Yeah, I think so. I think most of this happens - you know this is the difference to the more traditional publishing. You know, suddenly the author is a real person, who answers questions in the comments section, who’s on Twitter, stuff like that, and, well I can say at least for me, I don’t really see a need for this kind of community around Leanpub because it would probably split the community a little bit. Like, here is the book page itself from the author, here is Leanpub, there is a small community there, the other community is there, I’m not sure about this…

A: Right.

K: …but maybe, for all those that don’t already have a following, and a community, or don’t want to invest their time into this kind of stuff, maybe for them that would make sense.

A: Maybe, we actually as you know went kind of back-and-forth on that, we did a bit of stuff, but we realized it was kind of half-baked, and the authors who were doing it really well were just using Twitter anyway, and so maybe we should just encourage that. Is there anything you’d feel, in terms of Leanpub books, integrating them more with Twitter and other social networs, like in terms of either encouraging readers to interact… Like now, on your author information you can put your Twitter avatar. We have really basic stuff like Hey, here’s the author’s Twitter name, but would you want more in the book driving readers toward, Tweet this!

K: Yeah, now that think about it, you know there is this About the Author section on the right side - maybe having a Twitter stream, a filtered Twitter stream box below this section, with some clever search put behind it, it could refer to everything on Twitter, where people talk about this book, or the author talks about the book, that would be awesome, definitely.

A: OK, that sounds easy, and helpful. Do you have any advice for someone who’s blogging about - because for you it transitioned really well - for someone who’s blogging about programming topics and considering writing a book?

K: Yeah, I thought about this lately, a lot. I’m currently, probably if my time allows I’m going to blog about this too. And the bottom line is, I don’t know if this podcast allows any swearing, but…

A: Go for it!

K: …the bottom line is, just f—ing do it. So often, before, I thought, you know, in the past, when I had an idea, or I learned something and wanted to write about it, so often I thought, you know, Oh, but I am a beginner myself, and nobody’s going to listen to me, and maybe if I write something and it turns out, maybe it’s not wrong, but it’s not the best solution, you know I have to wait for the best solution before I can write something, yeah, that’s true on the one hand, but on the other side, just f—ing do it. Maybe if it’s not the optimal solution, if it’s not the best out there, there are still, there are always people below your own level. Even if there are a million people above your own level. And this is what I think, this is what really changed with the Internet, or with the World Wide Web, is that now everybody can learn from everybody. Maybe if you are, if 99% of your time you are the student and you need teachers, there is this 1% where you can be the teacher for other people, even if you have to learn a lot youself. And so this is what I suggest is just write stuff, write about stuff, accept that maybe it’s not perfect, you will get the feedback and you can discuss it and correct it later, and everybody can be a student and a teacher at the same time.

A: Yeah, there’s a phenomenon about that, where the better you get at something, the more unsure of yourself you are. It’s not … you know what I’m saying, shoot, I can’t remember what it is now … but you know where people who are completely incompetent at something overestimate their abilities, whereas people who are really good at something often underestimate their abilities?

K: Yeah, the Dunning-Kruger effect?

A: Something like that, yeah, it’s related to imposter syndrome, but not the same thing.

…I have one more question. When you started the Node Beginner book, Leanpub, the idea with Leanpub was to write in HTML, but now we’ve switched to Markdown, and your book has gotten converted. How did that go? How is that for you now?

K: It’s perfect. You know, the web page obviously is still HTML, and now that the text is finished, I didn’t take the time to convert it to Markdown, but I do a lot of stuff in Markdown, and it’s the way to go. It’s way better. I had a hard time with the HTML, not related to Leanpub, but to the overall page, and it’s not so good for the translators for example, they have to fiddle around with my HTML stuff, and Markdown is the way to go, definitely.

A: OK, excellent. Thank you very much Manual for being on the Lean Publishing Podcast, and for being a Leanpub author!

K: Thank you.

Leanpub Podcast Interview #4: Reg Braithwaite

2012-05-16T15:00:00-07:00

Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite is the author of four Leanpub books: How to Do What You Love & Earn What You’re Worth as a Programmer, Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity, What I’ve Learned From Failure and Steal Raganwald’s Book!

When he’s not shipping Ruby, Javascript and Java applications scaling out to millions of users, Reg “Raganwald” Braithwaite has authored libraries for Javascript and Ruby programming such as Katy, JQuery Combinators, YouAreDaChef, andand, and others.

He also writes about various subjects and sometimes dives into the code. He is known for his popular programming blog.

Follow @raganwald for updates.

This interview was recorded on April 5, 2012.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml.

Armstrong: I’m here with Reginald Braithwaite, who is a software developer and well-known blogger. He’s also the author of four Leanpub books, all of which have been created since November 2011. We’re going to talk today about Reg’s blogging, his books, his experiences as a writer and about his experiences using the lean publishing approach on Leanpub. We’re also going to talk about ways we can improve Leanpub for him at the end of this podcast, since Leanpub is a lean startup and we’re doing the customer development process of listening to our customers. So, thanks Reg for being on the Lean Publishing Podcast.

Braithwaite: My pleasure indeed.

A: So, a few days ago, you wrote a fictional resignation letter which made the front page of reddit and Hacker News – and its clarification also made Hacker News. So, tell me about that.

B: Well, I wrote a parable, some people call it satire, I just thought it was a parable. And I didn’t actually write, you know, put huge disclaimers, “This is Fictional” and so on, I just relied upon the kinds of people who read the kinds of things I write to sort it out. And, yes, the vast majority of people who read it were perfectly aware that it was a parable, or satirical, but a small number didn’t – and my observation is that when people believe something, their personal, emotional investment in that belief is proportional to the amount of, to the size of the leap of faith they have to make to believe it. So if I tell you that, you know, Lisp is a profoundly enlightening programming language that will forever change the way you write software (I’m borrowing something from Eric Scott Raymond there), but I don’t actually provide you with any evidence, but you try Lisp and you feel that way, you can become very emotionally invested in this idea even though you don’t actually have much evidence for it. And this is something I have observed in a lot of fields not just technology. And I did get a bit of a backlash from people who complained that it was fictional. They even used the word “fake” which… I didn’t debate with anyone on the internet, but I think to say something is fake implies an intent to deceive….

A: Right.

B: …as opposed to saying something, the word I prefer is fictional. But I understand how people feel, because there were people who made an emotional investment. They weren’t actually presented with a lot of evidence that it was a true person who had truly resigned. If anything, the opposite: I’d left a number of clues that, you know, in retrospect for most people were quite obvious that it was fictional. But when people make that emotional sort of investment in believing something without a lot of evidence they can get upset when that belief is overturned. I’m sure listeners to this podcast can extrapolate that to a lot of other areas of their lives.

A: Yes. Actually, this leads me into the next idea. Your blog posts often end up on the front page of Hacker News, and there’s quite often a lively discussion of them there and on other community sites as well. How has this feedback loop impacted your writing? Like, I know that for example, they’re not always going to be misinterpreted so much, but you get a lot of feedback right away as you write quite often, it looks like.

B: Yes. First I want to say “it looks like” and I think this, if I may be so bold, I’m not an expert on Lean-anything – my midriff certainly backs that up! – but my observation is that people have asked me: “So, you know, how come all your posts are on the top of HackerNews?” And there’s a remarkably flawed assumption in that question, which is that all my posts are on the front page of Hacker News. That’s not true. Very few of my posts, in proportion, are on the front page of Hacker News–it’s just that I write a lot of posts.

A: Right.

B: I’m prolific. And as a result, say only 1 in 10 makes it to the front page of HackerNews. Well if I write 10 a week, I’d be on the front page of Hacker News every week. I mean I’m just making numbers up; I haven’t actually studied it, but the underlying principle – and I’ve in fact written one of my blog posts, called “Write” of all things, speaks to that very subject. I believe, and I think this is relevant for people who are interested in lean publishing, I believe that one of the things about the way we currently aggregate news, opinions, referrals and so on, whether it be through Facebook, Hacker News, Twitter, reddit and other mechanisms for sharing attention, sharing eyeballs, this bottom-up idea, this idea of crowd-sourcing attention – which is different than the way broadcasting works, where a few people decide what you want to see, a few people decide what movies to watch this weekend, a few people decide what’s printed in the newspaper. When you have this aggregation thing, you sort of ratchet up the “everyone gets their 15 seconds of fame” concept.

A: Right.

B: And because of that, I believe that–and I don’t think this is something that, I mean some people, you know, game it, it’s part of their business - search engine optimization, social media optimization, but I think for people who are looking to write, whether it be software, or whether it be words, or whether it be podcasts, I think there is a real incentive today to turn up the volume. To write more often.

A: Or make extreme statements even.

B: Well, I try to stay away from that to be perfectly blunt.

A; No, I wasn’t talking about you, I was just talking about in general you see, like, you know, “10 Reasons why Apple’s going to die tomorrow”…

B: Absolutely, people do that, people have done that, but that was true when print media ruled the day as well. You know, I mean, trying to be controversial. Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Springer, and so on. I agree with you about that. But I was speaking to the fact that in this day and age I think there’s more of an incentive to try experimenting. To write more often, to try writing different kinds of things.

When you’re writing, and this is an example I gave before I even knew about lean publishing, and please correct me if this doesn’t fit the lean publishing philosophy, but I believe that when you are writing a “dead tree” book there’s this enormous investment in it, which means you have to be enormously conservative. The turnaround time on making a change or an edit is massive. So, dead tree companies spend so much time on, what you might call, up-front quality control. There are editors that review, you have the schedule where you write all the chapters. Whereas when you’re blogging, you just blog. If somebody points out a flaw in your argument, you could take the post down, you could modify the post, you can correct your spelling after people have seen it, after it’s on the front page of Hacker News.

So you asked about the turnaround time, and I believe that there are two factors here. One, the feedback loop is much tighter because you don’t have to wait months to publish a book and get it out there and then read reviews. The feedback loop is tighter, number one. Number two, I think people tend to forget your failures and remember your successes. Now I won’t speak to what happens if you’re writing incredibly offensive things that people, you know, that are notorious, or just notable. But if we’re talking about the difference between stuff that is mediocre and exemplary, stuff that is forgettable and memorable, people remember the memorable stuff. So if you write 10 blog posts and 9 of them are kind of like “eh” or “meh” (I think is what people say on the internet), but the 10th one strikes people’s fancy, that’s what they remember.

A: Yes.

B: And so, I think for whether you’re measuring your success in terms of the influence you’re having over the future of the human race, or the attention you’re getting personally because that gratifies you, or the money you’re making through a venture such as Leanpub, I think the circumstances are such at this time in history and the internet that you’re rewarded for doing things which have a tighter feedback loop, and which allow you to be more prolific. Personally, I find that works for blogging, and when I stumbled upon Leanpub it clicked with what has been working for me as a blogger.

A: Right. Actually, how did you find Leanpub? How did you run into it?

B: Quite honestly, I don’t remember. From the time that you said ‘Hey, let’s talk about this,’ I’ve been sort of, I did some quick searches to try and find out, did someone email me, or something, I strongly suspect I found you through like a Google search or something. But I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember.

A: It’s interesting.

B: I ought too, but I don’t!

A: Actually that’s really neat in some ways, in the last few months we’ve run into a lot of people who’ve heard of us, and that’s a new experience for us at Leanpub… So, you’re the author of four Leanpub books, and you found out about Leanpub somehow, and then what made you decide to get started with your first Leanpub book, about combinators?

B: Well that one was a very natural fit for me, because what it was, for the benefit of the people that are listening to this and have better things to do than follow my writing, it was a series of blog posts that I actually wrote as a connected series. Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics and computer science, and it’s of deep interest to people who are interested in computer science, but it also has extraordinarily practical applications when applied to programming. It’s not so much a revolutionary ‘you can do things you couldn’t do otherwise’ but it provides a programming style. And people occasionally dip into it, the very popular jquery library for people doing client-side JavaScript, for example, is based very much on combinators, on a subset of the possible combinators. Raymond Smullyan has written a book called ‘To Mock a Mockingbird’ where he exposes this in a sort of recreational math and puzzles form that people find entertaining, and I wrote a series of articles about how this could be applied to Ruby programming in practical terms. And I was already doing that with my blog, and they were already connected,, so every time I wrote a new article about them I always kind of a little table of contents, ‘if you’re interested in this, you’ll also be interested in these other articles,’ so they were already in a form that made sense to package together in a book-like form. I’ve been approached many times since I started blogging to write a book of one kind or another, usually some sort of advanced Ruby meta-programming book type thing, and once I saw the Leanpub concept it sort of clicked for me, literally, that’s exactly what I want to do. I rejected all these all these other things; they just didn’t make sense. I have a copy of a dead tree book by Joel Spolsky, which I like, I mean amongst other things it doesn’t need batteries, and it’s easy to read in the smallish room of your house. But, you know I never wanted to go through the process of writing a dead tree book, and it’s not even a question of the economics - I can always use more money, and I don’t know why I turn down advances - but the Leanpub thing just clicked for me as something I could try, experiment with. The extremely low barrier to entry was a huge win for me. Huge, huge win for me. I currently publish all of my technical essays on GitHub where I was already using Markdown, and I had done this a few years ago, I fell in love with Markdown, specifically because it prevented me from - does this interview have to be safe for work?

A: No, go for it.

B: It prevented me from dicking around with formatting. Markdown is just like, this is what you can do with it, and it makes sense to know what to do about bolding things and emphasizing things and doing quotes and headings, and after that, stop dicking around and write.

A: Yeah, exactly. We added support for images, but similarly it’s like, we don’t support layout options or anything, you should be writing, not laying out your pages, this isn’t a newsletter, like stick it in a cafeteria, right, it’s words.

[Editor’s note: Markdown supports images obviously. What I meant was that we added support for external code samples using a similar format to the syntax for images. The full podcast audio had this correction at the end of it, after the interview ended.]

B: That’s exactly what attracted me. I used to have a conventional blog, where I could do tons and tons of formatting things, and I switched to blogging on GitHub for a number of reasons, and one of them was it forced me to just focus on the words.

A: Right.

B: It was a worse-is-better, sparse, simplified approach, and it really worked for allowing me to be more prolific. I could just bang out more words. I now also use Posterous, I have two blogs, the technical stuff is still on GitHub, and the non-technical, social observations - I don’t know why a guy who has some expertise with programming thinks he also knows about freedom, or politics or something, it’s really ridiculous hubris, but that stuff, I use Posterous, because it works in much the same way. I send it an email.

A: Yeah.

B: And my email client, it does allow me to bold things and so on, and actually if I hunt through the menus I can find other ways to format emails, but my brain sort of thinks that emails are mostly text. My brain doesn’t try to format things and how they’ll appear on the page and whether I could stick an Amazon affiliate ad link on there or whatever, my brain doesn’t do those things when I’m in an email client, and that allows me to write more.

A: I know exactly what you mean. We actually, at Leanpub we used to support HTML or Markdown, because we figured, well Markdown, some people might not like it, but then people tried to do lots of formatting, with their HTML, and we’re like, No, you only need the HTML that you need in Markdown, and it’s like, well then why don’t we just use Markdown? Okay… yeah.

B: Exactly. My theory is that if any of my books become extremely successful, then I will be able to do a royalty split with a designer, who can fiddle with things, and if they’re not successful enough, then I’m not going to do that, and I don’t believe that there is the case of a book that I write, where if only I formatted it beautifully, then people would buy it. I’m not in that business. There are such books, coffee table books, children’s books can be incredibly effective when you pay a great deal of attention to the design and layout, and so on, to create interest, this is not a general-purpose piece of advice for people about writing, but I think for my writing it’s perfectly appropriate to just focus on getting the words out, and then you know in the fulness of time, and I believe this is part of your philosophy, if any of these things become a huge hit, then I can reconsider going to a different system, where they are more laid out, more formatted, and possibly monetized in a different manner that can take advantage of their layout.

