Has anybody ever written a book and/or created an educational website (Possibly with paid access to written information) as a side gig? If so, what advice do you have around the process of getting attention for your creation, selling your products, etc? It's a kind of vague question because I haven't decided what direction to go in yet. I could write a book and sell it to a publisher, make an e-book and self-publish, or create a website complete with blog, forum, and downloadable content (Basically, the e-book or individual sections of it).
As a bit more background information, here's a description of what I'm working on. I do engineering research, complete with boat loads of data analysis. Usually from laboratory experiments, sometimes from field measurement (e.g. "Install equipment in a building, and sensors to measure what happens, look at results 6 months later."). To make the data analysis process both less tedious, and less expensive for my customers, I wrote computer programs in python that automate the entire process. They load the raw data files, split them up into files from individual tests, identify the test condition in each data file, analyze each file to find the result from an individual test, and analyze the resulting data set to create regression. All while spitting out intermediate results to allow for easy error checking. This approach can turn a month's worth of boring, expensive data analysis into an hour of quickly checking to make sure that everything worked right. I'd also envision some content discussing relationship management, and collaboration with lab testers as this approach is highly dependent on them working with you.
Ultimately, I think this is a fabulous approach that many scientists would benefit from. It could be especially targeted to young researchers, and/or grad students as there's often significant pressure to become skilled at computer programming with limited support. A single resource talking them through the philosophy, potential approaches, available resources (e.g. python packages), and syntax examples could be a very valuable resource. I only need to figure out how to present, and sell it to the world at this point...
Thanks in advance!