Peter Cook, Author of D3 Start to Finish

Len: Hi I’m Len Epp from Leanpub, and in this episode of the Frontmatter podcast I’ll be interviewing Peter Cook.

Based in Brighton, Peter is a senior visualisation developer at Flourish who writes about the how-to of data visualisation for Create With Data.

You can follow him on Twitter @createwithdata and @peter_r_cook and check out his website at createwithdata.com as well as peterrcook.com, d3indepth.com, and animateddata.com.

Peter is the author of the Leanpub books D3 Start to Finish: Learn how to make a custom data visualisation using D3.js and Fundamentals of HTML, SVG, CSS and JavaScript for Data Visualisation.

In D3 Start to Finish, Peter shows you how to build an interactive data visualization using the popular JavaScript D3.js library. You can actually see the working visualization yourself, called Energy Explorer, at d3-start-to-finish-energy-explorer.surge.sh, which shows the energy mix of 141 countries.

In this interview, we’re going to talk about Peter’s background and career, professional interests, his books, and at the end we’ll talk about his experience writing and self-publishing.

So, thank you Peter for being on the Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast.

Peter: Hi Len, thanks for asking me.

Len: I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin story. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you grew up, and how you found your way into a career in data visualization?

Peter: I grew up in the UK, just outside of London, in a village in the county of Surrey.

I think I was always good at, and enjoyed doing, maths and scienc-y things. I think my first interest in computing started because of my dad, who - this could have been in the late 70s, brought home a - no, not brought home. He bought a kit computer, because he was an electronics engineer. That’s how we just started learning to program. Because that’s all you could do in those days. That was in the BASIC language. I think it just captured my imagination, and I enjoyed it. I always liked, electronic gadgets, that kind of thing, even at a young age.

I really enjoyed that. I think eventually for Christmas, I got a Sinclair ZX81, which I absolutely loved. In those days, you’d type in programs or buy a tape with a game on it, and load that in. Then I just went through a progression of different computers. By the time I got to my end of school and choosing what to do at university, I didn’t even know what I wanted to do. But I defaulted, I think, partly because my older brother did it, to Computer Science. It was a software engineering degree. But I think a few months into that, I just realized it wasn’t quite for me.

I was always really, also really interested in motor sport, and decided that actually I wanted to - I decided I actually wanted to study mechanical engineering. So I changed degrees. I studied that in Birmingham. I think - looking back, I’ve always been interested in that, almost the intersection of - I suppose, engineering and computing. Or it’s almost applied computing.

I’m definitely not a computer scientist. I’m not really interested in - I’ll use algorithms, rather than making them really optimal or study the theory behind them. I’m more interested in using computers to make things, almost the creative side of making things, with software.

My final year project was - it just so happened that my tutor was in the department that did research on computer-aided design. So he suggested a final year project for me, that was improving the user interface of some software that they had for experimenting with things like Bézier curves. Which are really common though, they were all over the place. But they originated in computer-aided design.

The software was just like a text input software. So it’s extremely painful to use. I basically developed, a graphical user interface that - and, again - that was in the 90s. So there wasn’t - I think back then it was called, the discipline I got really interested in, was called “human computer interaction.” Which these days is commonly known as “user interface design,” or “user experience. I really enjoyed doing that.

Then after my degree, I was offered a Ph.D. by my tutor in computer aided design. But I thought I’d just try working. So I got a job in an IT consultancy. I didn’t really enjoy that.

So, I went back and did the Ph.D. That was a mix of maths and computer graphics, 3D geometry. That possibly set a bit of a foundation for getting into data visualization later on. That went fairly well. I mean, I definitely wasn’t really cut out to stay in academia. I’m - at the end of the Ph.D. - I moved to Cambridge, and went to work for a company who do software for computer-aided design. That was really geometry-heavy, 3D-type geometry problems. I stayed there for quite a few years. Then, I just really wanted a change.