A: Yeah, exactly. For us, it’s like, we see Leanpub as the best way to self-publish in-progress ebooks, and, we feel that publishers have some value, but the value they offer is at the end of the process, in terms of taking something that’s good and adding polish to it, but that if you take them and bring them in at the beginning of the writing process, it can have effects that you don’t necessarily want. And also publishers are good at putting physical books into channels, something that we don’t have any interest in doing. So, what you’re saying is completely the Leanpub philosophy…

So we’ve talked about your first Leanpub book. Tell me about the other three that you currently have on Leanpub.

B: Well let’s see, from memory, I have one called Steal This Book, this is my favourite and I believe least popular.

A: Yep.

B: That one I am trying to give away, and not making much headway. So, my observation about that one is that people like free stuff when they think that it has a monetary value and they’re getting it for free.

A: Yes.

B: If you tell them…

A: If you had a one-day sale on Steal This Book where it normally cost $20, I’m sure you’d have about ten times as much.

B: That is my exact experience because I did have a one-day sale on one of my other books which was How To Do What You Love And Earn What You’re Worth As A Programmer. So, I’m going to come back and talk about that, or I assume you’ll ask me about that, because I think we both learned something from that one-day sale. The third of the other three books is called What I’ve Learned From Failure. That book I believe is the most valuable book I’ve written so far. That, I started blogging at a time when, it wasn’t even a blog, it was just essays on my own personal website, and they would get discussed in like Google Groups, the equivalent of, Usenet groups and stuff like that, and people could just follow them and could read them and then tell me what an idiot I was and so on. I was mostly writing about Agile methodologies and my experiences as a software development manager, and I wrote a book called What I’ve Learned From Failure where I listed four software development antipatterns and talked very frankly. I mean, it was one of those, sit down in front of a keyboard and open a vein, essays, it was very heartfelt, and it was my first, sort of, big internet hit. And, over the years I’ve continued to return to the theme of software antipatterns, not always in a nasty way, sometimes in a very positive way, but about things that we believe to be true about developing software, that aren’t really true, and why. And What I’ve Learned From Failure is a collection of essays that meet two tests, number one they were all popular, one kind of another, Reddit or Hacker News, I mean some of these go back to before there was a Reddit, and the other test is that I personally have a big emotional investment in them. And I think if I remember correctly that was my second Leanpub book, after Combinators.

A: Yeah.

B: And, that one, I actually, if I remember correctly, I originaly charged like ten dollars for the Cominators book, and twenty dollars for What I’ve Learned From Failure, and my theory was that the kinds of people that are interested in software development, at that level, are tech leads, software management managers, working programmers, and therefore they ought to be able to afford one.

A: Right.

B: And, you know, I have no complaints with the people who bought it for fifteen dollars or twenty dollars, or whatever I charged at the time. Over the years I also constantly got asked for advice about getting a job as a programmer, and some of the most discussed - discussed, not disgusted! - commented upon things I’ve ever written have been around either a personal passion for software development, or around getting a job as a software developer, they’re deeply related issues, or about interviewing people, and I hastily threw together a collection of those articles, which is, which formed the basis for How To Do What You Love And Earn What You’re Worth As A Programmer. But I didn’t put nearly as much work into sort of fixing up the essays and it was kind of the red-headed stepchild compared to the other two books, and sales weren’t really going anywhere with it, so what happened? Well, I wrote an essay in conjunction with your excellent work, the name of the book fails me, but you wrote a book in support of the EFF?

A: Yeah, Uncensored. We did a…

B: …_Uncensored_, yeah, that’s right, pardon me, having a senior moment here, you know, ready for another espresso, but - I wrote another essay for Uncensored, called ‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ and that one, not quite at the level of ‘I Hereby Resign,’ this week’s thing, but it actually got a tremendous number of retweets, views, discussions on Reddit, discussions on Hacker News, it really struck a nerve with people. Unfortunately as far as I can tell, they didn’t really all rush to buy the Uncensored book, which is really bogus…

A: …yeah, I don’t know…

B: …but that’s, those are the breaks, and you know I mean, our job is to lead horses to water. But it really struck a nerve with people, and I sat there, after writing it, and I had a real impostor syndrome feeling, like here I am, talking about intellectual property cartels and freedom, and I do write, I’ve written a number of free sort of programming libraries that I give away, and all of my words, I don’t think there’s a single essay or anything in one of those books that isn’t also on the web somewhere, for free. I like to think of myself not so much as selling the ideas, as selling a convenient format for them. Like I sell packaging but the ice cream’s free.

A: Yeah, I know, exactly. Basically your selling the blog, like if you just do a vanilla import into Leanpub, we’re just taking your blog and just reversing the order, basically.

B: Yeah absolutely, that’s it exactly. So I had, I’m not going to say a pang of conscience, which makes sound like I shaved my head and became a Buddhist something, which is ridiculous hyperbole, but I did have a kind of feeling about it, and I wanted to give something away. And uh, the How To Do What You Love wasn’t really doing well financially, compared to the other two, you know, first world problems here! And you know when I thought about it, it kind of had the most value in another way, different than the value of the Combinators book… I mean fundamentally that’s a, you know, you’ve already got a job, you’re already doing something, here’s a way you can do it better; but it’s not going to like help you get a job to read my Combinators book - that’s not what it does.

A: No.

B: That’s not what it’s about, it’s for people who really love their craft, and they’re like interested in it, and the What I’ve Learned From Failure is a book for people who are leading teams or aspiring to lead teams, or who are influential in that process, and again I’m sure there are some people working in not for profits and so on who don’t have a lot of money to spend on a book, but fundamentally, there’s a real economic value their that you can touch, and you know honestly if someone doesn’t want to buy it, I don’t need to give it to them to make the world a better place.

A: And most of the readers of that book are already successful. If you’re reading this, you’re a software development manager.

B: Or you’re an employed developer who wants to print it out on paper, roll it up into a tight tube, and then hit your manager with it. READ THIS BOOK!

But, How To Do What You Love had some stuff in there that really I felt like, man, if there was anything I should give away, this is it. I mean there are some people it’s ridiculously arrogant to think that there people you know whose lives will be horrible if they don’t read my words on how to get a job or how to be passionate about your work, I mean no, not at all, and you know especially when you consider that I hadn’t really put a lot of work into making it a great book, but I really kind of felt like, you know what, if this isn’t really like taking off, like give it away, let people just use it, they’re already free, but you know here’s another channel by which people can take advantage of these, and hey, if there’s one person who gets it, you know a bunch of people download it, if there’s one person who gets a job because of it, you know, or who gets another $5000 a year because there’s a tip in there about negotiating your salary, you know, or something, it’s like yeah, the world’s a better place and that’s much more important than making another fifty bucks or something in royalties. So I said yeah, let’s do it, and don’t ask me why but like I had this idea, one-day sale, you know just like, tomorrow it’s free! Go get it! And for some reason, that struck a nerve with people, it was like, ridiculous.

A: My cofounder Scott submitted it to Hacker News. We normally don’t submit any Leanpub things, but he submitted that one, because usually your stuff ends up on Hacker News anyway, and we try not to be like annoying about things. But he submitted it because wow, this was cool, and it just took off. Like, you had thousands of sales that, in terms of thousands of downloads of free sales but also paid sales that day.

B: A ton of paid sales that day. And there were people who were commenting that they felt guilty, they felt pressured, and so on, and I had to go on Hacker News and say honestly ‘No, I’m sincere, take it!’

A: One person was made about our slider, like, ‘The slider makes me feel guilty’, it’s like “yes!” We brought a designer on, and the first thing I asked him to do was, I want a royalty slider, I want it on the purchase page, I want you to drag it to see how much you’re paying, I want you to see how the royalties get affected, and we were joking about how when you drag the price down, you should like show like food being removed from an author’s plate or something, or else, we were joking about making the colour of the slider all red… And we’re like no, let’s just go for a light happy green, light grey, meh, as it gets cheaper, and I think we hit the right balance there, where most people thought it was cool, some people got angry but lots of people kinda liked it, and you got a lot of revenue from that, it was like the best day for a book, it was pretty fantastic.

B: Absolutely. It did in fact blow up, and I told people, hey, you know what, if you really feel like sending me any money, you don’t even have to like pay for this book, take it for free, and buy one of my other books. Get a twofer if you feel like spending, but - it was financially successful, which was great, and it did get - I haven’t checked this morning, but I think maybe 7600 people have downloaded the book, in total, and there have been continued, and it actually motivated me to go in there and clean some things up, and tidy it up… And then when you worked on the EFF thing, that you know it sort of struck a chord with me again, and I made the fourth book, Steal This Book!, you know there’s been a theme on my blog from time to time about freedoms, it’s something I believe in very very deeply, in the importance of information, and opportunity being accessible to everyone. I recently wrote something, which is now in Steal This Book!, it’s the latest chapter of it, which is called A Woman’s Story, which is about my mother, and about her becoming an early programmer. Some people said the first black woman programmer in Canada, I don’t know if that’s true, I haven’t done as survey, but certainly one of the earlier ones, I think she got started in the late ’50s, in programming, and you know the machine has the power to democratize us, it as I said in the essay, which is something that she told me, you know it didn’t care that she was a woman or that she was black. The machine doesn’t care that you’re in, if I remember correctly, in British Columbia as opposed to being in Silicon Valley. I mean, humans care, you make deals, and you bump into people at the coffee shop and so on, but you know the machine does give more opportunities. It’ll never be a perfectly level playing field for everybody everywhere regardless of where they came from, but the Internet and openness do create more opportunities and they give us more chances and they make it more possible for small businesses to grow into really huge businesses and so on, and I think those all of those things are important both for moral ethical reasons and for economic reasons. I think that the more open our societies have been, there are a bunch of reasons why North America has become very successful economically in the last fifty years, cheap oil for example should not be ignored, but, a certain amount of that does come down to people’s freedom to be able to start a small business, as you do, that can sell books to people all around the world, and to do so with very little friction, and you know that’s the same thing that, it’s connected in a deep way, in my opinion, to being able to get on the net and read books, and learn things, without having to pay a university to teach you something, or without having to buy a book, that you can get something for free, you know the Internet will be my childrens’ library system, and you know I’m sort of really, deeply, deeply, deeply impressed by Leanpub in that aspect, it’s not like I’ve been to your offices and looked at them, or met you in person, it’s like, wow, this is, you guys are gonna change the world - I can’t say that, but I can say that Leanpub to my, in my opinion, is emblematic of, or symptomatic of, or an exemplary example of what makes this time and place in history with the Internet, and openness, and accessibility, so special, and so wonderful, this idea that people can write words, very simply, create a book, maybe make some money, maybe share it, you know maybe make their reputation for something else, and do so with very little friction, without needing an editor, a selector, and trucking physical books, or you know, an ISBN number that you have to apply for and so on, all those things to me you know they resonate with my personal beliefs, my opinions! Let’s face it, I’m not an economist, I’m not a futurist, I’m not an expert, but I believe it’s important, and so it clicks with me.

A: Thank you very much. That’s really nice to hear. Wow.

Speaking in terms of Leanpub, for us you, our opinion about what we’re trying to do in the world, is the writer and the readers, for the writer it should be you sitting at your computer, writing words, and then you click a button, and then everything else should just happen magically, and readers should be able to get your book instantly and as often as you want, you shouldn’t have to have approval from anyone, you shouldn’t have to wait on anything, we want to be this sort of thing that enables authors to connect with their readers a lot earlier than otherwise and a lot easier… That’s what we’re trying to accomplish. And I think it’s, from what you said, it sounds like we’re getting there.

So, is there anything that you wish that we’d improve, in terms of what we have now, feature-wise, or in terms of for you as an author, or for your readers?

B: Good question. I do have a couple of ideas. First, I love the Dropbox integration, I’m crazy about it. I actually, I mean this is maybe just me personally, but I would like to see either something like GitHub integration, or in the fullness of time, with your you know staggering software development resources -

A: Ha!

B: I’d like you to build something like that…

A: We actually already had it! We had GitHub integration before Dropbox. At one point, before you showed up to Leanpub, we had two choices: you could write the book using Markdown and sync with GitHub, or you could write the book in a web browser. (We’d forked WordPress.) And what we realized was that the GitHub thing was not accessible to everyone, and the in-browser experience was terrible.

B: Yes.

A: …for a book. Like it’s fine for writing a blog post, but for writing a book it’s terrible. And so we thought, well, they both suck. Well, the GitHub we really liked, because we’re geeks too right, and GitHub made sense for us, but it’s, so, but I couldn’t tell, like my father to use GitHub.

B: Yes.

A: So, we’ve had some Dropbox flakiness recently and I’ve considered thinking hey, should we bring back Git and GitHub as an option for the technically sophisticated authors who want to be able to, say, git push, and have that trigger their book generation. Is that what you’re going for?

B: No, actually. Personally, I’m actually one of the most ignorant programmers I know. I’m just terrible with all sorts of tools and git push and forking and so on. I was thinking more, I’ve been talking to the Mozilla Foundation people lately about some of their visions, something really exciting they’ve done recently called Boot to Gecko for, boy if I use an expression like ‘low-end phones’ you know it’s like so emotionally laden.

A: [laughter] ‘Ghetto phones.’

B: For, yeah exactly, but you know what, let’s use that word, ‘ghetto phones’, because the fact of the matter is that of the six and whatever billion people on earth, at least three billion of those live in what we would consider ghettos.

A: Right.

B: So, a ‘ghetto phone’ is actually a really important thing. So, what they’re doing in Boot to Gecko, and I don’t speak for them so anybody listening to this, you know, if you in any way think ‘that might be neat but it sounds like it sucks because A and B and C,’ assume that the ‘might be neat’ is true and you should look up Boot to Gecko, and ‘it sucks because A and B and C’ is just my misunderstanding. So, if it sounds interesting, go find out more.

But, what they’re doing is creating phones that boot into a web browser. There’s nothing in between there’s no, like you boot an operating system and a web browser is one of the 27 application icons on your screen - it’s all a web browser, if there are 27 application icons, this are images that you tap on, you know, just like you were faking an iPhone in a web browser. And one of the things that’s super interesting about that of course is that it bypasses all of the big questions about application distribution and blah blah blah and so on. So, why I mention that, is that in a world where half the population of the earth had things like this, maybe they had a boot to Gecko tablet, and when I think about that, I say to myself, What are all of the things that you can’t do on a tablet easily? Well, actually, fooling around with Git is something that you can’t do on a tablet easily, it just, Git is just so tied to our conventional notions of file systems and so on it just doesn’t work. I realize that WordPress, a custom forked version of WordPress or plugin that published to Leanpub or whatever it is, you know is not appropriate, especially the way I think about Markdown and so on. But, I do hope that one day it will be possible to write a book entirely in a browser in a way that is actually closer to the philosophy of what you’re trying to espouse now. Not fooling around with all sorts of styles and so on, but being able to have various chapters, to organize them, being able to create new content, Git right now, GitHub you go online, they don’t allow you to tap a new Markdown file button

A: Yes!

B: …they allow you to edit one that exists, but they don’t allow you to tap a ‘New Markdown File’ button.

A: Yes.

B: So, I, when I say GitHub, I mean to my mind, that’s like three steps backwards one step forward, but I do hope that one day it’s possible to be able to do something like Leanpub entirely from within a browser, and I think that would make the concept instantly that much more accessible to people.

A: The funny thing is it’s actually not technically that hard. We actually use Git internally as well. Like whenever you click publish, like, we had to wipe some of our old history because we used to do this badly, but whenever you click ‘Publish’ or ‘Preview’ for you book we make a new Git version of your book. So one of our ideas is that, for example, you know, imagine someone writes a great work of literature on Leanpub.

B: Right.

A: …imagine if like Ulysses had been written on Leanpub. You know how many PhDs would come out of looking at the diffs?

B: Exactly.

A: You know, you can say well here, in this version he said this, and then 22 versions later… But, the notion of version control, trying to explain what you do as a software developer to someone who’s not a software developer, I can say look, I can look at a file from nine months ago, compared to now, I can see exactly what changed in my writing, in my code, why can’t I do that in my writing? It’s like science fiction, right, and then you say, well the answer is the reason you can’t do this, is you’re storing your writing as a bunch of ones and zeroes like as a Microsoft Word document, instead of storing it as text.

B: That’s right.

