Ultimate Rust Crash Course
My experience self-publishing vs working with a publisher
Since I recently prerecorded a Rust course with a Publisher (Packt), I thought it would be a good idea to also self-publish a course. Which I did! Check out the Ultimate Rust Crash Course page I made for my web site, which lists the various ways you can take the course (and I get a larger portion of the sale if you use my links).
I just barely published two courses, one through a publisher and the other by myself. What have I learned so far?
When self-publishing:
- Self-publishing is much faster than working with a publisher, because I don’t have to wait for the publisher, so I can just move forward without any delays, negotiations, or backtracking.
- Self-publishing is much slower than working with a publisher, because sometimes I just don’t work on it because no one is holding me accountable and I’d rather do something else with my nights and weekends.
- I have way more control over the content when I self-publish, which makes it much more satisfying. This is a meaningful point to me.
- I don’t know how to market my course effectively. Okay, let’s be honest. I pretty much don’t know how to market my course at all, so I’m not sure if many people will ever have the chance to see the course. I can make the course, make a web page for the course, write a blog post for the course…and that’s about it. Maybe people will magically stumble upon it? Okay, I’m pretty sure that’s not an effective marketing strategy, but that is the point I am making, after all.
When working with a publisher:
- Much more structure, constraints, and motivation. I may not get to control everything, but there’s also less uncertainty. “Here’s the subject we chose. Here’s the title we chose. Based on your input here’s the outline of your course. Go, go, go.”
- Working with a publisher means you work on their timeline, which seems slow when you’re waiting months for them to approve your proposal, but fast when they’re pushing you to produce, produce, produce.
- The publisher knows a thing or two about getting the content uploaded to a variety of places and marketing it. Presumably they are good at marketing.
- The folks at the publishers are opinionated and yet also know little or nothing about the subject you teach. This combination sometimes leads to the publisher breaking things unintentionally. Specifically: code examples. Publishers may rewrite your slides entirely, and introduce bugs into your carefully-composed example code. In my experience, I had to “take” my published course in order to discover what had been done to my content behind-the-scenes and then submit feedback to the publisher to get it fixed.
What conclusions can I make so far? Well, if all else is equal, I can already tell that I prefer the self-publishing route just for the sheer control, lower stress, and higher enjoyment of the process. If I had to make a full-time living out of it…I’m not sure yet. My guess would be through the publisher, because the trickle of income from self-publishing attempts past and present is pitifully small. Lucky for me, I’m not planning to ever do training courses as a full-time job, so if I ever choose to make another course (an open question, at this point), I’ll likely do the self-publishing thing again.
That being said, after I finish prepping to teach my 1-day Rust crash course at OSCON 2020, I’m planning on putting training activities on the shelf in favor of working on actual software projects.
