Kill the HiPPO is now published!
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Good news, everyone! Kill the HiPPO is now available to purchase in either Kindle or print format on:
A request for reviews: Writing a review is the #1 way you can help me right now. If you do buy and read Kill the HiPPO, please leave a review! The book's Amazon page is currently lacking any reviews—as you'd expect—and reviews are so important on Amazon. Getting to "published": Finally! It's been one year and nine months. Writing a book seems to take forever. Even the last steps dragged out. Someone in my Writing Accountability Group recommended getting a physical "proof copy" before publishing. I'm glad I did, because a couple of the illustrations were illegible in the print version. The proof copy took a week to arrive; when it did arrive at home I had just left the country for a few days so I was unable to read the proof copy until I returned. Creating a book is not like creating software, where you can deploy quick fixes to solve problems within minutes. Last Saturday I had some time to fix the illustrations, and generate a new version to submit to Amazon. I had to wait for the Amazon minions to review it before it could be published. Then, on Sunday, the news arrived: The "launch year" starts now: Instead of focusing on a single launch event, I'm now entering "launch year", a concept I'm borrowing from April Dunford, who used this approach for her book Obviously Awesome. For the next year, each week I'll spend a couple of hours working on marketing and promotion. That time might be spent experimenting with Amazon ads; it might be appearing on podcasts; it might be applying to speak at events; it might be learning what things I might try; it will definitely be spent writing more email newsletters. From here, this newsletter is changing format a little: First, for the next year, I'll be aiming to send it weekly. Secondly, rather than share my progress on writing, I will focus on practical advice on the theme of choosing what feature to build next. Until next time, Steve McLeod PS: If you featured in a chapter of Kill the HiPPO, I'll be in touch soon to arrange sending you some complimentary copies. |
Kill the HiPPO
Follow our journey creating, publishing and marketing our book Kill the HiPPO.
Hello! I now have the cover design for the Kindle version of Kill the HiPPO. It's feeling like a real book now! The cover is designed to stand out in Amazon thumbnails—Amazon is the main source of sales for this type of self-published book, so it is important to optimise for the buyer's experience on Amazon. The cover design for the print version is still in progress because I overlooked that it needs back cover text. I quickly wrote a draft a couple of days ago, let it simmer overnight, then...
Hello! It's looking like Kill the HiPPO will be published by the end of this month, March 2026. Here's an update of all the balls I'm juggling to get there: Acquire 2 ISBNs So far I've got 1 out of 2 ISBNs approved. To sell a book on Amazon, you need an ISBN. Two ISBNs actually: one for the print version, and one for the Kindle/ebook version. And if there's an audio version? That's another ISBN. These cost about $50 each, and have to be applied for from a national agency in the country you...
Hello The copyediting of Kill the HiPPO is finished. The copyeditor was extremely nitpicky. Across the 100-ish pages of manuscript, she made 3,000+ suggested revisions! Many of these suggestions were trivialities about punctuation and word choice. Many other revisions were converting our British-ish English into US English - the copyeditor said that in tech books the convention is to use US English. So every prioritise became prioritize. But amongst the trivialities, the copyeditor made some...