A: So, to come back to your suggestion, I think it’s really doable, in that we could just, now that we’ve just decided, Leanpub has bet the company on Markdown, we think Markdown is the way to write a book, we could expose a new ability to edit Mardown files and create Markdown files in a browser quite trivially, I mean I think there are already perfectly good, because it’s just plain text right, we could do that without a problem.

B: And there are Markdown preview libraries out the yin-yang.

A: Yeah, live preview, HTML and Javascript, you just, there you go, it’ll show you exactly what it is.

B: And you can always use the GitHub API in the backend, to continue to store these things in GitHub…

A: …h no we don’t store it in GitHub, we store it ourselves, in our own Git repositories.

B: Oh, in you’re own Git repositories.

A: We don’t use GitHub for that. What we did before - the only thing we use GitHub for is so that we didn’t have to do a huge hassle around like Gitosis and whatnot. We figured anyone who’s already using Git already has a GitHub account, and so we’ll have them add us as a like a deploy key or something.

B: Perfect.

A: Yeah, whatever, but if I tried to explain myself how to add as a deploy key you can see why this is… it’s very elitist.

B: And a lot of it doesn’t even serve programmers very well. They’re you know they’re just artifacts of history, what we’d call accidental complexity in design - you know the way these things work. But I think you get my underlying idea - I’m really excited, and I’m not saying, you know it’s sort of trivially easy if you sort of write down the raw features, you need to be able to do this and do this and do this, but to be fair, you could say the same thing about creating a touchscreen telephone, but you know there’s a palpable difference between well-designed touchscreen phones and poorly-designed touchscreen phones. And I think the concept of ‘I need to be able to write a book online using Markdown’ is a tremendous design challenge, and you know I personally would be phenomenally impressed to see it done well, and I hope you guys can pull it off. I just wouldn’t want to promise anyone, oh yeah, yeah…

A: Yeah, I’m not gonna say ‘Yeah, I’ll launch that tomorrow’…

B: Maybe you should test it, you know, that’s the ‘lean’ thing to do. What’s the smallest thing we can do that can test our ideas, that can validate this business proposition, or the value proposition, and so on. You know, more to the Lean Startup concept. But I’m super excited about that being the future of communicating.

A: Excellent, wow. Is there anything else that you can think about that, in terms of… So one thing, for example, you obviously already have a lot of people commenting on your books in places like Hacker News, Reddit etc. - do you want Leanpub to do more to try to facilitate community around your books specifically? Or, do you find that you get enough communication through all the existing channels…?

B: Right. So there’s something. So I’ve noticed, so I’m a bit of a slacker, and I just give out the Leanpub homepage. I notice other people like build their own home pages for their stuff, so, you asked me about community, and I think in order to answer, I think that’s kind of a step two, the step one is branding. Now I’m not sure everyone needs to have their own custom home page for their book. I mean maybe that’s an advanced feature where there’s a tab, for the super advanced people, down the road for you, but before I would get to community, I think a really easy way to be able to say, for me to be able to go get, you know, stealthisbook.com, or .ca or whatever, and then have to go the page you already host. GitHub has found a way to do that in some sort of awkward, nerdy programming way. And now if you go to braythwayt.com it’s actually going to take you to a page hosted on GitHub’s servers. And I would say in order for me to be excited about building a community, I’d want to control my brand, and if you could facilitate that, then I’d be super excited about tools that would allow me to build a community.

Now, all that being said, you’ll notice it hasn’t stopped me from publishing books with what’s already there, so…

A: And today you could just redirect, if you wanted to make, like a sort of no-brainer solution where we do nothing is someone can make a URL and point it, direct to like leanpub.com/whatever their book is. But I see what you’re saying, that you want to mask it so that you, you’re saying so that if someone goes to braythwayt.com/stealthisbook then they end up on your book page, or if someone goes to braythwayt.com then they end up on some sort of author page featuring you and all your books, or…?

B: I think, I’m not an expert on DNS. Given that braythwayt.com is hosted somewhere else that might not be a good example, but let’s take stealthisbook.com as an example. So I’m getting a brand new domain. I believe that this can be handled now, if instead of giving me leanpub.com/stealthisbook, you give me stealthisbook.leanpub.com.

A: Oh, we could do that today. You don’t have to do anything. That was, ironically, we went back and forth on which is better, that’s like, the subdomain, like blah.leanpub.com, that, at one point we had that approach, I’m not sure if it’s when we had the forked version of WordPress, or… actually, I think we might have even at one point not have been opinionated and we may have supported both. I know that, it’s just Rails routing, we can just do that, it’s not a problem. But the thing is, we decided people, we erroneously possibly decided that people wouldn’t care whether it’s leanpub.com/blah or blah.leanpub.com, we felt they both kind of were roughly as good, like in terms of number of characters, but for you actually, for you it’s better the other way?

B: Well, if you support blah.leanpub.com, my understanding is that you can then, you need to do one other step, and if you do this one other step, then it makes it very easy for me to create stealthisbook.ca. If you look at the way GitHub pages works…

A: Oh…

B: All you have to do is create a file called CNAME…

A: Yeah, I get it now.

B: Yeah, so that’s what I’m imagining. I’m imagining you give me stealthisbook.leanpub.com and then in your instructions you say ‘And oh, if by the way along with your Book.txt, you upload a CNAME file with this format, then it would work exactly the same way.

A: Interesting. We’ll have to talk about that, it’s quite possible.

B: Because I know people like our compatriot The Grumpy Programmer, I think he has a custom website for his book which you then click a link to come to your site.

A: That’s funny, one of our first successful books was Manuel Kiessling’s Node Beginner Book, and he set up a whole blog based, well before he made a Leanpub book he had a free tutorial, but then like he’d set up like a really nice blog… Basically, the requirement for us turned into: Leanpub book pages should not be so ugly that people set up an entire WordPress blog just to say ‘Yeah, ok, click this button!’ and that’s the point of the WordPress blog, is to click the button and then that takes you to Leanpub and then you buy it. Because like our book pages used to be horrible, and now they’re passable…

B: They’re beautiful! I like it!

A: …and, I think that, you can see that our book page looks different than the whole rest of our site, because, well, we have Steve doing design work for us, and it’s like well, what’s the most important page on Leanpub’s website? And the answer is the author’s book page, so….

B: The page that holds the ‘Buy’ button!

A: …the page with the ‘Buy’ button! Right, and the page that the author, is their face to the world in terms of their book. Right, that’s the most important thing, and so that’s what we turned Steve loose on first, and then everything else, is sort of, our sort of programmer design, and it will, you know, the rest of Leanpub will end up looking that good as well, it just has to take a little while.

…Um, wow, so, I think we’ve probably gone pretty long.

B: Yes, I’ve used up a lot of your time!

A: No, it’s been really fascinating for me, and I think for our listeners as well. Reg, thank you very much for being on the Lean Publishing podcast and for being a Leanpub author.

B: Well, thank you guys so much for creating this, and as I said, and I’m not kidding, obviously I’m not a venture capitalist, I can’t pick winners, I can’t tell you who the next Google is going to be, but I do know that what you’re doing is important, and I do know that what you’re doing is, I believe, the future of publishing. And if anybody’s gonna become, you know, multigazillionaires with yachts and so on, I sincerely hope it’s you guys.

A: Well, thank you very much.

Leanpub Podcast Interview #3: Johanna Rothman

2012-05-16T14:00:00-07:00

Johanna Rothman is the author of three Leanpub books, including Manage Your Job Search.

Johanna Rothman works with managers and leaders to identify problems and seize opportunities around how they manage their product development. She focuses on removing management and technical staff impediments.

In addition to her management consulting, Johanna was the Agile 2009 conference chair.

This interview was recorded on March 22, 2012.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml.

Armstrong: I’m here with Johanna Rothman, a management consultant who works with managers and leaders to identify problems and seize opportunities on how they manage their product development. In addition to her consulting, Johanna is also a blogger and the author of multiple books, including the 2008 Jolt Productivity Award-winning book, Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna is also producing a few Leanpub books right now. None of them are published yet, but I’ve scanned the previews of the two of them which have previews, and they look fantastic. She’s let me know it’s OK to talk about them. We’re going to talk today about her writing, her experiences so far using Leanpub, and also ways we can improve Leanpub for her. Leanpub is a Lean startup after all, and so we’re doing this podcast series as part of our customer development process. So, thanks Johanna for being on the third-ever Lean Publishing podcast!

Rothman: Well thank you so much Peter, I’m so excited to be here!

A: So, first off, so you’ve been blogging for about a decade and you have a few different blogs, so tell me about them.

R: So, Managing Product Development is really my main blog, because that’s my passion: project management program management, people management, risk management. That’s really the key: how do you actually get stuff done in the organization? But Hiring Technical People is really the predecessor, and that’s why my very first book was all about hiring, because if you don’t hire the right people, you can’t get anything done. So, my very first book was Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies and Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People. And it came out in paper in 2004. And I was having tremendous trouble getting my publisher to come out with it in anything resembling electronic form. It came out in PDF less than a year ago, and I could not get the publisher to come out with it for any electronic reader, aside from PDF.

A: Hmmm.

R: Yeah. So that’s why, that’s the book I’m working on now, for Leanpub, in Leanpub, that’s the one I’m making the most progress on. And I’m actuall doing a bunch of revisions. I’m not just doing a straight translation, if you can call it a translation from print to electronic form. I’m cleaning up the language, I’m streamlining it, I’m trying to make it, I guess I would say more electronic-friendly. So, this is why I just love Leanpub, because I get to work in Markdown, I get to actually see my book as I’m writing it, this is one of the things I love. You didn’t even pay me to say this, right?

A: No! I’m just sitting here smiling.

R: I get to see it as I’m doing it! And this is one of the things, I just love it. And you know I had a question about, how do I do sidebars, I sent an email this morning, you responded a couple of hours later, and this is one of the things I realy love. I get to see my product as I’m developing it. I don’t have to wait three months, I don’t have to wait two weeks, I get an answer the same day as I actually ask the question. Now I may not like the answer, I still think you should put boxes around my sidebars…

A: And we actually might! The answer was, ‘Scott’s on holiday this week, please don’t make me do it!’

R: Yeah, I’m gonna nudge you until you put boxes around the sidebars. But, that, even if you don’t, I still have something that works.

A: The funny thing, the thing I’m actually working on next on my queue is actually parts, which is the other thing that you and someone else both asked for within about one week, and I was like “Yeah, we need parts.” Ironically, we’d actually thought about adding parts, and then we thought, no, minimum viable product, we shouldn’t do it, and also we didn’t want to, we thought originally about making h1 be part and h2 be chapter, but we thought that for everyone who didn’t have parts, that all their HTML with h1s would have parts, so then we’d have to convert h1 to h2, and so we went down the path of no, we shouldn’t have parts. But then we realized some people need parts, at least some people do, and so we need to add that in as some kind of special syntax instead of h1 obviously, h1 has to be chapter.

R: Yeah, and if you just said to us, “a part has to be this, and a sidebar has to be that”, and then when you sent me an email that I could do a tip is this and a warning is that, I thought Oh, how cute! So I get to, right, so I actually really like the fact that you guys monitor the list and you respond right away, even if I don’t like the answer, I have an answer. So I get to see the book as I develop it, I get to work in TextMate, which I really like, I get to work in Markdown, which I really like. I mean, Word is fine if you’re going to do an article. Word is a terrible thing if you’re going to write a book, because you can’t move stuff around, you can’t organize your stuff, you can’t organize your thoughts, you can’t organize the pieces. Word is the wrong program, the wrong application, for writing a book.

A: Oh, totally.

R: I’ve written a few, so, at least for me, I know what I need to do to write a book. So, Word is not the right application for me. So it’s really great. You know, it’s funny, a lot of people come to me and say “So Johanna, you’ve written four or five books, you have a bunch of books in the hopper, what should I do to write a book?” And I always say to them, it doesn’t matter, you can use Scrivener, you can use TextMate, and I always say to them, use Leanpub, do not use Word. And it doesn’t matter what I say to them, they all say “But I know Word, and I like Word!” And I say, “Fine, don’t use it, go to Leanpub, you can start there, you can use Markdown, you know HTML, you’ve been blogging, don’t be afraid of it, there’s a whole community out there, they’ll help you, I’ll help you, there’s even a Markdown syntax page on the web, and I can look at your stuff, and you know people are there to help you”. And they all so, “Oh, but it’s not Word!” And I say, “So what are you afraid of?”

A: Yeah.

R: And they all kind of, it’s like they’re looking at me, and on email, and they’re all saying “Wow, I’ve been a developer for 15 years but I’m afraid of a little Markdown syntax”, and I think to them, you know, you were the one who insulted me, and said “You’re just a management consultant - and you work in Markdown?” And I wanna say ‘expletive deleted’ to you too, buddy! I just don’t understand this. So, I think that Markdown is very easy, it’s almost like working in text, except that it gives you just enough organization to say “Ah! Here’s a heading”, or “Ah! Here’s a little bit of structure.” So, for me, it’s perfect.

A: Yeah, for us, the funny thing is, for us, we used to support HTML and Markdown, because we thought, well, everybody knows HTML, but then people tried to do all kinds of fancy formatting divs and whatnot and we’re like, you know, what we’re really trying to say with HTML, is we’re going to support only the HTML that you need for a book, which happens to be exactly the HTML Markdown makes.

R: Yeah.

A: So we just need to be opinionated about this, and say Markdown is the best way to write a book, every other way is terrible. I’ve written a couple of books, my first time, my first book I tried using Open Office, and after about 200 or 300 pages in size it started crashing all the time. Then I had to use Word, when I made a Manning book out of it, and I had to make a separate file for every chapter, and I just hated life so much, like, when I tried to add index entries, it would crash every sort of fourth index entry, it was just terrible. It’s like when you think about, this is 2012, and like there’s no good way in the world to write a book? We’ve had computers for 50 years, we’ve had like the printing press for 500, and every way to write a book in the world is horrible? Like, so that’s why our attempt at Markdown plus listing text files we think is actually probably one of the best ways, because all of the existing ways suck. And so it’s a low bar.

R: Yeah! And it’s so funny because, the reason I came to you guys, is because The Pragmatic Bookshelf rejected my book Agile Program Management, that’s the working title, I don’t know what the actual title is going to be, and I had looked into Docbook, but if you’re not a programmer, DocBook has a really high bar to get into.

A: Yeah, and you don’t want to write in XML. Because even if you can handle XML, I can handle XML just fine, Scott, my co-founder, he had actually written book in DocBook, but I said to him, I said look, I can write XML just fine, but I can’t think like a writer when I’m writing XML, I think like someone writing an XML document.

R: Yeah, yeah. And so, I was trying to figure out, what’s my environment, how am I going to get an environment so I actually have a shot of putting a book together, because I don’t want to spend all of my time working on an environment, I want to spend my time writing, and that’s really the key. So with Leanpub, I get to spend all of my time writing. I spend a little bit of time saying, Do I want an ordered list, or an unordered list? Well, if that’s all the time I spend with formatting, that’s great! That’s about the right amount of time. I want to think, “Is this a new chapter, or a continuation of this chapter?” That’s the right amount of time, because that means I’m thinking about the logical parts of my book. Is this a new idea, or a continuation of the same idea? And that’s, I fully expect to re-architect my book several times. That’s the way I write. I start writing, and I think, “Oh, this is a really good idea”, and then I think, “Oh, wait a minute, that belongs in this chapter”, or, “Oh, this is getting boring, I need a story! I’d better put a story in fast, because it’s been a while since I had a story.” Because I’m a writer like anyone else. I write and write and write and write, and then I step back and say, When was the last time I had a story? Hmm, must be time I had a story. Must be time for an example. And, because, you know, when we’re writing, we fall into the same traps that every other writer falls into, at least many writers fall into. I forget to put in stories, I find some passive voice and use it a lot. We all do this, because we’re writers, and so the key is, how do you get the feedback, how do you discover this? And when you have an opportunity to see the book unfold, to see the book get created, passive voice, when you have an opportunity to create the book as you write it, then you can get the feedback. So, for the Get Your Next Job Fast, or Take Control of Your Job Search, or Find Your Next Job Using Agile and Lean, whatever I’m going to call that book, I have no idea what I’m going to call that book! I’ve already sent that out to trusted reviewers, and I’m integrating the feedback, so that’s already been through one round of review, and thank goodness it has, because it really needed review. And so as soon as I’m done integrating the feedback, I can send it our for another round of review, and then I can probably take it out of the sort of stealth mode it’s in, and get it out for what I would call limited release, and see what people are willing to pay for it.

