Ok, so you start out wanting to test if there is a market for your book, and use a Kickstarter to gauge interest.<p>But then you pivot to the Kickstarter being its own goal, and do everything you can think of to make it succeed.<p>Do you end up learning anything useful about whether there's a market for your book?
I think the quoted Reddit comment is very ironic. People are allergic to self-promotion but hand complain that no one writes blogs anymore (beside the corporate ones).<p>I am not sure what can be done about strong luck impact on HN submissions or publishing Amazon books. It really feels like you have one attempt and the end result is mostly out of you hands.
Book author, in reply to your post’s discussion about the effectiveness of submitting posts to Hacker News:<p>Your final post title to HN was clear, direct, and talked about your book. The prior titles were not necessarily that - and used the Foo Bar Title Caps formatting in their submissions which is a mark against you before I’ve read past word two.<p>> <i>My Seventh Year as a Bootstrapped Founder</i><p>Biographies are interesting to some people but not me, and this offers very little insight into what’s unique about you that’s worth reading. (There is, presumably, something unique to you that’s interesting!)<p>> <i>No Longer My Favorite Git Commit</i><p>This feels like an in-joke that I didn’t get because I’m not a regular reader of your site, and probably overlooked the prior HN post. It also isn’t particularly distinctive: <i>why</i> not? <i>what</i> commit?<p>> <i>Show HN: …</i><p>This title was excellent. I remember the post and I remember having all the information I needed in the title to decide how to respond to it. Lots of people run statistical analyses on HN, so it’s a common enough Show topic.<p>> <i>How to write blog posts that developers read</i><p>This title is also excellent. It’s to the point, helps me understand what the focus is going to be, and either is a topic I care about or not. More like this, please!<p>As a concluding note, when I see people self-linking, I take a glance through their post and comment tendencies; >90% of your last 20 posts and of your last 90 days of comments are about your own work, rather than those of others. It typically takes me about ten seconds to check someone’s recent posts and make a snap judgment if I see a page full of self-links, no matter if it’s over ten days or ten months, because that’s a very reliable indicator of “promoting” rather than “participating”. I’m perfectly fine with promotion, but only in balance with participation. So, that’s a key factor in why I haven’t engaged with your posts this year to date. I’m glad your book funding went well, but I’ll continue glossing over your submissions as long as that participation ratio remains 9:1 self/other rather than 1:9 self/other.