I got interested in web development. Again, this is in the early days. When I started, JavaScript wasn’t really much. It was just a little language that you would sprinkle into websites. There was no - I think - I’m not sure if even jQuery was around at that stage? I got interested in building websites.

Then eventually, I made the bold decision of quitting my job, and going freelance in web development. Shortly after that, moved down to Brighton, which is on the south coast of the UK. I was able to get an okay amount of work doing web development. Then I saw advertised a workshop on data visualization in Brighton. I went along to that, and just really loved it.

That’s where I discovered D3. This is back in - I think, 2013 - I think? Yeah. I just really connected with D3. I think it might’ve been a little bit easier to learn back then, from the documentation. But I studied the documentation. Got my head around it. Built a few things, published them on my website. Then I started getting a few enquiries for work, so I just thought, “Okay, I’m going to put everything into this, and market myself as a visualization designer and developer.” That went pretty well.

I started writing tutorials, and then eventually run a workshop in Brighton, which I enjoyed doing. Then I started the website D3 in Depth.

I think in the background of this, I was using a co-working space. The guy who runs that, John Markwell [?], he’s an entrepreneur as well. He used to be able to offer us advice on Being freelance, but also looking at having a product-type business. It was always in the back of my head, that that would be nice to do. I remember telling him about my D3 in Depth website. He said, “Are you charging for it?” But it’s a free website.

From that point on, I’ve always been thinking, “Okay, how can I turn this into something?” More recently, I’ve realized that people all want to learn how to actually build. It’s really useful to learn actually how to build something from scratch using D3. Because you see lots of examples. But they’re not finished examples, in a way. That’s where the name, D3 Start to Finish comes from. Because you’re starting from nothing, and going all the way to building a fully-functioning, or release-ready data visualization. That’s two or three years ago. But I first packaged it up as a online course. That did okay. I mean, I didn’t really market it all that much, to be honest. I led people from D3 in Depth to it, so I got a few sales.

Just a few months ago, I still can’t remember the process, but I just thought it made more sense as a book. I think I was a little bit getting a bit tired of running a WordPress site as well. It started feeling like I was having to be this admin as well, which I just didn’t want to have to do.

Also, I just know that saying, “Okay, I’ve got a book,” everyone gets that. Everyone really understands - if it’s an ebook, people understand what that is, and what the expectation is. My course, because it was a text based course, I think people possibly assume, if it’s a course, it’s a video course? There’s lots of other reasons.

I furiously, for a couple of months, converted all these WordPress pages into markup and used Leanpub. I’ve been onto the way of Leanpub for quite a few years, and I’ve toyed with it in the past. So I converted them into books, and published them back in June, just a couple of months ago. I think one of my tweets seemed got a lot of attention, which I wasn’t quite expecting. I think off the back of that, it’s had a good reception. Here we are.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing all the details of that really great story, and that journey as well. We of course noticed as soon as the books came out. That tweet was quite popular. For people who might not know, D3 is a very popular thing. I was just scrolling Twitter last night, and The Economist was advertising a job for some D3 developer, and stuff like that, it’s really hot.

Peter’s being very modest, but his book is our current bestseller right at the moment. If you go to Leanpub.com, it’d be number one. People are really, really enjoying the book. It is actually a very interesting approach to writing a book, and presenting it, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, in the next part of the interview, where we talk about the book.

But the idea that you actually have - you could click a link and go to, “Here’s what you’re going to build when it’s done.” It’s actually a really powerful way of convincing, proving to people the value of the book. “Like, wow, I’m going to be able to do that?” It’s really amazing.

But before we get there actually, there’s one thing I wanted to go into, going all the way back to the beginning of what you were talking about.

It’s interesting, we easily date ourselves by the references to the technology we used when we were young. I’m of the same generation, where I remember tapes, the computers, and things like that. It’s really interesting how many people we’ve had on the podcast who, their first introduction to - when they’re as old a we are, their first introduction to a computer actually was from a parent bringing it into the home, one way or another.