A: So the limiited, that’s going to be when you actually publish it on Leanpub?

R: Right, published on Leanpub, but probably not widely. Not released to Amazon, not released to all the other places, and then as I get more feedback and see what people are willing to pay for it, then I can continue integrating feedback, and when I think it’s really done - because I actually think that book probably needs another round or two of feedback after that - then I can say, because I’m not even sure what the real title is, although I probably have to have a real title before I get money for it, right? But, maybe not?

A: The process of getting feedback on Leanpub - so this is one of the, this is really interesting for me because, one thing we want to do with Leanpub is have the whole process of getting feeedback be something that Leanpub really helps with, you know, have Leanpub be a way of publishing that book while it’s in what you consider to be alpha or beta, like, is to have that process, like the process that you have with reviewers, but be something that ideally for us people just click the Publish button. You know, most books, like, a lot earlier than yours. For example, your Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers book, that’s over 400 pages.

R: Oh, God, yeah!

A: And it’s actually really good! And I’m, like, it needs cleanup, there are a couple of little things that need cleanup, like a bug in a table or whatever, but it’s something that could be published on Leanpub today and people would love it! And it’s, the question for us is, so you’re coming from a workflow where you’re used to having a limited set of readers give you feedback first before it’s, sort of, for wider consumption. So my question is, what can Leanpub do to make this process more attractive, and make the process of review easier for you? Is there anything we need to do in that regard to make it, like, make you want to click the Publish button sooner, or make the notion of publishing earlier in the process more attractive? Or is that process just fine for you and you just want to go about it that way?

R: Well, the Hiring book is the one that was originally published in print, so that’s why it’s already pretty darn good.

A: Yeah.

R: And, I’m still not, I haven’t finished even creating all the templates and tables, right, so, until all that’s done, although I’ve been making a lot of, I have a lot of traction on that, I’m actually not going to give you a date, I’m not going to give you a date.

A: And you don’t have to, we’re not your publisher, we’re just a tool.

R: Yeah. But I’m really hoping that in a very short while I’m going to be ready to release that one. And I feel, you know part of it is, I feel as though I have, if I have feedback from my initial reviewers, I feel as if I have an obligation to finish integrating that feedback, before I let the book out for the next round of reviewers, if that makes any sense.

A: Oh yeah, yeah I get it. That makes sense.

R: Because if I have said to them, I really wanted the feedback because I didn’t feel as if it was ready for more people, and I ask my trusted reviewers for feedback, then I really want to integrate that feedback before I put it out to the world.

A: Yeah, that makes sense.

R: Because, yeah, you know I’m a pretty good writer. When I make mistakes, boy, they are doozies! You know, I don’t just go for a small mistake, I go for really big ones, that offend the entire universe. You know I go for broke. So if I really go for broke, I really want to make sure that I haven’t gotten everything wrong. So, I want to cover my tush that much. I’m quite willing to say, “Here’s what I stand for, Here’s my opinion, Here are the facts, Here are my references”

A: Right.

R: But I don’t want to, if I have big mistakes, I want to fix those, so people don’t flip the Bozo Bit on me. So that’s why I want to make sure I’ve integrated my initial reviewers for the Get Your Next Job book, whatever that’s going to be called, and I want to make sure that whatever I have for the Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers book, that already exists in print, and if people want to also buy the electronic book, I feel it’s really important that they also have the templates in electronic form, and right now I don’t have those all done. Right, so, that means that they would feel cheated, and I don’t want them to feel cheated.

A: OK, that makes sense. Is there anything we could do to make your private review process better, or are you happy sending private PDF drafts to people, or is there anything that Leanpub could enable that private process, and improve it somehow?

R: I haven’t thought about it that much. So maybe being able to send it to people’s Kindles, or something, but I think that that’s something that I would have to think about some more. I could always ask people, would you make me a trusted sender to your Kindle, and then, or maybe make Leanpub a trusted sender to your Kindle.

A: Yeah, so when you were talking about that, I was thinking, should we do something with Dropbox possibly, like create Dropbox review folders, that people could use…. I’m just trying to think of ways that we could help this. Dropbox seems to work really well for us lots of the time, except for sometimes when we have minor hiccups, but… OK, cool.

R: Dropbox is great. The nice thing about Dropbox is, remember one of my very first questions to you, which was, How do we back everythinng up? I’m one of those, and I’m going to say this word even though it’s going to get recorded for all time: I’m one of those anal backup people.

A: Me too.

R: Right, so, the fact that you said, Dropbox keeps a backup of everything, and then, I think you also said that you backup everything?

A: Yeah.

R: So, that means, and I think that you said that you use, what backup?

A: We use Git, so here’s how this works now. So, we used to do something kind of badly, and we fixed it now, with one consequence. What we used to do, when you published or previewed, we would do a whole bunch of Git commits, one for every file you changed, which is absolutely terrible. And we did this because, frankly, the way that we were doing things in that regard was bad, and so instead what we do now is, when you publish or preview, and this is as of about a week ago, when you publish or preview, we make one Git commit for this preview or publish. And so then that way, what we want to be able to do later on, is let an author be able to look at a history of their book, at a history of every publish and preview version ever made, so if you had some sentence you wrote really nicely nine months ago and you don’t like your sentence now, you can just drag a slider back nine months and see ok, here it is, kind of like how GitHub works with looking at a repository.

So, whenever you preview or publish, you’re making a Git commit, one Git commit for the whole book, based on this preview or published version. And so, and besides that we also back up our repositories, we’re on Amazon and we have Amazon’s backup service, etc, so we have backups and we have version control, and Dropbox has backups. So even if we’re incompetent idiots, Dropbox is backing you up; and if Dropbox is incompetent, we’re backing you up; and so Dropbox would have to fail, and we’d have to fail, and Amazon would have to fail, and you know, so there’s, at some point along the line, you should have your files somewwhere, right.

R: Right.

A: …and so even if you’re computer or laptop - now that said, Terms Of Service-wise we’re not responsible, yadda yadda yadda, but we’re backing you up. But the point is, just for the record, since this is being recorded, when we made the change to do the Git stuff properly, a few weeks ago, we had the problem of what do we do with all this garbage version history that doesn’t make any sense, from the past, where we had like hundreds of Git commits for every… and so we just nuked that, because, it would mean that all existing Leanpub books had a whole bunch of garbage, and then good content. And since this isn’t a feature, it wasn’t an official feature yet, and in terms of the history, we didn’t want to show you for example your book, and then there’s this stuff that made sense and then a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. And so we just start everything with like a first new commit as of about a week ago. And so every time you preview or publish you’re making one commit. And so as far as your book is concerned, the beginning of time is about a week ago, that’s your first version, even though there was earlier stuff. That’s what we do.

So we like backups too. I mean, I grew up with computers in the 1980s and so I’m used to saving like every sentence or two, right…

R: Yeah, I’m not going to tell you when I grew up with computers. But let’s just say, it’s really important to me to back up, because it’s just not worth not having the backup.

A: No, totally.

R: It’s just not worth it. Because the cost of not having the backup is too high. So, it’s really, you know when you guys said that to me, I thought, “Ah! I can work with these people.” And so that was really important to me. So the fact that I can see my book as I generate it, and I can get the feedback really fast. Feedback to me, as I preview, in Markdown, feedback to me as I see my book, because I look at it in PDF as I generate it, and feedback to me from my readers, and the backup, you know… You’re not perfect, but you’re darn close.

A: Well thank you. Hey, you said you use TextMate - have you ever used the HTML preview feature in TextMate?

R: I use the Markdown bundle, so I haven’t used the HTML feature in TextMate.

A: So does the Markdown bundle, is that the type of thing that shows you what your HTML looks like, as you write Markdown?

R: It shows me what the Markdown looks like. So I can see, so when I put in images, so for example, I have a bunch of tables, so in the Hiring book I have tables that I converted into images, and so in order to see that the image looks right, I actually have, I created, instead of trying to use tables in the text, my tables are too big, so I created images of the tables in OmniGraffle, and then made JPEGs.

A: OK.

R: And so I put the JPEGs in the text, and previewed them in the Markdown. So I used the Markdown bundle. For people who are confused, who are listening to this, this is actually really easy, and so you create an image, I use OmniGraffle because I’m on a Mac, and I exported to a JPEG, and then if it’s too wide, you just say 75% or 60%, or 50%, because you can’t make it bigger than the width of the page. And Peter and Scott say it can be four inches or five inches or three inches or whatever it is, I can never keep that in my head, so I use the preview in TextMate to actually look at it, and so if it goes over the right margin, I know it’s too big!

A: Nice.

R: So I look at it in the preview mode, and when it goes over the right margin, I say, “Well, 100% is too big, let me see what 75% looks like.” And so, I export it again, saying 75% percent. And so if it looks good in 75%, chances are good that when I preview the PDF in Leanpub it will be correct.

A: Hmm.

R: So, that’s what I’m doing.

A: So for the people who are listening, Leanpub does try to automatically resize things. And we have documentation about how wide an image should be based on what type of book it is, and how wide the book is, and we have other documentaiton about that, but it helps when you make your images a nice size, so that they’re large enough or they’re small enough. Because typically, the program that you use probably does a better job than we do, so then yeah, that makes sense.

OK, so, one question then, around community. So when you launch your books, do you want, like, currently, Leanpub, we sort of think our role is to be a store and let authors to produce new versions whenever they want and have people get them, let a community grow, but don’t provide many explicit community tools. I mean, we have Disqus comments, but we don’t do much more than that. So do you see your blogs and Twitter as filling the role adequately for you around what you want for community-type tools, or do you want, do you see there being something missing that you’d like Leanpub to do in that regard?

R: Well, the fact that you have the ability for people to sign up to be notified about my book is great. But I have a mailing list, and I have a blog, and I have people who subscribe to my blog. So I’ve been really working on building my own platform for a long time.

A: Perfect.

R: And I have a Twitter following, so, I’ve been really working on trying to build my own following for a very long time.

A: Right, so you’re covered then, you don’t need us to do much for you?

R: Well, you know, if I understood marketing, I would love that. Anything else you could do for me is great. But I don’t think it’s, in some sense you’re helping me publish my book, but any publisher is not going to really help me do my marketing.

A: Oh, yeah, they’re just going to tell you, go on Twitter, get loads of Twitter followers. Go sign up for Amazon and write something there.

R: Yeah, I think that any publisher is not going to really help you do the marketing. In fact, both publishers I’ve had, have always said, We will help you publish your book, we will help you do the marketing, but you have got to do your own marketing yourself. That’s what’s going to sell books. So anything you can do to help, great. But, I think that any author who thinks that a publisher is going to do the marketing, is… I think naive is the best word I can use.

A: Yeah, that’s been my experience too. My take on it is, for a publisher, unless you’ve got like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, you really can’t afford to do marketing, because the amount of money you’d have to spend, versus the amount of money a book makes in terms of gross revenue, you can’t really do anything. And for publishers, if you do have Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, then fine, you can go and spend, you can do stuff where you can spend x and you know you’ll get back whatever, but, yeah, for any book that’s like a technical book or a business book, unless it’s a #1 bestseller type thing, you’re basically on your own. And we say that too, you know when people on the list ask, How are you going to help with marketing? We’re like, “We’re not! And no one else is either!”

R: Right, it’s just not going to happen. And so if you’re an author, or a would-be author, the best thing I can suggest to you is, start blogging about your book now, in fact blog your book!

A: Yeah.

R: Because the best thing you can do is attract an audience, and even if you blog every single thing in your book, that’s not what a book is, you can’t just take all of the blog entries and put them together and make a book. You have to weave it together.

A: Yeah, there’s curation, editing. It’s funny, because when Leanpub started with our blog import feature, we had Venture Hacks and Eric Ries’s Startup Lessons Learned, they were imported and produced that way, and so our affectionate term for those is Blog Barfs, right, because there’s literally no curation or editing at all, it’s just like they, the blog just slurped into a PDF. And those have actually done well, because, you know, Eric and Nivi are just so widely known that they’ve done OK, but we’re, that’s not sort of our core business. We think that blogs are starting points for books, but that you need to go ahead and get rid of everything that doesn’t make sense, you know rearrange, curate, edit, and produce a book out of it. And that’s what you’re doing, and so that’s fantastic.

R: Yeah, and at some point I’ll turn my Create an Adaptable Life blog into a book, but, it’s part memoir, and part, here’s how you adapt to change, but it’s nowhere near ready for a book, and I don’t know what the book would be, and I mean, it’s just, it’s way too raw right now, and so I haven’t even created a place for it, because I don’t know what it is yet.

A: Right, that’s great.

R: But in the meantime I’m blogging and building an audience, and when I figure out what that is, then I can figure out what to import, and it won’t be the whole blog. It will be pieces. And when I understand what the pieces are, then I can figure out what it is.

A: It’s funny, what we’ve found is, some people have asked us, Hey, can I have a category to import with a blog, say, and we’re going to add that, we don’t have that now, so our current approach is to say, look, import the whole thing, and look at it, and then you realize, oh, there’s actually two or three books here, and then process that some people have done is just taken the imported Markdown and then just made two or three books and pasted everything in each one, and then selectively deleted. Or else have one book that is the full blog, and then start moving files out, into other folders, and the book sort of emerges, like you have 100 files there, and it’s like oh, 20 of these are memoir-y, and 30 are sort of how-to type stuff.

R: Right

A: So, this has been fantastic for me. While I’m in customer development mode, are there any other missing features you wish Leanpub had? Other than Parts?

R: Well, at some point, I think it would be nice, this is really on the edge of, it would nice if - but, it would be nice if, maybe, and this is something all your authors have to get together and provide, people who edit and people who do cover design. So, and maybe this is something that we collaborate on and provide to you. Because, I have, I am working with… Because I know I need an editor. I am a good writer, but that does not mean I don’t need an editor. And so, how do I find an editor who is good for this kind of a book? And how do I find an editor who is good for that kind of a book? And how do I find someone who helps me with the cover design?

A: Right.

R: Because I need, you know, different covers need different kinds of designs. So, I’m not worried about it this second, but I’m hoping to need a cover design soon. So, I think that that’s, and maybe that’s something that we as the community help provide.

A: Yeah, I’m thinking that we need to create some sort of marketplace, down the road, some sort of marketplace for people who want to provide services to Leanpub authors, like technical editing, or covers.

R: Yeah.

A: And this is something that, we don’t necessarily want to monetize that, we just want to help facilitate. Or maybe that is part of our business model, who knows. But yeah I know, I see what you mean. For us, our hope is that by enabling authors to publish in-progress, like earlier than they normally would, that the community of readers around their book, can kind of provide the function of a development editor, like where you’ll get feedback around a programming book, like I don’t understand this explanation, or how does your code work. But, and so some of the development editor functions, we see happening as, we see sort of functioning as readers providing some of that, if you publish earlier. Now, that said, there’s lots of other editor functions, like copy editor type things, or technical editor, and you know that type of stuff, that we see that there needs to be something else, and we’re just not sure what it is.

R: Yeah.

A: So, this is excellent, thank you very much Johanna! Thanks very much for being on the podcast, and I’m going to post this sometime in the next few days, I have to learn how to add introductions and all that.

R: Well thank you Peter, this is fun.

A: And thank you for being a Leanpub author!

Leanpub Podcast Interview #2: Yves Hanoulle

2012-05-16T13:00:00-07:00

Yves Hanoulle is the author of many Leanpub books, including Who Is Agile.

The Agile community knows Yves Hanoulle from his many contributions, such as the public Agile conferences Google calendar, his Agile Thursday Quiz, the coach retreats and conferences he’s paired to organize, daily coaching questions via @Retroflections, and the Agile Games Google group, just to name a few. He originated PairCoaching, an idea which has been adopted by many agile trainers and coaches. He’s constantly learning, and passing on what he learns as a coach and trainer to organizations large and small.

