<i>"...That means about 8,000 RSS blog readers and 10,000+ twitter followers that knew about my book while I was writing it..."</i><p>I always find these articles interesting. Usually the real story is more like "I know how to market stuff and made a lot of money" but the article titles are something along the lines of "How I made 40K by picking my nose online in one weekend!"<p>So the reader gets this great story of some guy picking his nose. All kinds of details about how he did it, why he did it, what tools he used, what kind of nose he has, and so on. All kinds of little details here and there to get lost in. Maybe some graphs of his nose, or a bunch of charts showing traffic to his site hour by hour and a discussion of how using a bold font increased conversion by .2%. In short, nerd candy.<p>Once again, the important story here is marketing, in-depth interaction with a target audience, but this is always downplayed or ignored by the author, a specialist in getting your attention and engaging you. LeanPub is not the story, although it has a role. E-books are not the story, although they also have a role. Having a huge blogging audience and Twitter following, and leading them into a meaningful conversation about value? <i>That's</i> the story.<p><i>"...I do very little marketing, and it is mostly on my blog and twitter, in the form of sidebar links from my various websites..."</i><p>Right now somewhere around 100K HN readers are reading this story, thinking about team leadership, making money online, agile, and so forth. Some significant percentage are going to sign up for the RSS feed, perhaps buy the book. They are going to begin a process of discussion around what's important to them and what they're willing to pay for.<p>Dude. If that isn't marketing, I don't know what is. Great job.<p>(ADD: This looks like a great book, btw. I don't mean to impugn the author or make it out like he's purposely trying to trick anybody. HN is traditionally a startup forum. Just trying to take a fresh look at material like this from the viewpoint of somebody who might want to do it themselves one day. What I learned from this piece is that my current Agile Team Tune-Up email list of around 200 (<a href="http://bit.ly/15sz0Pl" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/15sz0Pl</a>) needs to expand by about 40-fold before it would be worthwhile to start a conversation about books. Perhaps more than that depending on my engagement skills. This is really good stuff to know.)