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Ask HN: How much money to realistically expect from a technical book?

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Re: Ask HN: How much money to realistically expect from a technical book?

#11

Post by thawkins »

aartav wrote: post #8

I have real experience in this. I wrote and published two "big" technical books which were released through a major technical publisher. Both books were "mass market" in that you could find them on any bookstore computer shelf, they were translated into multiple languages, and used as course curriculum at several colleges. My caveat is that unfortunately my real world experience was a while ago. 20 years, which is a…

I have authored 3 tech books and quite honestly I would not do it again, the shift to ebooks has allowed the publishers to cut the royalties paid on electronic deliveries, even though thier costs have been cut. I found that the majority of sales were ebooks, plus you often find your books sold onto platforms like O'Reily where you receive no royalty. It also appears that translations cut the author off from royalties, one ofmy books was translated to Korean and I stop getting any royalties on that set of sales.

Re: Ask HN: How much money to realistically expect from a technical book?

#12

Post by lmiller1990 »

How is your network? I wrote a technical book, I have around 1k twitter followers, a few hundred people on my emailing list. Each month I wrote a chapter or so, and sent it to my email list, and shared on twitter, etc. This is known as marketing. When I released the book, I had a ton of interest and I've made around 10k since release (15 months ago). I sell via Gumroad and have a membership ($100 / year) so they only take around 2.5%, I keep the rest. I sell for $30 but have many vouchers for lower income earners/countries, so the average sale price is around $15.

If you are not actively marketing and/or are not targeting a niche, no-one will buy your book, since it won't stand out among the hundreds (or thousands) of others.

Re: Ask HN: How much money to realistically expect from a technical book?

#13

Post by jefflinwood »

I think the biggest problem you might face for getting money out of it by self publishing is that it doesn't have a clear audience - at least from the way you describe it.

It sounds as if you have this book sitting inside you, and it's part of your creative process to write it down and release it to the world, so I'd really focus on the act of publishing, and releasing, more than the actual monetary value.

Re: Ask HN: How much money to realistically expect from a technical book?

#14

Post by airbreather »

I have a friend who wrote a technical book in a non computing field (sort of agriculture for home/small group use).

He couldn't get a publisher interested, so he self published, took well over $100k first year.

He had a subject specific forum he ran and for some time was #1 google hit for his specialty.

He also had converted his back yard in a bunch of experimental demonstration systems, so was pretty well living what he was selling.

Point is he probably sold less books, for much greater profit, but he already had an audience.

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