Hey everyone! I'm excited to have my book on Product Hunt, especially after I've seen so many other great technical books here (some of them were inspirations for my own writing, too!). Please feel free to leave any questions or comments here, on the book's LeanPub page, or on Twitter. I'd love to talk more about Ansible, self-publishing a book, or whatever you find interesting!
@bentossell - Happy to oblige! I actually gave a talk on the entire process at the November meetup of the Ansible St. Louis group, so the info is fresh in my mind :)
When I started writing the book, I was still thinking about pitching the book to a few publishers, and I even got in talks with a couple of the major tech publishers. However, after I started publishing a few early editions (just a few chapters and an outline to start!) on LeanPub, the ability to build a relationship with the early readers was so awesome that I tossed aside any notion of publishing through a traditional mechanism.
I had some great early success with book sales, too—I targeted a 90 page book and 200+ readers... and was already past 100 pages and 500 readers in just a couple months of writing! Part of that was due to luck/timing, because Ansible was just passing it's early adopter growth curve, and becoming a mainstream automation tool. My book was one of the earliest available, as other publishers announced books which would not be available for a few months.
Taking that reader feedback, refining the book as Ansible itself matured, and being involved in the Ansible community made the book a huge success! Including Amazon, iBooks, and LeanPub sales since late October, I've sold just over 3,000 copies, which is _far_ beyond what I'd imagined I could sell. I wrote the book entirely in Markdown, tracking it with Git (a private repo) and Dropbox, and I wrote everything in either Byword or Sublime Text.
I wrote a bit more about the publishing process on the Server Check.in blog (there are a few posts there you can look through on sales, on inspiration, the process, etc.), and I'd be happy to answer any other specific questions here!
Seems like a great book, Jeff.
For folks looking for great online Ansible tutorials, https://hackr.io/tutorials/learn... is a great resource. Tutorials here are submitted and voted by the programming community.
Got a copy and love learning about it. Thanks @geerlingguy
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