Would mean giving away my identity

Congratulations on your success! I actually own one of your books and recommend it regularly

The anonymity allows me to be open and transparent about finances that I wouldn’t be able to if I identified myself. On my other accounts I mainly just post programming related stuff, nothing special.

You can be transparent about your numbers from linking to your Amazon ranking. Pretty easy to reverse engineer sales numbers from that.

Thanks for calling my post great, it means a lot :)

You’re welcome! I really enjoyed reading it and could relate to your experience :)

Some people I follow on Twitter have used this model really successfully. I think now I have a bigger following it could work for me too

It's like today the way to make money in the music business is to give away the CDs, build a following, and then sell concert tickets.

Good for you! Nice work getting paid speaking engagements in the past and I hope they pick up again for you. Seems conferences are starting up in person again this year.

I think you are likely correct on this but I do think having deadlines helped me make sure I actually finished. If I was to write another I would self publish.

A good way to have deadlines is to presell the book, and promise these deadlines to people who paid. Example: buy now for 50% of the final price, two chapters already ready, and I promise one new chapter every two weeks.

I use this strategy, and I’m always amazed that people trust me enough to deliver as promised :)

Given the amount of high profile kickstarter failures (or delays), i'm surprised that people would continue to do pre-orders and such! I guess if the cost is small, it won't be a loss for the backer even if it was delayed.

Thanks! Do you have a suggestion for a better title given the content?

It’s a fine title. It’s descriptive and honest. It doesn’t read as click bait/scam.

Click bait would be, “Passive income guaranteed in publishing,” which would make a (false) promise you did not.