And thanks!
I'd guess that I didn't profit more than a couple of thousand (British) pounds (of both paper and digital sales), after all the publishing costs had been paid for. I think there's still quite a bit of paper stock; I'm still waiting to find out how much is left (though I'm unlikely to try to sell it - I'll probably give them away at conferences, etc).
The parent company that owned the publishing company was acquired by Monotype, and they made the difficult decision to close down the publishing arm as part of the acquisition. The contracts with all the authors were nullified, and all rights returned. As the book was a few years old, and some of it out of date, I figured the best thing to do with it - especially as I'm 100% focused on my startup, and it was never going to make me rich - was to "give it away" to see if it could have any extra life.
It's about 80,000 words and I wrote it over the course of a full year (of traveling; I was also doing some consultancy, so it wasn't full time). So I'd rather that effort was 'available' for other people to possibly use.
What are you working on now?
You may adapt it for any purpose, including commercially. The only terms are that you need to credit the original source (the website will do) and indicate if any changes were made. There are no other restrictions. Have at it!
It's quite a high level book, so doesn't go into anything in TOO much detail, but instead is supposed to give an entrepreneur - even non-technical - a good understanding of most aspects of building a web app (or at least, what that consisted of a few years ago).
The dev chapters probably won't hold much interest to HN visitors (as they'll know much of the advice), but the marketing ones, maybe some of the design ones, might have some new insights if you've been focusing mostly on tech in your day to day work.