Sometimes it’s like, they were the only person at work who was interested in the challenge of learning how to use one of these things. They were a hobbyist, who was just fascinated by the technology. It’s really interesting that, with the very early ones, personal computers, often the only thing you could do is code something.

Which is funny. Because people, we’re, for all kinds of reasons, used to being able to just turn it on, and use things.

When you were typing in programs, where were you getting the programs from?

Peter: Mainly magazines. There’s just tons of, well, I say “tons,” there’s a few different magazines, again, which I just loved. I just absolutely loved the magazines, flicking through them. There’d be specific ones for the ZX81. But at least for Sinclair computers, there’d be a “Sinclair User,” and “Your Spectrum,” that kind of thing. And so they’d have programs that you could type in. Also, there were a few books as well, actually.

Len: For people listening, we’re talking about paper magazines and paper books.

And you didn’t get them online, you went to the store. I’m not romantic myself for that era, but it was very interesting how precious it could be to come across a magazine, with a program in it, that you could take home and type into your computer, and make it run. Like, it would work. It was just quite a magical experience. Sometimes I think maybe it’s nice to remember how, or remind ourselves, of how magical it is, the things that we can do nowadays.

Which leads me to actually ask you a version of a question that always comes up on the podcast, or often does, which is, if you were - you mentioned you were a Computer Science major for a brief moment, and then realized mechanical engineering was more your thing.

But if you were starting out now, in 2022, with the intention of having a career doing what you’re doing now with data visualization, would you go to university, and do a full degree?

Peter: That’s a really good question. I’ve thought about this quite a lot. We also have a four-year-old daughter, so I think, “Oh, will she go to university? Would we recommend it?” To be honest, in my day, it’s almost automatically, you’d go. You wouldn’t even question it.

I would definitely question it now, without any doubt. But it’s too, I think I’d, at the very least, weigh up the cost of it, with what the return is likely to be. Because that’s the other thing. I think it’s more expensive. I didn’t have to pay for it in my day.

Len: I was going to ask, did you have to pay tuition? The answer’s no, right?

Peter: No, we got a grant. The government would give us a modest amount to live by. But no, with all the resources that are out there, even just on YouTube, I’m presuming that there’s plenty of paid for resources as well. Now I’d say, just try things out. If it seems to make sense to go to university, then go for it. But definitely I wouldn’t just fall into it, which I think was - I don’t know if that still happens now? But certainly in my day, you wouldn’t even really think about it, you just did that automatically.

Len: You mentioned you did a Ph.D., and then you went, I don’t think you named it, but I can see from, I’m just looking at your page on LinkedIn, you went to work for Siemens in Cambridge, for about ten years.

Were you doing manufacturing representations of machines, and things that?

Peter: When I joined, they were just a small company called D-Cubed. They were just about 30 people. Then they were actually acquired by one of our customers, UGS, I think it was? Then two acquisitions we went through. But it was the mathematical representation of shapes. So, I mean there’s software like, I think one of the most famous one is “SOLIDWORKS,” so if people have heard of that, we wrote some of the brains of the software. Not so much the user interface, but some of the under-the-bonnet stuff, we were licensed to people SOLIDWORKS, and lots of other companies. They were really successful at what they did. But yes, it is very mathematical, and, yeah, it was for very complex software. A lot of it really was pretty complex.

Len: I’m just curious, were you coding, or were you doing math, or -?

Peter: It was more coding. Really, it was maintaining this software, which, by the time I’d left, it was over ten years old, the software. To be honest, it was, I don’t know? 70% or 80% maintenance. In other words, dealing with bugs, trying to fix them. A bug fix, sometimes it could be, if you were lucky, half a day, or it could be a few days of a lot of work going into diagnosing it and figuring out, what really the issue is, fixing it.

Then there’s a huge test suite, so you have to make sure it didn’t break something else. You could spend a few days just fixing an issue, and making sure nothing else is breaking, and doing iterations on your initial fix.

Occasionally, if we were lucky, we’d work on a new feature. This is why, after quite a few years of doing this, I just needed to do something different.

