I'm not sure this is a success, but more of a habit I developed that helped me a lot.
While in bed about to sleep, I take about 5min to do the following:
- Think about 3 bad things I did during the day
- Think about 3 good things I did during the day (from smiling to a cachier, to helping someone in need, to sharing knowledge with co-workers)
- Re-visit what I did the whole day and be thankful for everything. And I really mean litterarely for everything (made coffee in the morning? I'm thankful for having a coffee machine, a full fridge, thankful for the weather, money I have or don't have..etc).
The above has helped me with two things: Remembering things (I have a bad memory) and be more happy with what I have. And as someone said "Happiness is doing more and expecting less".
Whenever I think about writing an ebook, I write out twenty blog post titles. If I can't get to twenty titles, I don't have enough knowledge or passion to write a whole book.
Then, the one time I wrote an ebook, I blogged each of those twenty titles. I set up a mailing list. I participated in forums on the topic, with my signature linking to the blog posts/email signup form.
Then, after I'd written the blog posts, I used leanpub to pull in the RSS for them. Then I edited them and expanded where needed.
That worked for me once, that's the path I'd take in the future.
Things to realize:
* writing a book is hard. I remember spending an hour on one sentence of my book (just testing to make sure I was correct about a statement).
* technical books have short lives. Tech moves on. That said, people are willing to spend money to save time.
* marketing is at least as hard as writing the book. Prepare to spend time doing this.
* If you aren't using the tech in your work (or won't be in the future) you better love the tech or your book will need changes and you won't want to put in the time.
Most likely because developing a web app using a react frontend and an API backend adds a significant amount of work for arguably little to no benefit, especially not at MVP stage.