A self-identified change artist and first follower, one of Yves’ unique qualities is that he gives free lifetime support on anything he does: every client, everything he writes and presents, every workshop he leads.

In 2011, Yves started his popular WhoIs series, a weekly interview with an Agile practitioner. Some WhoIs interviewees are famous thought leaders, some are less familiar to the global Agile community, but readers of WhoIs learn something new and interesting about each one.

Yves believes in maintaining a sustainable pace both professionally and personally. You can learn more about Yves at http://www.hanoulle.be/yves-hanoulle/, and find him on social media as YvesHanoulle.

This interview was recorded on March 21, 2012.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml.

Armstrong: As a preamble, I’m here with Yves Hanoulle who is a prolific contributor to the Agile community, and the originator of Pair Coaching. In 2011, Yves started his popular ‘Who Is’ series, a weekly interview with an Agile practitioner. Yves has recently turned this into a Leanpub book entitled Who Is Agile?, which is written in English, and is being translated into German, Spanish, French, Russian and Catalan. We’re going to talk today about Yves’s experiences as a writer using the Lean Publishing approach on Leanpub, and we’ll also talk about ways we can improve Leanpub at the end of the podcast, since Leanpub is a Lean startup and we’re doing the customer development process.

So Yves, thanks for being on the podcast!

Hanoulle: Thanks for having me.

A: First of all, I want to ask you, how did you find out about Leanpub, and what made you want to try it?

H: So I found out about the book from Laurent Bossavit, I can’t come up with the name, it’s an English word and I’m not sure how it’s pronounced, so I will not even try it. But he wrote an interesting book about ideas that are generally accepted but are actually wrong, or there is no scientific evidence for that. And he did that on Leanpub. Now, I was immediately attracted to the idea because I, about a year ago or two years ago, I had an idea to write a book with lots of people about Agile games, that completely didn’t work out, for multiple reasons, but one of the things I was trying to do there was writing it at the same time creating a community, and next to that doing all the technical stuff for writing the book – which was impossible to do all of that together. And when I found Leanpub that was exactly what I needed. That was something, a company doing all the technical parts, for doing such a book, which I believe is the right way to publish a book, in the sense that you publish it, and you find errors, so you change something and you write a new one. I’ve been bugging and asking Agile authors for at least three or four years about, why don’t they write their books in an agile way, and lots of large Agile writers told me it’s not possible, and you guys are proving it is. So thank you.

A: Well, thank you! You’ve basically summarized why we’re making Leanpub…

So, continuing along that train of thought - do you think that, when you started the Who Is Agile? book - actually, let’s talk about the previous book you tried. So, before you used Leanpub, with the other book, you were going to try to build a system, try to create a community around the book as you wrote it. With Leanpub, one of the things we’ve been thinking about, is should we try to do more to try to facilitate community, or, whether what we’re doing is enough, and authors get the community parts they need with their blog and Twitter.

H: I’ve not been really thinking about that. Let me answer the first part about, what did I do with the book on the Agile Games. I think a lot of things were confusing at the time. There was not really a real goal, or we didn’t have a common vision there, which is always something that is needed to create something together. So that was part of the big problem that we had. So, that’s one big reason why it didn’t work. There were other as well, but that’s a really big thing. Who Is Agile? started totally different, in the sense that I had already these blog posts on my website which were - actually the questions I created in five or six minutes - when I had the idea I put that together in just a few minutes, I had some set of questions that I liked, and that apparently a lot of people liked. So I blogged about it, and very quickly I got a very emotional response from people who really loved it, so by republishing every week something new, I had very quickly some people who were very in favour of what I’d done there. So there was almost instantly a kind of community around it. And that helped of course for if I wanted to publish something, to go for and have a community. But then in the beginning when I started with the book, it was just me writing, or converting the blog into book posts. But for people that know me in the community, know that almost everything I do I try to turn into a community, whether I want it or not it just happens. So, at one point people were, I’m not, English is not my first language, so I make a lot of mistakes in English and I, actually my first language as well…

A: You speak your second or third language better than many people speak their second or third languages, or some people even speak their first!

H: …but speaking is probably rather ok, but writing I’m rather terrible, so a lot of people started sending me, or a few people started sending me updates saying, well, there’s something wrong there, and there’s something wrong there, and I just, in a real Agile way, I just gave them full permission on Dropbox and others, so they could fix the errors that I was making. And so, very quickly I had two, three people that were helping me out, with the layout, something about pictures, I had a question about pictures being the right size, and I had questions about someone that also had a Leanpub book and he helped me out, and somebody else came up with the idea of maps or something like that, and then I realized that, when I was in France last year, when I lived in France, that most people in French, in France, they actually like to read in French and not in English, so, I started chatting with someone that I know has been translating a lot of English books just for pleasure on his blog, or at least creating kind of Cliff Notes from these books, and he was interested in that idea, and from that I started asking other people if they wanted to translate. So that comes back to, do we need more community support - well, what we do see is I can add all the Twitter accounts for all the contributors to the book, to the editors and stuff like that, which is really nice. What probably would be nice as an extra feature, is if we could see who is tweeting about the book and some other stuff. I’m not sure if it’s interesting for the community, but I know as authors, already a few people have asked this on the mailing list and already you guys have responded to that, is the fact that we could see how many people download something in PDF or in Kindle.

A: Yeah, we have to do the analytics better in terms of formats.

H: Exactly. But I know that you guys are working on that, so that’s and idea that you have. One thing that I know that Amazon is doing lately which I like is that there is an option in Amazon, I’m not sure how it works, but there is an option that if, in a Kindle, I tweet something to a tag that’s called ‘author’, automatically it’s emailed, or somehow the author gets a notification about that. So that could be a nice thing to create community, or a link for readers to do…

A: One thing we were thinking of doing was having hashtags for every book, and putting that into the PDFs. I’ve seen one book, a book on customer development acutally had done, not a Leanpub book, a different book, had done it really well, where they had in the book, built in, ‘Hey, Tweet This’, and it had a hashtag. If every book had a hashtag, that would be an easy way for it to materialize on Twitter. But yeah, I think that would help a lot.

So, in terms of Who Is Agile?, so what are your goals for the Who Is Agile? book? I know you’ve been making a lot of progress on it. Do you think you’re mostly done, or half way? What’s your vision for it?

H: Actually, my vision when I started, I’m almost there, in the sense that I, this week I will publish 50 people or contributors, 51 or something like that, but my vision has shifted of course - we’re Agile! Some person created a map of where people are living in this book, and what I saw there is something I knew more less, but didn’t know how bad it was, is that most authors were actually from Europe and US. And so I thought, ok, this is mostly what it is. But when I saw the map I really realized how little other countries we had. So what I’ve been doing the last weeks is I’ve been inviting a lot of people that were actually already in my backlog, but I’ve been pushing them up front in my backlog, so that they would actually reply now, and so that I could have answers for well maybe not all countries in the world, but for a lot more countries than we have right now. Which would mean that instead of publishing the first book with just 52 - so I came up with the idea of 52 because that’s one year of publishing, so that was my idea. And then I have already about 200 people in my backlog, but then I said, ok I’ll just create a second book, with the next and the next. But still I don’t like to have a book with mainly people just from Europe and from the US. So, I’ve been publishing a lot of people from different countries. It means basically I’m kind of ignoring the people I already have, for example from Belgium, the country I’m living in, I’m still missing two or three important people from the Belgian Agile community, but I’m ignoring them for this book because I think we have already two or three Belgian people so I think that’s more than enough. So I really tried to have more people from different communities, because one of my goals for the book was to get to know people that I didn’t know. So it’s not a book that is a ‘Who’s Who’ of who are the people I regularly work with, or something like that. It’s really a way to get to know much more different people, and that’s in that sense it has been a terrific year, because lots of people that I know from names but have never worked with or who I didn’t even have email addresses for, that are now in the book.

A: That makes sense. Actually I have a question about that. So in terms of the book, traditionally, lots of what we’ve found on Leanpub is the notion of when a book is done or not is a hard thing to figure out. For example, when you have a physical book you can’t make it beyond say 600, 700 pages without it being really annoying to read, because it’s too heavy. But we’ve had Leanpub books that go over 1000 pages. It’s an interseting question about how long should a book be. So if you have a topic such as this, should you make one large book, or yearly books? I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that, like what you think the right thing to do is.

H: So, yeah, like I said my original idea was I would cap it off at 52, which was an arbitrary number, but I can explain it.

A: Yeah, once a week.

H: Yeah, but now it’s harder. I think I now have about 80 people I now want to have in the book, but then today I received another answer from someone, and he proposes someone that is in yet another country, and I’m tempted, like oh, maybe 81! So that makes it a lot harder. I have already right now about 200 printed A4 pages. I have no idea what that would be in small Kindle pages, but a lot.

A: Right. Yeah pages don’t make any sense on Kindle.

H: Yeah, well numbers, or points, or whatever they call it. But still it’s a lot. So I know that I only have 50, and with 80 we’ll probably end up with 300 or 400 A4 pages, which is a rather heavy book. So that’s really, I have been doubting do I really want that, but for me, it was important to have a lot of diverse people in it, so I will stick to that. But after that I definitely want to stop, so that is why I think 80 will be the maximum. And just create a second book.

A: Actually, just for a random suggestion: One thing we found for example, we have Eric Ries’s Startup Lessons Learned on Leanpub, and what he did, he had his whole blog there, but what he did is he subsetted out, like a year of his blog, and then another year, to make print books, so that you wouldn’t have to print the whole thing. And so, at one point on Leanpub, we were sellling three versions of his book: we were selling the entire thing, which was called All Seasons, and then we were selling Season One, and then Season Two, and so, the idea of, a book is a kind of like a collection of content, and you can slice and dice it in a few different ways, and have those all being offered. Because like with the ebook, it’s weird, if you think about it, let’s say you have 90 people in your book, or 80 or whatever, and say that the comfortable amount to have in your hand when you’re reading a printed book is like 40 or 50, then from a print perspective it’s interesting to consider making two books, but then the ebook is almost nicer to have there be one, for searchability, and also just for completeness, in terms of people not understanding which one are they in. So it’s an interesting question.

H: Well, as long as it’s sold on Leanpub, it’s easy to keep it in just one book, but one of the ideas is to also publish it on Amazon because I know that if I look at the books I’m buying for my Kindle, and this is something I blogged about earlier on, where do I buy books on my Kindle? I buy books on my Kindle when I’m somewhere on the road, on a train, on a plane, or in an airport or somewhere, where I don’t have access to a computer. And so I go online using my Kindle, and I directly buy a book. That’s only possible with Amazon, unfortunately, or with Apple as well if you’re on an iPad, but that’s just not possible for Leanpub to sell Leanpub books there. So unfortunately I need to cap it off at some point. And another thing of course is that for all the contributors, in there, and I think also the people who helped with the book, it would be nice to have a physical version of the book, and for that you have to cap it off as well at some point. So there will be a point where I will say “This book is done, we’ll finish it up and make sure that we’ll remove all the problems that we currently haven’t solved yet”, and then just go for a second book.

A: That makes sense. Let’s talk about pricing for a minute…

H: I wanted to add one thing. Because I was curious you didn’t mention, you guys actually have an extra service that does grouping of books, right? Next to Leanpub, you have another service or website?

A: Yeah, this was… We made a thing called LeanBundle. It was one of those, we have one of those things inside our company where if someone has an idea, and they’re willing to say ‘This is doable in 24 hours’, well, we’re not in our 20s, well, some of us are, but some of us are in our 30s and we’re married with kids, and, 24 hours doesn’t mean one day anymore, but if you can build a minimum viable product in 24 hours, obviously supporting it means that is a lot longer, but it’s worth considering doing something as an experiment. So, LeanBundle is an experiment that we’ve created, primarily as, we actually, during customer development, one of our authors, he wanted to sell a bundle of his book with another book about nodejs, and the other book wasn’t a Leanpub book, and so for us it was like, well, Leanpub has to sell Leanpub books because readers expect all three formats, and so we can’t just sell some arbitrary PDF that someone has. And so we thought, the idea of selling bundles is interesting, so that’s why we created LeanBundle. We’re not really empahsizing it right now, because it’s sort of an experiment, and some people find it and use it, but at this point it’s an experimental product.

H: But it’s good that you mention it, that it’s not limited to Leanpub books, because I thought it was.

[Editor’s note: LeanBundle has since become a feature of Leanpub.]

A: Exactly. It’s actually arbitrary digital content. I could sell coupons for a sushi restaurant on Leanbundle. It’s like, if Leanpub went and made Groupon, what would we do? Right? And that was sort of our Leanbundle idea. But we’ve just, we’re just a bootstrapped startup, and we only have a certain amount of time during the day, and there are things for example like fixing Dropbox syncing issues, and other things that we have to do. Leanpub is the thing that we’re betting on, and that we really like, and we think that LeanBundle is an interesting thing, but it’s more interesting for things around questions like business models, and experimenting with selling just arbitrary digital goods, but that’s a space that has everything from like Gumroad where you just sell an arbitrary link…. We don’t really offer anything unique there. I mean except for the idea of creating a bundle with other people that you don’t necessarily, where you like wouldn’t give them your credit card number, and that’s the interesting idea of it. If you and I wanted to make a bundle of our books, we could do that, and LeanBundle would split the money and all that, and so we’d be - it’s sort of a combination of Groupon plus… It’s an experiment. If we had infinite time and money, I’d like to see what we could do with that, but for now it’s just a little experiment on the side.

H: What I wanted to say is I really like that, because it offers the possibility to, say, for example, we translate books, or the Who Is Agile? will be translated in a few languages, there’s actually more people that people are signing up so they’re not busy yet, so we’ve not made any publicity, but I would want to have an offer to say, well you can actually buy the French and the English book together. And things like that. So it’s nice to have a way to deal with that kind of stuff. So it shows in multiple ways that you’re Agile in some ways, you stick with Leanpub, that we sell the three versions, which I really like, every book, I saw multiple questions on the mailing list, people saying ‘Oh I want only to sell PDF or only Kindle’, and you’ve been, really, kind of hard but fair, saying then sorry you have to go somewhere else, because that’s not what we’re doing. Which is a good focus, but at the same time you found a way around that. Well, if you want to sell with something else, that’s how you can deal with it, so I like that.

A: Yeah, we believe in the Lean Startup and Agile ideas, very deeply. It’s a really interesting question. Because there’s two types of books in the world: there’s finished books, and there’s in-progress books. And there’s all kinds of ways to sell finished books. And lots of people are in a situation where I have this Word document, it’s done, make this a book please. And there are services like BookBaby and other competitors and they charge like 50 or 60 bucks and they provide services like that and I’m sure they probably do a fine job. And so we’re like well, you know what, we don’t really add anything unique there. And converting a book, if you want to take a Word document and make a PDF, going through Markdown is probably not the most inuitive thing in the world to do. Now if you want to iterate on a book, then all of a sudden we add value, and then… So we try to focus on the things we’re good at and then ignore everything else. Because we don’t have time focus on things we’re not good at.

H: Right, exactly, and that’s typical Lean Startup mentality, which I think you guys are indeed very good at. I’ve been throwing lots of ideas at you, and at everybody at Leanpub I think, and I can see that if it’s an idea that has some merit and can be quickly solved and will help a lot of things, you will quickly do it, but if it’s an idea that you think might be interesting, but it’s not really in your core values, or not on your roadmap right now, you might say “Well nice, but we’re not going to do that.” Which is what you need to do, you need to focus, you need to prioritize, and I think you guys are really good at that. So thank you.

A: The danger, the weird thing, is there’s this scary middle area. I’m curious to know how you deal with this: we have the ideas where we know are outside of our core, what Leanpub is, and we just say no to those, and we have ideas which are, like, this is on fire, it’s hurting an author, fix this today, and then everything in between, there’s lots of good ideas that go into our backlog, and the problem is, we use Pivotal Tracker, and it’s fine, it works well for us, but our backlog is just growing and growing, and just trying to prioritize our backlog, like…

H: It’s a full-time job.

