I'd suggest, if you want to run publishing on niche business topics as a business, that you take a page out of the Nathan Barry / Brennan Dunn / et al formula. (There exist many others who do similar things, but they're locally recognizable examples of it.)
Trade the book, or some other incentive [+], for the customer's email address. Attention is fleeting, but relationships with one's email list are enduring, if you do them correctly.
Send people who give you their email address lots of valuable stuff for free. Then, ask them to buy your products. Charge an appropriate amount for those products.
The math is, as has been widely reported by people writing books/etc on HN about a wide range of niche business topics, quite attractive. (Ballpark numbers? 650k people with some level of interaction with an online version of the book implies probably between 20k and 50k folks who would have been happy to swap their email address for a downloadable version. That's basically a nice house which temporarily happens to exist inside of an e.g. Mailchimp account.)
[+] I will note the author appears to have aesthetic reasons to reject creating a PDF/e-book/etc version of the book, despite people literally offering him money to do so. http://practicaltypography.com/why-there's-no-e-book-or-pdf.... There must be something which adds incremental value to the book which would justify incremental closeness to a portion of the readers.
Trade the book, or some other incentive [+], for the customer's email address. Attention is fleeting, but relationships with one's email list are enduring, if you do them correctly.
Send people who give you their email address lots of valuable stuff for free. Then, ask them to buy your products. Charge an appropriate amount for those products.
The math is, as has been widely reported by people writing books/etc on HN about a wide range of niche business topics, quite attractive. (Ballpark numbers? 650k people with some level of interaction with an online version of the book implies probably between 20k and 50k folks who would have been happy to swap their email address for a downloadable version. That's basically a nice house which temporarily happens to exist inside of an e.g. Mailchimp account.)
[+] I will note the author appears to have aesthetic reasons to reject creating a PDF/e-book/etc version of the book, despite people literally offering him money to do so. http://practicaltypography.com/why-there's-no-e-book-or-pdf.... There must be something which adds incremental value to the book which would justify incremental closeness to a portion of the readers.