Len: I was going to ask about that. In the next stage, you did something that actually quite a few Leanpub authors do at a certain point in their careers, which is, “You know what? I want to be independent for, at least for a while.”

So you make that leap. What was that like? Did you have clients lined up before you did it? Or did you dive in?

Peter: I had one client, I didn’t have a whole list of clients. I can’t remember what my thinking was, I think I just realized I had to go through it. But I did have one client.

Somehow, I can’t quite remember? Somehow I just managed to find work, or find enough work. I think when I moved out to Brighton, I was also did some networking. I think that’s how I got more work. I was on various mailing lists, and responded to those, and managed to get some work that way.

Len: Was it when you went independent, that you then started creating your own websites and learning materials, and things that?

Peter: For a long time, even back in, I think my first website was when I finished my Ph.D. - it’s around 2000.

Len: Oh, okay.

Peter: In the really early days. It’s always something that I was interested in. I had a website at that point. But, again, the main thing I was doing was WordPress work. Building websites using WordPress.

Len: And then eventually, just a few years ago, you started working for Flourish as well. You went back into the corporate field. What work do you do for them?

Peter: It’s a bit of a funny one, because I think it’s around the same time - I’ve got notes here. 2016.

Again, I always liked building, my favorite thing to do with software is building small things, almost proof-of-concepts, or that side of things, that initial really creative phase.

One of the things, which I’m still interested in, is just devising tools, so that other people can visualize data.

I built a tool called Vizmeo. I don’t think it’s live at the moment. You could upload a CSV file, and then choose different visualizations, and get a chart, and download it or publish it. I think it’s around the same time Flourish did a similar thing. I think the big difference is that they really ran with the idea. The two founders behind it, Duncan and Robin, they’re tremendously competent as well. They really ran with it. They hired the right people. It’s just astonishing how successful it’s been.

I got introduced to them and did some work for them. Because they were originally an agency. I did a bit of data vis work for them. Then eventually Duncan started talking to me about working on Flourish. Then, eventually, that evolved into asking me whether I wanted to join Flourish.

At that point, the idea was that I’d be able to work for them part time, so about three and a half days a week. For the remainder of my time, I could really focus on my writing and my courses. That’s still what I’m doing now. I still work on data visualizations for Flourish. They have different templates, so that you can upload your data to them and choose between different templates to visualize your data. There’s a handful that I’ve created. But also, there’s one or two that I maintain as well. And most of them are using D3 as well.

Len: Actually, moving onto that, let’s talk a little bit more specifically about D3.

You mentioned that in the early days, JavaScript was maybe something you’d add to a website, or something that. But now, many of our listeners will know how it’s much more robustly used than that now. But can you talk a little bit specifically about D3?

What is it, and what makes it different from other JavaScript libraries?

Peter: I think when I was still working in Cambridge, one of the things I got interested in was, I was logging my energy data. I thought I’d have a go at visualizing it. The charting libraries at that, in JavaScript, I think there was really only Google Charts, even back then, where you could do basic , Similar charts to what you’d get in Excel. There was another one called Flot, which I think’s still around, and I used that.

That was before D3 existed. Then when D3 came out, it uses a very different approach. A good way of describing it is a building block approach. It has the parts of a chart. Whether it’s the axis or - it just has lots of components that will help you build a chart. One of the big ones now, is pie charts. You would say, “Okay, I want a bar chart.” You’d plug your data in, and you get a bar chart.

But with D3, it’s more about saying, “Here’s my data, I want to kind of -“ you’re almost transforming it into different shapes. You’re saying how I want to transform my data into different shapes and you’re describing how, where you want those shapes to appear on the screen. You could build a charting library using D3. Or you can just make a completely custom visualization using D3 as well.

Len: And people will be able to look at an example of the things you can do, when they click a link in the transcript for this episode, and see the Energy Explorer. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that? Just what that’s about?

Because I’m looking at it right now, and it’s just fascinating in itself. Where did you get the data from, and then what are the different things that you do with that? Splitting things up into the categories of energy production, and then the proportions, and how that’s presented for each country?

