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A Practical Guide to Web App Success (2011) – now free and CC licensed

112 points| spxdcz | 12 years ago |webappsuccess.com | reply

17 comments

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[+] gabemart|12 years ago|reply
Could you talk a little about the commercial performance of the book, and what led to the decision to release it under CC?

And thanks!

[+] spxdcz|12 years ago|reply
Sure! Though I don't actually have much in the way of commercial performance details - it's all split between many quarters of receipts over the last few years, that I'm too lazy to aggregate...

I'd guess that I didn't profit more than a couple of thousand (British) pounds (of both paper and digital sales), after all the publishing costs had been paid for. I think there's still quite a bit of paper stock; I'm still waiting to find out how much is left (though I'm unlikely to try to sell it - I'll probably give them away at conferences, etc).

The parent company that owned the publishing company was acquired by Monotype, and they made the difficult decision to close down the publishing arm as part of the acquisition. The contracts with all the authors were nullified, and all rights returned. As the book was a few years old, and some of it out of date, I figured the best thing to do with it - especially as I'm 100% focused on my startup, and it was never going to make me rich - was to "give it away" to see if it could have any extra life.

It's about 80,000 words and I wrote it over the course of a full year (of traveling; I was also doing some consultancy, so it wasn't full time). So I'd rather that effort was 'available' for other people to possibly use.

[+] atmosx|12 years ago|reply
I read a couple of paragraphs and I liked it. Will read it, even if it's not up-to-date :-) Thanks.
[+] sandywilkinscr|12 years ago|reply
Does the CC license allow me to update and sell it? The license itself isn't clear on this.
[+] spxdcz|12 years ago|reply
Yes, you certainly can do that. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

You may adapt it for any purpose, including commercially. The only terms are that you need to credit the original source (the website will do) and indicate if any changes were made. There are no other restrictions. Have at it!

[+] quadrangle|12 years ago|reply
The CC-BY license used is clear on this. It most definitely permits both updating and selling. Cheers
[+] chintan39|12 years ago|reply
I have just started reading it.And I am excited to read it all. Thank you @spxdcz / Don Zambonini
[+] notastartup|12 years ago|reply
Any particular chapters that contains the really important lessons?
[+] spxdcz|12 years ago|reply
Surprisingly, at least to me, I think the chapters on marketing are some of the more interesting ones for the HN audience, and have aged pretty well.

It's quite a high level book, so doesn't go into anything in TOO much detail, but instead is supposed to give an entrepreneur - even non-technical - a good understanding of most aspects of building a web app (or at least, what that consisted of a few years ago).

The dev chapters probably won't hold much interest to HN visitors (as they'll know much of the advice), but the marketing ones, maybe some of the design ones, might have some new insights if you've been focusing mostly on tech in your day to day work.