A: It’s hard. It’s really hard. Especially when you only have a few people and you’re bootsrapped, so it’s, we have to be pretty ruthless, but even still there’s lots of things that are in our backlog. For example, when we were talking about, earlier in our conversation right now, when you were saying you’d like to be able to sell the multiple language versions together, and we were talking about Leanbundle, I mean, to me, if there are a bunch of Leanpub books that want to be sold together, that are translations, of the same thing, that should be something that’s, it’s one of those, I just felt a little tug, it’s like, there’s a little feature hiding there - should we support buying all the translations of a book? Or should we support arbitrary bundles, like, for example, when you suggested you’d like to be able to buy books with your royalties, I think that’s a fanstastic idea and I want to do that, and the nice thing about that one is that there’s a business justification which is easy, which is that we don’t have to take a PayPal cut twice, right? So that’ll get done. The question about LeanBundle, if you have a LeanBundle, if you have three Leanpub books that are all being sold together and are by the same person, you shouldn’t have to use LeanBundle for that.

H: I have a few answers because you asked multiple questions there. So, you asked, how do you deal with that? I will reply to that afterwards. But the first thing, you said, right now about well, LeanBundle, and should we make it easier? One of the things I have already answered at the Leanpub mailing list, which is a great support by the way, but one of the things I have answered is, if there is a way that I, as an author, can do it myself, then I don’t think it’s your top priority, because you do have things that I’m still not able to do myself, and that is really good. Of course, you should at some point do some of these things, like having ways for people to buy them together, that might be interesting, for the translations, but it’s not, for me, it’s not a top priority. I haven’t also started doing this, well we haven’t started selling translations, so it’s not on my plate yet, but it might be for some other people. But again, thanks to LeanBundle, we can deal with that.

A: …or just coupon codes. You could just have coupon codes on Leanpub too.

H: Yeah, so there is ways to deal with that, and that’s fine. But there are options that are not possible. Like with Lean startups, you have to focus on some stuff. You asked, how do you deal with that? Well, I have a very nice example. I had a request for, so, I’m really busy with way too many projects, like a lot of people, and this one is one that’s taking a lot of my time, but I had a really interesting question from another Leanpub author, who asked me to write a particular part in his book, which I’m really interested in because it’s something I’ve been talking about for years, and actually wrote a few articles about that, about core protocols, but I really don’t see how I can start writing it right now because I’m so busy with the Who Is Agile? book, but then I just realized that I just reviewed a book of a friend of mine about the core protocols and the last year, and my idea was to orginally write that text and ask her to review, but I just sent her an email today and asked hey, Vicki, would you be interested to write most part of it, and then we can begin to work together on it, but you write the main part, and she said yes. So basically I delegate all the things where, that are in the middle. This is partially how I create communities, in a sense that I ask a lot for help to people, and, for example, you know that I am working also on a Lean startup that is working on showing statistics for book sales, and so, yeah, I think this is where, I know that you guys really want to make much nicer statistics for all the book sales and all listings, but we have a service where we think we can actually at least in the first time we can kind of work together, until the moment where you have time to work more on statistics, and we could show some of that stuff, and so you could delegate, and this is just an example, but I’m sure that some of the other stuff could be delegated, like LeanBundle, it’s kind of delegated in a way that you said, well, people can do that in 24 hours, in a FedEx day, they can just do something like that, well, it was kind of delegated to such a moment. So for me, there’s multiple ways of that delegation. The book I have, I think we have now 14 people working one way or another on the book, that’s just crazy, that’s just me asking for help, and other people that are really glad that they can help out.

A: Yeah it’s fantastic. Is the Dropbox experience working well? I know that in the past few days we’ve been having trouble with publishing, but, other than that, in terms of collaboration, does the Dropbox approach work well for you, or do you need more…?

H: I’m a really big fan of Dropbox. I’ve been using it for about half a year for multiple things. So my Dropbox account is really full, I’m at very high levels, because I’m doing trainings with other Agile coaches around the world, so that’s one way that we deal with large slideshows and other stuff. So I’m using that a lot. With now 14 people editing, we have lost already some content, and, but we can find it back so that’s not a problem, because thanks to Dropbox you can find the history back. But the problem there is that then you have some kind of merging problems. But then of course Git or SVN would be something because then you have tools that are there for merging, which is not possible with Dropbox, which is a shame because it’s text. So it technically, it could be merged.

A: I understand.

H: But, ok, we are dealing with that making sure that we communicate a little more. I’m not sure how it will work with the translations. We had a spreadsheet that, where people are saying, I’m working on that file, so I think with translations it’s probably less of a problem. On the other side, the new files I’m adding to the book, I receive them, I add a little introduction about the person, and I add a lot of links to it, and at the same time, other people are reviewing the text and removing spelling mistakes and other mistakes. And that’s why we had some hiccups. But we kind of, I think, we didn’t lose anything in the last two weeks, I think it’s because we streamlined our communication better. So we worked around it, and I think it works for us. Where Git or something would be more interesting, is that we can fork translations, because now, one thing that makes it harder is that if I start with the new translation, we have to copy the files over, and at that level, we kind of lose if people are still changing it. That’s not a problem right now because like I said we have 50 people who are in the English book and they all need to be translated, and by the time we are it 50 we will probably already have added 10 or 20 more, so we’ll probably finish the English books before they’re halfway into the translations. So I don’t think we’ll have lots of problems there. But there might be a risk that when we change something in some of the earlier files that it’s hard to see for the translators. Moreover, the part where I see most of the problems is, we have a file that’s called ‘Library’, so we have I think about 200, no I’m not sure, I don’t know, 100 or 200 books in it, that are sorted alphabetically, so every time that I add a new contributor’s answers, I add all the books that he’s talking about in his files in his answers, and I add them alphabetically in the library. So if the people that are doing the translations have already translated part of the library, that is a problem.

A: You know I think there might be… I have an idea that might work. So, as an aside, we actually used to use Git, and GitHub, before we switched to Dropbox. Back in the day Leanpub was a thing where you could use GitHub or Git or you could use, in the website, WordPress, like editing your book in the browser, and the conclusion we came to was that Git was too elitist, and the website one was just terrible because you shouldn’t write a book in a web browser, and Git put us out of the reach of almost everyone. But we really liked Git and we use it internally, and whenever you hit Publish now, we - we had to reset this when we did our recent refactoring, but now whenever you click Publish, or Preview, we make a new Git commit of everything. But the interesting thing is we ignore Git repositories, like .git directories, and so what that means is you can use Git yourself with a Leanpub book and it will have no effect on our use of Git with a Leanpub book. And so what you could do, is you could have one Git repository for your book, and all the translations, as forks, and you could use GitHub to share as well. And then the convention would be that you just check it out in multiple places, each into a different Dropbox folder, for the translation, and the translation would be on the branch, but that’s just the equivalent of you having - I mean it’s a bit ironic, that you’d have for example, like all the translations, let’s say there’s five translations on your computer, then you’d have six copies of the same repository on your computer, well whatever, they’re all just on different branches, but you’d still… I think there’s a workflow you could use where you could have all the benefits of Git. Because, our goal at Leanpub, with Git at a high level, is, we think Git is the best way by far for distributive version control, and we should not ever get in the way of authors using Git and GitHub. Without requiring authors to use Git and GitHub. And so I think you could actually set it up the way you want, with all the branches, with branches for all the translations, all with one repository, and have Git for diffing and merging and whatnot. And I think it would work just fine. I think it would take some work, obviously to pull it all back together. What you’d want to do basically is have everyone pause, and then have one person, presumably you, do all the grunt work, but I think it is possible. And if it’s not possible, for some reason, let me know, because if something Leanpub does stops you from doing that, let me know, because it shouldn’t be the case. Because for us, my goal is for Leanpub to be useable by people like us who can use Git just fine, or by people like my Dad who, you know, I had to show him Dropbox for the first time, let alone Git, right.

H: The advantage of Dropbox is exactly that, that we have some people helping out, that are actually not used to Git, and so that would definitely be a lot harder. I actually worked with a few authors that even have problems with Dropbox, because I shared Dropbox with all the contributors, so everyone who wrote for it, like these 40 people right now in the Dropbox, because some of them did accept, others didn’t, but some of these people and then I’m talking more about some of the Agile coaches who never wrote software themselves, already had problems with Dropbox, so I agree there that going to GitHub…

A: Yeah, it’s hard. If everyone used Git, life would be fantastic. I mean, when my father was working on an autobiography, I’m like yeah, well, it’s like, and I was trying to explain what distributed version control was, and I was explaning well, if you wrote something six months ago, and then deleted it, how can you compare these things on Microsoft Word, the idea that this is something that you should be easily able to do, and get really angry if you can’t do it, is like, ok, yeah, once you get that idea, then it’s OK, now you understand…

…back to Leanpub. So one thing I found really interesting about Who Is Agile? is the pricing that you did. Because your spread of, your minimum price is 99 cents, and your suggested price is $29.99, and that’s probably like the largest spread other than free and a big price, that I think I’ve seen. What have you found with that, what’s led to that thinking, I’m just curious, because I think you might have something here.

H: Ok, I really believe in having people set their own price. So I started out with actually zero and $29.99, but I think it was Johanna Rothman who said to me, Yves you’re crazy, you should not sell anything that you spent so much time in it just for zero. They should at least give some money. And so I wasn’t really convinced yet, but I said, when people that smart like Johanna tell me that I’m wrong, I’m listening, so even if I didn’t grab the idea, I said let’s just change it to $0.99. My idea with the proposed price was that, I had the idea that proposed price would be the maximum that people would pay, and that’s exactly what happened. Of course, it’s a little biased because it’s that high, but I said, let’s see what happens, and I get prices a little bit all over the place. I had in the beginning when it was zero, a lot of people zero, but of course I also had all these authors that also contributed, and at least some of them bought it, and I, they spent probably more time on it than I did, or at least some of them spent a lot of time in creating these answers, and so I thought they could download it for free, and so that was happy for me, or fine for me. But I thought also that it’s, I had no idea how much to money sell this on, so I let people set their own price, and that was interesting to see what people would actually pay for it, and in that sense I have an idea of multiple people paying multiple things, and I am convinced that if I would have sold, set it to eight Euros, for example, I would probably have more sales, but less money. And now I let people decide and there are people who are actually paying $0.99, I think there are about 25 percent pays the proposed price, so that’s interesting to see that. For me, it was a kind of play, let’s see what people will do with it. I never intend to get rich off this book, because I know there’s not many people that can live off these books. So my idea was just, if I can make some money out of it, it’s nice, if I can, yeah.

A: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s interesting, we’ve found with some books that have a smaller spread, like say three dollars and eight dollars, or four dollars and ten dollars, we’ve seen some people actually pay more than the suggested price, and we’ve also seen people round up. For example, if it’s a ten dollar book and that makes the author earn $8.50, with the royalty, we’ve seen people grab the royalty slider and drag that up to ten dollars, and so people will buy the book for $11.60 or something. And with free, I think you’re right, that obviously, free is slightly easier to buy than not free, because you have to use PayPal for not free, and since we’re in Canada, using alternate payment, like we’d love to use Stripe, or Google Checkout or Amazon Checkout, but these are more of a pain for non-American startups, than American startups. But, we’ve found that when you enable free, you get a lot more purchases, but then a lot of them are just free. And I’m not sure what the answer is. I’m not sure whether - I think free is an interesting thing for some books that are mass market, but that once you have a minimum price, then the spread you get goes a lot more towards the suggested, than with free.

Anyways, this has been really interesting, for me anyway, I’m not sure for listeners! A couple of last questions: What surprised you the most about using Leanpub so far, about your experience with it?

H: What I’m really happy about is the way you guys support things. So I’m happy-surprised. I was kind of expecting it, but it’s really nice to see that you guys are really doing it the right way.

A: Thanks.

H: So that’s a happy surprise. I like to work with smart people, so that, you seem to have all of that, and you seem, which is most important for me, to have the real Agile mindset, for the focusing, so I like that. The negative surprise is what you just said, PayPal, I don’t like PayPal at all, I think I’ve said it before. I understand your problem with payments, that’s exactly at this moment what we’re trying to solve with the PragAuthor as well, we will go for an official sales with lots of channels, but that’s not easy. So we’re right there in the middle with doing all that kind of stuff, so I understand the problems that you have with that. I personally don’t want to go with PayPal for my own startup, because I heard so many companies having trouble that PayPal decides, Well we’ll block all your money, and so that’s not a road I want to go to. But that’s just a choice, right. But I’ve seen people not want to go pay for the book, and that was actually another reason to put it zero in the beginning, which I already forgot, which is that way anybody can pay, they can just download the book and find another way, so that’s possible as well, if it’s at zero, otherwise it’s not.

A: Yeah, we’ve had thousands of people buy books, and get free books, and we’ve probably had about five or ten, sort of indignant, I’m not going to use PayPal because they’re bad, types of feedback, which means there’s probably about five or ten times that amount that think that way. But’s it’s probably a small percentage, it’s like one percent, two percent, but we’d do it in a second if it was as easy as using Stripe. Probably the day after Stripe is available in Canada, we’ll probably be trying to integrate it, but it’s a hard, annoying problem, and we have so many other problems, that we just have to prioritize.

H: Right, and I think it’s correct, because maybe by the time the other problems are solved, maybe other services are available in Canada and then it’s not a problem, so, although I don’t like that it’s only PayPal, I do understand that this is your priority.

A: Yeah, we want to make Leanpub as good as possible for authors, I mean right now you can’t even put parts in a book, which is something I’m going to be coding next!

…Anyway, thanks, this has been really nice Yves. Thanks for talking with me. I’m going to post this this week on Leanpub and also look at adapting this into the Lean Publishing book I’m writing, and if I do that I’ll ping you beforehand and show you what the section looks like, and see if you’re fine with that, or if you have any feedback or comments.

H: Cool. Thank you very much.

A: Thank you very much, and thank you for being a Leanpub author!

Leanpub Podcast Interview #1: Roy Osherove

2012-05-16T12:00:00-07:00

Roy Osherove is the author of the Leanpub book Notes to a Software Team Leader and of The Art Of Unit Testing. Roy has been in leadership roles for most of his professional life, acting as team lead, CTO and architect in many places. He’s had many failures to learn from but also some great successes, that he likes to share by doing training courses and mentoring. You can read his blog at 5whys.com.

Roy was a very interesting person to talk with. However, this is the first interview Peter had ever conducted as the interviewer, so it’s occasionally painful to listen to at times! The transcript below is a bit cleaned up.

This interview was recorded on March 20, 2012.

The full audio for the interview is here. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or add the following podcast URL directly: http://leanpub.com/podcast.xml.

Armstrong: So I’m here with Roy Osherove, who is an instructor and blogger and author. Roy blogs and teachers workshops about Agile development and software team leadership. His most recent book is Notes to a Software Team Leader which has been written and published on Leanpub. We’re going to talk today about his book, his experiences as an author, about Lean Publishing, and what led Roy to try Leanpub - and also as a programming note, this is the first podcast I’ve ever done as the interviewer, so I’m sure I’ll talk too quickly and make tons of mistakes, so forgive me!

Okay, so, Roy, thank you for being on the first ever Lean Publishing podcast.

Osherove: Thank you, I’m honored to be the first.

A: So, before we get into discussing your book and Lean Publishing, I’d like to find out a bit more about your background. On your blog it shows you teach workshops, and you’re a blogger and an author. So how did this all happen?

O: Well, I’ve been in the software development business for about 12, maybe 14 years. I live in Israel, and I’ve always been a software developer in my heart. About maybe ten years ago I started to blog about .NET, and things actually rolled from there. I got a bunch of readership, and I got to write my first book at some point, which was about unit testing, it’s called The Art of Unit Testing, and that led to speaking engagements and training and whatnot. And team leadership has always been a passion of mine; it’s something that I’ve failed to do so many times that I’ve learnd a lot about it, and so I’m doing the same thing that I did with my previous book, which is just sharing a lot of my mistakes.

A: Excellent… Yeah, I found myself as I was reviewing the book for this podcast, and I found myself just reading the whole thing, and didn’t prepare as much as I planned, because it struck a chord with me in my own experiences going from a developer to trying to lead teams. So, what led you to write Notes to a Software Team Leader? Was it, coming out of your training, or more out of your experience leading teams, or, how did that get started?