Peter: I put a lot of thought into what the reader would build. Because I wanted it to cover, some of the requirements - I wanted it to be a custom visualization. In other words, I didn’t want it to be a bar chart or a traditional chart. Because there isn’t much - for me, there isn’t really much point building something like that with D3. I wanted something fairly custom. But I also didn’t want it to be too difficult to build. I wanted to be able to cover as many concepts as possible. That’s how I came to building this grid of circles.

The data has come from The World Bank. They publish the energy mixes of different countries. They might say one country, 90% of their energy comes from fossil fuels, and 10% from renewables, that kind of thing. The split that this visualization shows, is four different categories. Fossils, renewables. Was it hydro? I can’t remember the other one, I’ve not got it in front of me.

Len: Nuclear.

Peter: Nuclear, that’s it, thank you. There’s a grid of circles. Each country’s represented by four circles. Each circle is representing one of the energy types. Each circle is styled differently. It almost gives each country a fingerprint. You can see at a glance - I’ve styled it so the renewable circles are a solid green. You can immediately get drawn to the countries which have larger amounts of renewables. Likewise, say, for nuclear power, I can immediately see France and Hungary, I’ve got this dotted orange circle.

I’m just really fascinated by these different kinds of visual representations, and what they can convey as an alternative to a traditional, say, stick bar chart. The visualization is partly driven, the design of it’s partly driven by it being an example that you can learn how to build. So, again, it’s finding a balance between something interesting, and something that’s not too hard.

But there’s a little menu at the top, where you can choose to sort by the different measures. You could click on, say, “nuclear,” and then the circles will shuffle into a new location. Then the country that has the most nuclear proportion will appear at the top left. They’ll all be sorted in descending order.

I think one of the big things that D3 brought, that was quite new, is just these amazing - it calls them “transitions,” but I think they’re more widely referred to as “animations,” where shapes will be shuffling into new positions.

You’d see these all over. I think there was a time, quite a few years ago now, typically you’d see these amazing examples in - The New York Times would, because Mike Bostock, who wrote D3, worked there for a while - you’d see these amazing visualizations coming out of The New York Times, with these really nice animations. I think that’s partly why D3 became so popular.

Len: Thanks for sharing all that. It’s so interesting how news organizations, and journalists, in particular, just in the last few years, really picked up on the how you can make data entertaining with visualizations, right?

That’s an old thing, and it’s hard to talk about in the abstract. But when you see an example of a great visualization, like, for example, looking at your Energy Explorer. Right now, when you click on “nuclear,” you really can see, it’s amazing. For example, you might think of, a lot of people who don’t know, might not know France is 80% nuclear energy for its electricity production, for example.

Or Germany, for example. You can see the dotted line for “nuclear” is just a bit smaller than the circle that’s green, for renewables. But then the “oil, gas and coal” one is even bigger than both of those. This data goes back to 2015, and things have actually changed a lot in the last seven years.

It is really interesting, the amount of information you can convey, and at a glance, about a number of different things.

I had a website of my own years ago. It was very primitive, but it was motivated by the idea that, particularly the way North American sports worked, there’s a regular season, and then there’s the playoffs. The only point of the regular season, other than enjoying watching your team, is to try and make it to the playoffs. But to this day, actually, if you see an update on the news or on a website about how the teams in the league are doing, you actually just see a table of numbers. It’s like it’s the 19th century and you’re looking up stock tables or something.

But with stocks, of course, what you want to see, is a chart. You want to see the chart performance over time.

To this day, with sportspeople, they still don’t do that. But once you start seeing things, and, how would you go about representing the performance of a team over time? Well, you need to come up with some metric. There’s just various things you can do that make it interesting. But once you work out a visualization for a particular thing, and then when you add, basically time, then you get animations.

Things get really interesting, and there’s so much that you can convey. I gather from your bio that you’ve done work with training people at the BBC and The Economist, and things like that. This is partly talking about the book. Do you need to be a programmer to do D3 visualization?

