Marc-André Cournoyer

I was in a similar position about two years ago. And was determined to bootstrap a "lifestyle" business that would provide income with the specific restriction of not doing consulting ever again. I reached my goal in the first month: http://macournoyer.com/blog/2011/05/02/working-for-me/ and now have my own biz http://codedinc.com/ that has been profitable and growing ever since while working very few hours. Some of this I attribute to the reputation and connections I built over the years before that. But also to knowledge I gained reading about marketing and advertising (mostly old books). I would highly recommend you drop the anonymity. If it's to feel safer, that's not going to work. To bootstrap your biz you have to put your credibility on the line EACH time. Also, any content you create must fuel your authority/credibility. Shameless self promo: here's a course I created to teach how I launch & sell products http://copywritingforgeeks.com/. But if you have any questions I'd be happy to help, drop me an email at gmail my username. Good luck!

Well, I think that it can be profitable, especially if going EBook only. There is some great advice on it here: http://macournoyer.com/blog/2010/03/01/promote-cyopl/ But for me, I didn't want to spend a ton of time and effort on marketing, and my topic was a niche within a niche at the time (I wrote the Ruport Book with Mike Milner -- ruportbook.com). After a year or so, instead of being thousands in the black, we were hundreds in the red, even though the book sold a few hundred copies. So we just made it available at cost and closed the doors at that point. This may be because the HTML version was available for free when we started. It may be because we set price points very low (I think our PDF was like $8), it may be because I started an LLC and wasted tons of money on absurd taxes just for keeping the doors open. It was a bunch of epic fail on the business side of things, and that at least taught me a lesson. I talked to O'Reilly and though they were very inflexible about certain things (due dates, typesetting, etc), they were open to change pretty much everything that mattered to me, and did. As a result, my book shipped early and at a much higher quality level than I could imagine doing myself. Of course, I could tell you stories about other publishers I either pitched ideas for, did tech editing with, or wrote chapters for that'd make your head spin. So I wouldn't say that professional publishers are good across the board, just O'Reilly pretty much let me…

Some people like to do cutesy things like this: http://macournoyer.com/blog/2010/02/23/how-to-apply-to-a-job/

I was reading something similar here about creating your own language using LLVM (and also using the Ruby bindings for LLVM as opposed to C++) ... http://macournoyer.com/blog/2008/12/09/orange/

I must confess I have not seen many. I drew inspiration from Marc-André Cournoyer and his post "how to apply to a job" http://macournoyer.com/blog/2010/02/23/how-to-apply-to-a-job/. However, I've entertained the idea of writing code as prose for quite some time.

http://macournoyer.com/instantinstant/ not quite the same thing, but an instant search for instant searches.

In a similar vein, here's my executable cover letter in ruby, http://tagaholic.me/resume.html. Running it opens my resume in your browser (on a Mac). Got the idea from http://macournoyer.com/blog/2010/02/23/how-to-apply-to-a-job/