O: Well the book, I view this book as more of a bridging book, much like the first one was. Notes to a Software Team Leader for me is a book that bridges people with no management experience or leadership experience with the most important basic material they should be introduced with. But very much from a down-to-earth point of view: no-nonsense, real advice, not necessarily in, let’s say, industrial terms, as least upper-case letters as possible if you will -

A: Yeah, jargon. There’s no jargon, it felt like reading a conversation, I really enjoyed that.

O: Thank you. And the point is, there was a series of books called 99 Things Every X Should Know, like a developer, an architect, and it’s edited by Kevlin Henney, and I got to meet Kevlin at a bunch of conferences, and I said ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a 99 things every team leader needs to know’? Unfortunately, the company that publishes his books didn’t really like the idea for this book, and I didn’t want to steal the naming convention, so it’s basically Kevlin’s idea to call it Notes to a Software Team Leader, and he’s getting full credit for this name, because I think it really matches. So the second part of the book is actually community-driven, and it’s filled with notes and advice from team leaders and consultants and team leader wannabes and project managers, about what would make a good team leader to them.

A: Right, I noticed that. I assume you’re evolving this as you publish it, like it’s currently around 30-40 pages on Leanpub right now, and what’s you’re plan for the book overall? Like, keep going with more notes from other people, or expand it yourself, or, what’s your plan forward, or are you just evolving as you go?

O: The plan is to have two parts to the book. The first part is the one that I’m writing, which is based on the blog at 5whys.com, and that’s my notion of my biggest discoveries in the world of team leadership, which is about the idea of elastic leadership and the idea of team leadership stages, where the team needs different things at different stages in its life. When I finish the first part, which is probably going to be about four or five chapters, or something more than that, I’m working on chapter three right now, I’m going to add probably no more than a hundred notes, and hopefully the book will be basically finished. And then I’m going to print it and then sell it. Because I’m teaching this stuff, and I’m really missing a book that encompasses the things that I’m teaching, a companion book for my courses.

A: That makes sense. I really like the three phases, the Chaos phase, the Learning phase, and the Self-Organizing phases for the team, and also the different leadership styles where you talk about command and control, coach and facilitator. It think they’re really valuable to think like that, because I find myself either falling into command and control or facilitator a lot, like defaulting to facilitator and then moving to command and control. It’s nice when you have words for describing what you’re doing, like design patterns kind of. To me it felt like when I read Design Patterns and it’s like ok, yeah there’s just some names for things I’m doing, like named ‘Facilitator’, ok, this is to recognize what you’re doing. I think it makes you more self aware as to what you’re doing as a leader; I really found it valuable.

O: One of the biggest points about the idea of elastic leadership in the book is something that I’ve been missing a lot. It’s basically a framework for deciding what type of leader should you be, based on the current situation with the team. So it’s more of a framework to say, What is the current situation of the team? Are we in chaos, are we in learning mode, are we in self-organizing mode, and then to change accordingly. That’s something that seems to be missing in terms of guidance for a lot of team leaders. Especially for me, it was missing, and I wish I would have thought about that when I just started out. But today, when I see team leaders make a lot of mistakes, once I have that framework in my head, it’s very easy to say OK, so I can see what the problem is, there’s a mismatch between the leadership type and the actual phase the team is in, and that’s a problem, if we just match one to the other things would be better. And it also gives you a framework for deciding what type of advice do you accept. Have you ever seen those questions on LinkedIn, like, ‘I’m a scrum master and my team, I have a person in my team who’s always negative, what should I do?’ Then that person gets like 100 different responses, things what they should do, and of course each and every one of them seems to make sense, but a lot of them collide with each other, a lot of them are the opposite of each other, and so it’s kind of a framework to say, OK, it depends, what is the phase the team is in, because based on that, you either have time to work with that person and challenge them, or you don’t. How do you challenge them? If the team is supposed to be self-organizing, are they really? And so your actions as a team leader will be different. So it’s a framework to decide what to do based on the current sitation.

A: Right. For people, say for example who might be better at facilitating than coaching, is there, do you try to look and follow the situation as much as possible, or do you take into account, well I might be like average or poor at coaching right now, but I’m excellent at facilitating, I’ll try to facilitate my way out of this, or should you try to really just improve your own abilities as a team leader, and then try to be really situational? Does that take into account the difference, what the team leader’s capable of? Like if you’re trying to coach teams using agile coaching, are you only making matters worse, or…?

O: That’s a good question.

A: I’m really good at facilitating, and I’m terrible at coaching. And I’m good at command and control, I enjoy it but I try to use it very sparingly, because it think it’s destructive if you use it a lot. The one question I had, maybe related to this, is: Lots of this, in the elastic leadership chapter, seemed to talk to team leaders inside larger organizations. Do you see the same sort of dynamic applying to smaller startups, or do you think that things are just so chaotic at startups that it may make more sense to apply this knowledge in larger organizations first? Who’s your ideal target reader? Is it a person in a 100 person company, a 1000 person company, a five person company?

O: Having worked with a startup mentality, and having moved to Ruby in the past couple of years, has taught me that I don’t think that this elastic leadership stuff makes a lot of sense if you are in startup mode and the whole idea is just to get feedback and see if you’re on the right track. I think that it’s more, it’s going to make more sense if you’re in an enterprise-related team…

A: Where you know the product you’re building and it’s about delivering, or you’re doing the traditional agile approaches?

O: I really come from the Microsoft world, and from the Microsoft world it’s a lot of enterprise stuff, and there’s a lot of people problems, because it’s usually not a startup space, and in that regard, you have a lot of time to work at your skills and improve your team. In startups, usually you would have a month or two to just develop something, and get feedback, and I don’t think it’s the right place for the team leader to develop the people in their team over a month or two…

A: …when they only have a couple months of runway. That makes sense.

O: If you’re past the startup stage, where you know you’ve already built something of value, and now you have a long stretch ahead of you, of mulptiple years that you know you’re going to be working, now is the time to start building a real team and growing them etc. But in the inital seed stages, I don’t see it happening too much right now.

A: That makes sense. So in terms of the mechanics of your book specfically, what led you to use the Lean Publishing approach of self-publishing while your book is in progress?

O: Well, initially I was talking with Manning about doing this book with Manning, and they really wanted to, and then I was talking with Pearson Books about doing the book with them, and I actually signed a contract. But then the whole SOPA thing came on, and one of the things that I saw was that the Pearson folks were actually in support of SOPA, so I contacted them and said I cannot work with someone who supports the SOPA Act.

A: Wow, excellent. We’re very anti-SOPA as you may know.

O: Yeah, so, and the more I looked at the publishing world, the more I see that it feels like a big scam. Because you know I’ve published a book that is mildly successful, it has sold many thousands of copies, I mean definitely more than ten I think, probably double that, I’m not sure, and yet the royalties are just horrible. It’s definitely no way to make money. It’s a good way to make yourself known, in terms of marketing, but for someone who believes in the idea of agility and incremental work, the process of writing a book is basically the opposite! It’s the most extreme version of Waterfall that can ever be imagined. You’re expected to write the whole table of contents up front, and then to kind of estimate how long it’s going to take, and then try to lead by that, and of course everybody knows that’s never going to work, but somehow you’re expected to write the book and two years later you’re supposed to finish it as if your mind is two years backwards.

A: Yeah, and if you have a good idea part way along, and you try to change your table of contents, then that’s like a new proposal.

O: Almost. It’s not really that big a deal if everyone’s already in it with you, and then you can go ahead and say look, it’s going to take six months more etc. So my first book actually took three years to publish, because I just had a kid born - so I started my book with no kids, and I finished it with two kids.

A: Wow.

O: Yeah, now this book, I just had a kid born nine months ago, so that’s interesting too. But my biggest problem was that the feedback mechanism, the feedback cycle of actually publishing the book and reviewing, and the copy-editing, all that stuff, is just so slow and so horrible and so Waterfallish, and so bureaucratic, it just doesn’t make sense, it’s something I would try to avoid at any cost. And so what happened, was that I was looking at other publishers and I was looking at the Pragmatic publishing company, and I’m actually still thinking about working with them, because their royalties are pretty good, they’re doing the 50/50 royalty stuff…

A: After costs, right.

O: After costs. It’s still not amazing, but you can tell they’re trying to do the right thing there. They’re developers, they’re working with developers, and they have some amazing books, I’ve always wanted to be a part of that.

A: I think that I have bought about ten Pragmatic books. Same with Manning though, one of the first Manning books I read was Java Swing, way back in the day. I wrote a Manning book myself, right. But I know what you mean.

O: It’s horrible.

A: The funny thing, I understand your experience totally, because I did two Manning books, and the first one I self-published it while it was in progress…

O: They were happy with that?

A: Before I had any contract with anyone, I was writing Flexible Rails, and I was self-publishing it, and what I was doing is I put the PDF on Lulu, and people could buy it. And in the thank-you note, I said Hey, this book is being updated, here’s a secret URL, and it was like flexiblerails.com/rumplestiltskin, and so it was my joke, right, don’t tell anyone this thing because this is the book you paid for is at this URL. And so I wrote the book in public, and iterated, and I after I finished the first draft, then I was getting contacted by various publishers, and did the deal with Manning, and my experience there was really positive, because I had the first draft finished, and then it was like, OK, take the thing and polish it and make a book out of it. And also my negotiating position was really good because I had a finished book and I was making lots of money, and so I could drive a hard bargain on the ebook royalties.

O: And that’s kind of where I’m driving to right now, because I really liked the Manning experience, the people are really nice…

A: Yeah.

O: They’re just stuck in a world of lots of bureaucracy. They’re trying to do the right thing.

A: Yeah, they add the most value near the end of the book. Like typesetting, copy-editing, all that stuff happens at the end.

O: Marketing too.

A: Yeah marketing, and the channels, I don’t know anything about selling print books in channels, right. But I found that if you do something with a community, like if you write in-progress and get your ideas out there early, for me what happened is the the community sort of functioned like my development editor…

O: Exactly.

A: …and then when I was done the book I put it through the sausage factory and then I made a real book out of it, like a real physical book, etc, but the process of actually creating the first full version, I really enjoyed that, self-publishing it, and it seems like you’re doing the same thing.

O: Yeah, I don’t want to hide the book as I’m writing it, and for me, the Leanpub process really fits, because I’m an extrovert in many ways, and if there’s one thing that I hate it’s to delay gratification, so I want to be able to fix a typo or add a missing bio to one the writers, and then click Preview, and then click Publish, and within three minutes everyone has the latest version.

A: Yeah, exactly, if it’s a technical book and you have a bug in it, you want to be able to push it out to readers the same day as you find it. Your book obviously it’s a technical book, but there’s no code in it, it’s a management book, but if you’re, if you want to just change something, you want to be able to push out releases to your readers, on your schedule, not putting people in between you and your readers.

O: Yeah, and it’s kind of like cooking, because you get to decide on the cover, so I went to 99designs.com, and I created a nice cover for it. So it’s like you’re a child, you’re in charge of everything, in terms of content, and you get to see it live. You know one of the nicest features that I like the most about the Leanpub stuff, is that I could tell that people would actually buy the book before I actually started publishing it, and that was a nice thing, that’s kind of the Lean idea, is to say, is this the right thing? Will people actually pay for this? And so I get to see whether people will actually pay for the book, and when it’s out, even though it has two chapters and couple of notes, people are actually buying it, I had already almost 80 readers so far. That’s, well it’s not the most amazing success, but it tells me that there is a pocket of loyal readership that’s just beginning, and to me it’s almost like a blog being written live, that’s going to turn into a beautiful book.

A: Exactly. I’ve obviously, since obviously I’m the co-founder of Leanpub, I can poke around and look at things, and I mean I noticed that you’ve had people paying from the minimum to like over $10, I mean your minimum price is $2.99 and your suggested price is $9.99, and you’ve had people pay more than the suggested price.

O: Yeah like 15 bucks.

A: I’ve seen the spread has been very impressive, actually. Lots of people have been paying over the minimum, which is fantastic. When we were initially building the variable pricing feature… Back in the day Leanpub only had fixed price, and we had the idea, we should do variable price as well, and kind of like based on the success of things like Kickstarter, seeing how people want to engage, feel like they’re participating in creating something, but yeah, this is, seeing the data from books like yours has made us realize that this is so good, that we should get rid of the idea of fixed price altogether, like it does not make any sense to charge a fixed price for a book.

O: I have to say, I’m pretty impressed. I think that you guys, I feel like I’m part of the beginning of a revolution in publishing. And I think a lot of people are going to start doing this in the next few years. We’re like just the earliest adopters. But, as the books become more and more published and printed, to have a nice graphic, like it says, ‘Published with Leanpub’, or ‘Incrementally Published’, I would call it ‘Lean-early’, as in the word lean…

A: (laughter)

O: Hey, I want dibs on that now!

A: Ha! I have a weakness for naming things too, whenever I have a good name I register the .com, it’s like my domain habit.

O: Exactly. I have six domains…

A: I think I probably have a problem an order of magnitude worse than you!

O: Wow. ADD? One thing that I like is that there is a Bestsellers, and my book is in the Bestsellers. But one thing I realised is that the Bestsellers is not sorted by the amount of readers.

A: It’s by revenue.

O: Oh… OK.

A So, the reason we did that, and that will show how early-stage we are, based on that you know your revenue. The short head of our revenue is really good, and then it falls off. But the reason we sorted it by revenue is that we had a couple books that had a free promotion that got a lot of press about a year ago, and say that had about a thousand copies that were just free, and so we wanted to give…. Well it’s a couple of things. We should on the Bestsellers page sort by, we should let a user of the website say show me top… it’s not like Apple where you say, top free or top paid, what you really want to see is, show me by grossing, which is what we do now, or show me, um number of copies, which would just count free and paid equally, but we should find some way to weight, they should be some sort of weighting… Where if someone chooses to pay more than $20 for a book, it should be worth more than free.

O: I’m sure the listeners are about to choke both of us right now!

A: Ha! Yeah, go ahead!

O: So, anyway, I really like the process, because it allows me to think freely and to change the book at my own whim, and geeks like me need that control, so it’s pretty cool.

A: Have you done much experimenting with your price? Did you do like $2.99, $9.99 right away, and did you change it around, or?

O: I just said $2.99 just to see what happens and that’s it.

A: Cool.

O: It would be nice to have like A/B testing, but you know what, the fact that people are buying it tells me everything I need to know, so basically I’m OK. I’m fine with how things are going. So far I’m happy with the design…. I think the whole idea of Lean Publishing, of incremental publishing and being able to see it as you write it, I don’t think that exists anywhere else.

A: Yeah, when we designed Leanpub, we based off my experiences, what I had to do though was a kludge - I had to use a service that was meant for selling finished print books, which was Lulu, right, but they also sold PDFs. So I put a PDF on Lulu, and then I wanted to do it in-progress, so I put a secret URL in my thank you note, and I also set up a Google Group, so if you bought the book you could join the Google Group. And then I’d put updates on the Google Group, but the whole thing relied on, like, distributing updates - I had to post a file somwhere and email the Google Group, it was a big hassle. And I did it, and it hundreds of people of people read the book, and it did well for me, but basically Leanpub was created to be the website I wish existed when I wrote Flexible Rails. And the funny thing is that the idea for the name ‘Leanpub’ came from, our first customer was Eric Ries, and he came to talk in Vancouver about Lean Startups, and we were talking with him afterwards, we were drinking with him, and talking about what would he like in a publishing website, and says, “Well, what I’d really like to be able to do, is make a book out of my blog, because all the good content’s right there.” And we were like well, we can do that! And so, that’s when we realized that the idea of self-published in-progress books really dovetailed nicely with blogging and bloggers, and so we could look at blogs being a good optional starting point for in-progress books. And so that’s how the whole thing sort of happened and why it’s called Leanpub, is like Lean Publishing, which is self-publishing an in-progress book.