Peter: I know so many people want to learn D3. When I ran public training courses, where anyone could sign up, I always tried to be careful to make sure that people did have the experience. But you would occasionally get people signing up who weren’t massively strong at programming. I really wish that it could be so much easier for people to create custom visualizations. I think the tools just still aren’t quite there. I don’t think fundamentally it has to be as difficult as it is.

But, you definitely need to be a programmer, and fairly proficient in JavaScript, for D3, to be really honest.

I’ve got a companion book to this, which I basically wrote because of this reason. I just wanted to make sure that people knew what level they needed to be at. But I also have a resource, so that people could get up to that level. So, another book with a really long title, Fundamentals of HTML, SVG, CSS and JavaScript for Data Visualisation, which is also on Leanpub. That really is just to help people get up to required level for the D3 Start to Finish book.

But I think it’s also quite useful. Because I can just say, “This is what you need to know in order to do the D3 Start To Finish book.” I think I’d much rather be upfront, to say, “It’s not an easy library to get to grips with.” But I think if you already have knowledge of web development, then you can learn it, if you’re methodical about it.

Len: That actually gives us a great opportunity to segue into the last part of the interview, where we talk about your work writing and self-publishing, and your projects, and how you work on them and things that. So D3 Start To Finish came before Fundamentals of HTML, SVG, or -?

Peter: They were written in tandem. I’d say that they were written in parallel. Because I can’t remember if one came before the other. But they’re pretty much companions.

Len: It’s really interesting, because whenever you go about writing a book that’s teaching someone something, you’re like, “Oh, they also need to know that. Oh they also need to know that,” and eventually sometimes it’s like, “Oh, I’m actually writing two books here, not one.” That can actually be either an exhilarating, or a very daunting thing to realize.

Peter: Yeah. It was a bit of that. It eventually dawned on me that, it would be really useful to have this extra material. Yes, it was quite a lot of extra work to do that. But I’m really pleased with both books.

Len: Oh, they’re really great. One interesting thing that I like to ask sometimes, is about your writing schedule. Did you have a schedule, for example? Because a lot of people listening might be thinking, “Oh, I’ve got a book in me, but how do I carve out the time, and how do I explain to my family?” Or something that. “No more Saturday afternoons with dad,” or something like that.

Peter: I think one of the key things is, at the outset of when I took the position at Flourish, that it was part time. I am fortunate to be in that position. When I was working in my previous job in Cambridge, it was something I really struggled with, how you would fit that time in.

But, to be honest, when I was converting the course into the book, again, I don’t know why, but I just had such tremendous energy to do that. I was fitting it in in every spare hour I had. I’d do it, I think a lot of it was done in just little hour-long slots at the end of the day. Sometimes if you’re really focused, you can actually get quite a lot done.

Len: With respect to the practical aspects of being a self-published author, I’ve noticed you’ve done some interesting things around marketing the book. For example, you had a discount at launch, and things like that. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about your approach to that? You had the successful tweet, and things like that. But how are you going about spreading the word about the book?

Peter: One of the reasons I went with the D3 book is that I’ve got the D3 In Depth site, which gets a fairly good amount of traffic. My thought was always that I’d try and advertise the book or market the book on that website. But that tweet that I put out -aAnd, again, I put a fair amount of thought into that tweet. That did seem to go really well, and I think a couple of key people retweeted it in the data 3 space. You could almost see the spike after one in particular retweeted it, or recommended it.

I’m definitely stronger at the coding side of things. I’m still just trying to learn how to market, I’m just learning on the job. The Create With Data website, I started a few years ago, but that’s my main focus. That’s a content marketing approach, where I’m just planning to write more tutorials. Which hopefully will, again, let people know about the books. I’m hoping to do a mailing - well I’ve already got a mailing list, but I’m hoping to focus a bit more on the mailing list as well. But again, it’s finding the time to do that.

Len: The last question I always to ask of a guest if they’re a Leanpub author, is, if there was one thing that had you shaking your fist at Leanpub and shouting about, that made you really angry, that you wish we could fix or do better, or if there was some magical feature you could ask us to build for you, can you think of anything you would ask us to do?

Peter: There’s absolutely nothing I shook my fist at. Absolutely, I really enjoyed it, it was a really smooth process, honestly. I really enjoyed it. It worked for me really well.

In terms of features, one of them, I think, which we touched upon just now, it’s just - I think because it’s probably true, especially the technical authors, I think I could really do with more help on the marketing and advertising side of it. I was looking at the documentation - itt sounded like there’s possibly of some help with with coupon advertising. But I haven’t really fully understood what might be possible there. I don’t know if it’s something that Leanpub is able to help with?

Len: Thanks very much for that, it’s interesting. We do have articles in our Help Center, with tips and tricks, and stuff that. The main article we have about that is basically like - I wrote it, so I remember it - but the main thing is, if you want self-publishing advice about how to market your book, there’s a million sites out there. There’s even people who charge you money, if you want to pay them. But we’ve got a relatively long article, which is like, “What we can contribute to this space, is what makes Leanpub a little bit different. What are the things you can do with Leanpub?”

There’s things like coupons, which are actually like, when you’ve made them on Leanpub, it seems really straightforward. But actually for self-publishing sites, that’s a pretty unique thing. You can make discount coupons.

You can create packages. You can add arbitrary digital data, or digital files to your book, and sell that. It’s like, “Get the book, plus -“ You’ve got your advanced version, for example, and you can do things that.

We did have a thing that we were showing to authors, about how we’ll buy Google Ads for you. That’s something we might bring back, but no one seemed to be that interested in it.

The idea there is that actually, we’ve got our own sales data. We know what books are doing well. We know what keywords work, and things that. And a lot of self-published authors are like, “I want to write my book about the thing that I love, and I’d like to have marketing done, but I don’t want to do it myself, because I’m not a marketer.”

And so, offering something like that, is something that we definitely have our eye on. We do have internal advertising. We’ve got this thing called The Shelf where you can get your book on our homepage, and you can get sponsored spots in our newsletters, which are actually really, really useful.

But when it comes to external marketing, there is a lot more we could do there. Even just guidance. Like, “I’ve clicked the Publish button, what do I do now?” There might be things that we take for granted, that might be totally new. But soliciting feedback from people. Tweeting relatively regularly, as long as - the main, I guess probably it sounds like a bit an easy answer, but the most important thing when it comes to self-promotion, is that you only do what you like.

If you feel gross doing something, don’t do it, you know what I mean? Don’t beat yourself up about it. That’s the hardest thing to navigate. Because people often feel like, “Oh, I wish I could do more to get sales. Am I second-guessing myself too much?” Or something like that. It’s like, if it’s not you, don’t do it, is the thing I to say.

For example, a lot of authors feel way more comfortable with promoting their book along with a blog post that actually is a useful and interesting blog post. Like, “I had an interesting thought, and here’s a blog post. Oh and by the way, buy my book.”

If the post is just “buy my book,” or some cheesy throwaway line to grab attention, or something like that -

By the way, I’m speaking negatively, but if that’s what you’re into, go ahead, do it. Good for you, lots of people have lots of great success with that thing too. But if that’s not your thing, if actually what you really enjoy is taking an hour to write a really interesting blog post, that’s great marketing for your book or books, or whatever that you’ve got out there. Making it enjoyable is actually the thing.

Say, “Oh, I’m going to go market my book for half an hour. Great, hopefully I’ll meet some new people,” and stuff that. Newsletters and things like that, are often really the best.

Well, Peter, thank you very much for taking some time out of your evening to talk to me, and to talk to our audience, and thank you very much for using Leanpub to publish your great books.

Peter: You’re welcome, and it’s been a great experience. Thank you.

Len: Thanks.

As always, thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of the Frontmatter podcast. If you what you heard, please rate and review it wherever you found it, and if you’d to be a Leanpub author, please visit our website at leanpub.com.