So, I think that you’re basically our ideal author. Obviously you have techinical skills, in terms of you’ve written, you’re a coder, and you’ve written a technical book and now you’re writing a business-type book, and so, basically, your feedback is really valuable to us. So, like, is there anything right now that you wish that Leanpub did, and it doesn’t?

O: Well… I know you guys were mentioning the idea of generating a PDF with things like Lulu, etc., which to me would be a very good idea. I want to be able to just, when I’m finished, to just ship it off, print it and just have it on Amazon and the Kindle and all that stuff, not even worry about it, just being able to get a link and tweet that and be done with it within ten minutes.

A: Yeah, what we’re going to do there I think is, so, currently you can just the PDF on Lulu, like yourself. For example Eric Ries’s Startup Lessons Learned is on Lulu right now, and I think I remember, last time I looked, a few months ago, it was like in the top 1000 Lulu books. But the thing is the PDF, right now the thing with Leanpub is that if you put it on Lulu as a PDF, that’s made for screen, and so we’re going to develop a feature where we make like print-optimized PDFs where we take the cover page off, so you can make your own cover page.

O: Yeah, that’s what I meant, exactly. There isn’t much that I miss, except maybe just being able to sort by readers, and, now I know it’s by grossing, that at least I know what it means, to be somewhere in the middle. Yeah, it just means that we’re somewhere in the beginning, because I definitely think it’s just the beginning. I know Johanna Rothman is working on a book, and I think in the next couple of years, other people will start realizing that there’s benefits to not working through a publisher at the beginning at least.

A: Yeah, I think publishers add value; the most value they add is at the end. And in the beginning part of the book, if you want to write in public, there’s lots of benefits.

So far in terms of reader feedback, like I know in Leanpub we have the opportunity for you to to say ‘email readers’, and send something from a form - have you found that useful, or have you found readers contacting you by email or Twitter, or has there been much feedback at all?

O: There’s been very little feedback from the readers. In fact now that I think about it, one of the things that I miss is that I can’t see the names of the people who bought my book.

A: Yeah. Oh man, this has been an internal debate on this. So at some point we were going to show everything, name and email of purchasers, but we didn’t want to do email because that would be bad.

O: Yeah, but the names at the very least. Because I can see, I have a course on TDDD on udemy.com, and so there when someone subscribes, I can their name, so I can know they’re part of my course, and I can contact them directly…

A: So we can maybe have some checkbox or something on our form, like we can have it by default say ‘share name’, then check box ‘opt out’, then be anonymous, or something…

O: I don’t know, I think the person who purchases my book, I think they kind of assume that I see all the information because I’m the author of the book, and they purchase it and they actually pay me in some way.

A: Yeah…

O: So I don’t see any kind of problem, at least giving their first and last name, I think it’s actually expected.

A: Yeah, it’s an interesting question, we’ll have to think about it, because it’s like, you make assumptions, we try to make reasonable assumptions, and you’ll always find someone who’s indignant about the fact that your assumption was just on the other side of what they thought. But you can’t let that deter your from building a good product. And so we have to figure out what the right balance is, without making, like… Our purchase form is really dead-simple, you know with the sliders and stuff, and the reason we don’t want to do make it more complicated… but I do know what you’re saying, yeah it would be nice to see names, I’m going to make a note about that. I’m going to make a Pivotal story for that.

O: Now that I’m thinking about it, another feature that’s missing to me is the analytics.

A: Yeah, if you go to the Edit Info page, you can put a Google Analytics code…

O: Yeah, but I’m using getclicky.com, so I need to be able to put JavaScript on the page.

A: Oh…

O: Yeah, it’s a much more powerful feature. Not everyone uses Google Analytics; getclicky is actually better, just so you know.

A: So our danger is that we don’t want to turn into MySpace, where everyone made their pages totally different, we’re a bit afraid of letting… Well, JavaScript for analytics, that makes sense, as long as we can do it in a way that didn’t open us up to being abused, or…

O: I think you should experiment. Do it for a month…

A: We should try something…

O: A new experiment…

A: Yeah, we should consider that for sure.

O: Because using Google Analytics is kind of a bitch, you know. The interface is so complex and everything. Getclicky, I seriously advise everyone to go getclicky.com and just use that. It’s so much better, so much more usable than Google Analytics, and it’s free for the basic five sites, so it’s pretty cool.

A: Have you ever… So what we do right now is we use Google Analytics and KISSmetrics. We were considering trying to figure our if there’s a way to expose KISSmetrics data to authors, automatically…

O: What kind of data?

A: Funnel. Funnel analysis. What kind of data do you want? I assume you’re doing funnel analysis basically, right?

O: Well I just want to see how many people go in, so when I tweet about it, I want to see that it actually has an effect on the wave, on the analytics wave, if you know what I mean.

A: Yeah, so Twitter is weird, like Twitter traffic often shows up as “direct”, because lots of people use different Twitter clients. And so if you at least knew the volume, then you’d be able to tell, well I did a big Twitter thing here and then VOOMP! Now I have like 100 more people…

O: Now that I think about it, one of the coolest things that I saw, I want to be able to at least like embed a YouTube video on the page, where I explain and I talk about the book, or there’s a video of me doing a talk or a lecture about the book or something like that, I think that will draw a lot of people into it. It’s like a landing page, so it is a book landing page after all, and there is a really powerful feature.

A: Yeah, actually that’s a really good suggestion. If you don’t mind talking about this for a few minutes, like our desing goal for the book landing page is to be good enough so that people don’t want to set up custom WordPress blogs just to point at their Leanpub books. And we had an author who did this, because, our landing page used to be terrible, and so Manuel actually created a WordPress blog just to be basically–no actually, it was a different person–but people have created WordPress blogs just to point at their Leanpub pages. And so we want to be flexible in terms of like have things like video and analytics and whatnot…

O: Basically you hvae to be able to give me some like JavaScript embedding stuff and YouTube embedding stuff, because that’s how people customize the hell out of these pages, and so they feel they have control, they don’t need to create their own.

A: Right. So, in terms of the layout that we have now, we did a bunch of work on the page…

O: The current layout is almost perfect, in Explorer it looks pretty good, but in Chrome there are like no margins to the right and left, otherwise I kinda like it. It’s clean and simple, but I want to be able to add some more information to it, you know, in a structured way.

A: And would you want that to be just like… OK, I can see that, and things like a YouTube video, I can see that living really nicely above the table of contents…

O: And like a big Twitter icon that leads right to my Twitter account, and a YouTube, where it’s right on the top of the page, where I explain about the book or whatever. Or a background image I can set, whatever.

A: I think you’re going a tiny bit farther than we’ll go, but I get the idea, and I think we’re going to start making this customizable, not like this week or anything, but I think going forward, and when we do I’ll ping you and see what you’re feedback is.

O: You know what? Before all that, I don’t mind if you keep the site as it is, just give me the ability to have parts in the book instead of just chapters…

A: Ha! Yes, you’re the second person who’s asked for this recently, we’ll do that, for sure, that makes sense.

O: Because my book is in two parts. Right now I have a chapter for the notes, instead of a part with multiple chapters.

A: So here’s the thing. We need to keep the h1 being a chapter, I think, because, for the listeners who don’t know what we’re talking about, in Leanpub you have a Book.txt file that lists file names, and then you have like h1 are chapters, h2 are sections etc. If we went and made parts be h1 then we’d break all the Leanpub books and we don’t want to do that, so I think what we’d end up doing is parts, I think the current thinking is, either some special syntax…

O: Yeah, just a special syntax, like multiple lines or something that says part one, or whatever. It’s just one hierarchy level up…

A: So do you need to be able to name the parts? Or is numbered, just part one, part two…

O: Yeah, you should be able to name the parts.

A: Ok, that makes sense.

O: And each part should have like a possible exposition, like a paragraph.

A: Yeah, OK, so then it’s basically just a special syntax for delimiting…

O: Yeah.

A: … a heading, and then you just write text in there that looks like normal text.

O: I’m pretty sure you’re going to have to cut this podcast in half, and say like the first half is a podcast and the second half is just us talking…

A: Ha! Well I like this because Leanpub is a startup and we’re a Lean startup and… part of this podcast is about Lean Publishing and the Lean Publishing ideas, because I’m going to be taking some of this and adapting some of it for my own book about Lean Publishing. And the other part is, I want to stick the podcast on Leanpub, and say hey, this is a podcast with a Leanpub author who’s enjoying using Leanpub, and etc., But, I think, frankly, we’re doing customer development, and we’re trying to build the best site for people who are basically you. And, so, this is very much what Leanpub is, I think, is this type of process. It’s usually been with emails, instead of on a podcast, but for me, this is what Leanpub is, and if you want to be like an author, who uses Leanpub, then yeah.

O: You know Peter, while we’re all being honest and recorded and stuff, here’s another request.

A: Alright.

O: So, I don’t get, and you’re not the only guys doing this, but I don’t get why do payments always have to be every three months. Why don’t I get paid every month?

A: They should be monthly. You know why they’re every three months? You know why? It’s because I’m the guy who does it and I’m lazy! It’s literally, like I’m literally going into PayPal…

O: “Never ascribe to malice that which can be attributed…”

A: It’s not malice, it’s not even incompetence, it’s sloth! And it’s actually lack of automation. What it’s going to be at some point, obviously we’re going to use PayPal’s MassPay to pay everyone automatically. I’m thinking about changing the terms of service so that if it’s over a certain amount it gets paid monthly. What I don’t want to do is every month have to pay for books that are like experiments, and they have like one sale…

O: Yeah, but if it’s over 50 bucks or something…

A: …like if it’s some material amount of money. Like, we don’t have this all sitting in some big bank account earning interest for Leanpub. We’ve had that request from one other person as well, and the better you do, the more of a request it is, and so yeah. I think we’ll change the terms to be, over a certain amount, monthly, otherwise quarterly. And then, the other aspect is, ironically I went to go code, the way that the code works to mark things as paid is written really inefficiently, because when I first coded it we didn’t have as many successful authors as now, so now I have to rewrite the code that actually marks things paid.

O: Hey, congratulations!

A: Yes, I’m happy about that, it’s first-world problems, right?

O: Champagne problems!

A: Exactly. Yeah, we’ll change it to monthly. What’s reasonable to you? Like $100, $200?

O: I would say everything over 50 bucks is payable.

A: Sure, that’s fine. So, here we go, I’m not going to cut this podcast, I’m just going to put it up there as-is I think. I like this.

O: Raw. Make it bleed.

A: This was really good, Roy. So, do you have any… I think I’ve pretty much covered everything I wanted to cover. So you’re fine with this being a podcast and also with me excerpting or quoting it entirely in my Lean Publishing book, or just snipping certain parts out, and whatnot, right?

O: As long as I get to review the stuff you wrote about me in the book, yeah.

A: Sure, of course.

O: Yeah, cool.

A: Also I’ll probably ask you to contribute something about yourself, that’ll be easiest. Well thanks a lot, thanks for being the first Lean Publishing Podcast guest!

O: It is an honour.

A: Thank you…

O: Thank you Peter. Great work so far guys.

A: And thanks for being a Leanpub author!

Who are Leanpub's competitors?

2012-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

Hyperink ($1.2mm in funding from A16Z, etc) vs. Leanpub

Recently an author asked us whether we saw ourselves as competitive with Hyperink.

And yesterday, to our pleasant surprise, Kevin Gao, the CEO of Hyperink, was quoted in Forbes as saying his biggest competitors included Leanpub:

“Still, Gao thinks his closest rivals are Leanpub, Amazon.com itself, and ultimately the Big Six book publishers.”

This is because Hyperink just launched a service where they do what Leanpub lets you do, but they take half the money. (In comparison, Leanpub pays a 90% minus 50 cents royalty per sale.)

This is a huge feather in our cap, since Leanpub is bootstrapped and Hyperink has raised $1.2 million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and other firms. So, clearly we have some traction and mindshare.

(As an aside, both Ben Horowitz’s blog and Marc Andreessen’s old blog would have been fantastic Leanpub books! I assume they’ll be great Hyperink books one day.)

Now, the question is, do we consider Hyperink to be one of our primary competitors? And, more broadly, who do we consider to be Leanpub’s primary competitors?

Is Hyperink a Leanpub competitor?

Well, their blog-to-book service certainly seems to compete with Leanpub! This is a good thing, but it’s only partially true.

They are focusing on doing the curating and editing of your blog posts, along with design work. We empower bloggers and writers to do this themselves and keep way more of the book revenue. (Leanpub: 90% minus 50 cents royalty; Hyperink: 50% royalty.)

More generally, Leanpub is much more than just blog-to-book workflow. This is why we compete with their blog-to-book service, but they only compete with a subset of what Leanpub does.

Leanpub is “self-published in-progress ebooks”. We’re a free, simple writing workflow funded by an optional store.

We’re building the best way in the world to write, self-publish and sell an in-progress ebook.

An optional blog import is just the starting point. The real key is our workflow:

Write in Markdown.
Sync with Dropbox.
Click a button on the Leanpub website.

That’s all it takes to preview or publish an ebook in PDF, EPUB (for iPads, etc) and MOBI (for Kindle). Yes, it is that easy.

Leanpub is not just a writing tool; we are also a means to sell a book: just set your price and click publish.

Hyperink seems to also be involved in providing design, layout, content advice, even writing help. That may be a good business, but it’s not our business. We want to be the best way in the world for an author to write and self-publish an in-progress ebook with no help from anyone.

With the exception of some occasional special projects (recently, the Uncensored project), we are not in the business of working to make the author’s book for them. We provide the ability to automatically import a blog RSS feed with one click, but the author is supposed to be the person doing the editing, curation, etc. We want to ensure that this process is as smooth as possible for authors to do themselves.

So, who are Leanpub’s primary competitors?

DIY approach with a generic digital storefront (E-junkie, Gumroad, etc) - you would create the PDF, EPUB and MOBI files yourself.
Print book self-publishing companies adding ebooks (Lulu, etc) - we’re not in the print book business, but these places are now in the ebook business.
Amazon and Apple - these will obviously dominate the market for selling finished ebooks; we’re trying to resegment it and win the market for in-progress ebooks
Other ebook startups (BookBaby, Hyperink, etc) - these are all focused on selling finished ebooks, and they seem to do more work for you than Leanpub. Yes, we do provide a premium feature where we export to Amazon and Apple for the author, but that’s just a bonus feature at the end of the Leanpub writing process once the book is done. Authors are free to just do that themselves; it’s not our core business model.

What’s next?

Leanpub exists to be the best way in the world to write, self-publish and sell an in-progress ebook. We call this process Lean Publishing. Everything we do is focused on that goal.

With that in mind, stay tuned for the next big Leanpub feature, which will make selling your Leanpub books even more effective…

Ordered lists with Roman numerals or letters

2011-09-19T00:00:00-07:00

One of our authors asked me how to do an ordered list with Roman numerals or letters instead of normal numbers. You know, like this:

unus, una, unum
uno, dos, tres, quatorze
duo, duae, duo
tres, tres, tria

Or like this

is for Astronaut
is for Betelgeuse
is for Comet

Here’s how you do it:

In HTML

In HTML, you set the class of the list to lower-roman, upper-roman, lower-alpha, upper-alpha or decimal.

For example:

<ol class="upper-roman">
<li>is one</li>
<li>is two</li>
<li>is three</li>
</ol>

will give you

is one
is two
is three

In Markdown

In Markdown, you just write what you want.

i. one
ii. two
iii. three

will result in

one
two
three

You can also change the punctuation

a) is for apple
b) is for bats
c) is for carrots

gives you

a) is for apple
b) is for bats
c) is for carrots

Note that you don’t have to change the numbers or letters and the order of them doesn’t matter

a. is for apple
a. is for aardvark
a. is for amazon

gives you

is for apple
is for aardvark
is for amazon

Multilingual support

2011-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

We’ve just added support for a bunch of languages to Leanpub. Most of you won’t have to do a thing, it’ll just work. However, if you’re writing in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, you’ll have to change a setting to get those books working correctly.

Turning on Chinese, Japanese or Korean support

If you are writing in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, then go to your book’s edit page. If you’re logged in, you’ll see something like this:

Click on the edit info link, and then scroll down until you see this:

Select the language you want to write in, and then click on the Update Book button at the bottom of the screen.