Ask HN: Considerations when asked to write a book?

I wrote a book most of a decade back... http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - No-starch approached me, based on some blog posts that I thought were absolutely terrible. Now, I don't know if they just wanted to know if I knew someone, and included the "or you" bit to be polite, but I'm all about grabbing opportunities to do things I'm not qualified to do... as far as I can tell, that's how you get qualified to do things.

I think I said something like "My English is Presidential, but I know a guy." I called up the roommate of a friend, and we got all excited. "We'll be done by Christmas!" We got a two bedroom apartment by the Lawrence Caltrain station and filled it with computers. Writing that book took forever. I still call it "the hardest thing I ever finished." but, it was super rewarding, and I still brag about it. I am very glad I did it.

Now, don't get me wrong, I personally am super proud of the tiny checks I get quarterly; and hell, they seem to still be coming in, like 6+ years later, and I am the sort of person who refuses to pretend like salary doesn't matter, but on an objective level? It's just so little money compared to what I get as a bay-area contractor that sometimes I think I'd be happier framing the checks than cashing them. I made literally thousands of dollars!

When I negotiated, it was explained that I got a better percentage for giving up the advance, so I did, because the advance was like a week's pay from the dayjob, but if I could go back and tell myself what to change in that negotiation? I'd tell me to take the percentage payout as if I had taken the advance, in exchange for the publisher promising to spend the advance money on publicity for the book.

Honestly, I have no idea if that's a standard thing, but I don't see why they wouldn't do it if I asked.

Also note, in my case? the e-book royalties were comparatively quite substantial, even though my book isn't available in the Kindle store; you can only buy the e-book, as far as I can tell, direct from no-starch, and it costs almost as much as the regular book and the e-book. They don't sell very many e-books, but my percentage on the e-book was way higher. I imagine that percentage drops a lot if you sell the e-book through amazon; I believe the vig on a kindle book is more than what it costs to print a book, (though I know printing a book is not the only cost of distribution, so the kindle book is likely still cheaper, as the 30% covers not only printing, but distribution and retail profit.)

The people I know who make good money off books are already famous, and they sell without a publisher. But... that's really hard to do if you aren't already famous.

I went with a publisher because going with a publisher gives you a lot of credibility if you are not yet famous, and because seeing my physical book in physical stores tickles me to no end. And because it was their idea, and to be completely honest, I never would have finished without the publisher working with me.

I guess my main point is that you should think carefully about the non-monetary things you want when deciding which publisher you want, way more than you should think about the monetary things. Sure, get the best deal you can, because why not, but looking back? I totally would have traded away some money for more fame.

>My biggest takeaway, is forget your tool chain. I wrote it in org mode, and exported to Libre Office and then Word. As soon as the first draft was returned I ended up battling with Word the whole time, for edits and redrafts.

Ah yes, this is another part of the negotiation that I would have re-done, had I to negotiate again. Publishers will accommodate you if you push hard enough.

I'm the author of a book published by O'Reilly: http://www.hello-startup.net/

Before I decided to write the book, I talked to a number of friends who were authors and they all basically gave me the same advice:

* It's a massive amount of work, especially if it's your first book. If you're working a full-time job at the same time, depending on the length of the book you have in mind, expect it to take on the order of 2 years.

* It's a different type of work than programming or even blogging. In programming, you get feedback on a near constant basis at all levels: your IDE (sub-second), your compiler (seconds), your test suite (minutes), your co-workers (hours), and customers (days or weeks). This helps keep motivation high and gives you the info you need to improve your work. With a book, unless you make a massive effort to seek it out, you get more or less no feedback whatsoever for months or even years. For a project that takes such a long time, this can really sap your motivation. You have to come back and write a bit every single day, day after day, and yet on any individual day, it feels like you've hardly made any progress at all. You have to be very good at driving yourself and you need to put in an effort to give talks, to send out chapters to friends and family for feedback, to join a writing group, and anything else you can to get the feeling of tangible, incremental progress.

* You won't make much money from it. If your book hits the New York Times best seller list, sure, you can make money. But most tech books don't sell anywhere near that much, and even if you have "decent" sales, when you factor in the massive amount of work (see point #1), it's a comically small return, especially compared to a programmer salary.

* Despite that, every single author I talked to was writing their 2nd, 3rd, or even fourth book, and they all recommended doing it, subject to the caveats above.

As a result, I took the plunge, and I am very happy that I did. The real reasons to write a tech book are:

* It's an unbelievable learning experience. I used to think that experts became authors, but the reality is that authors become experts. I did a ton of research for my book, met a lot of interesting people along the way, read a huge number of books I had been meaning to for years (http://www.hello-startup.net/resources/recommended-reading/), improved my writing skills, got better at marketing, and so on.

* It's a great way to develop ideas. I started a company not long after writing my book (http://www.gruntwork.io/) and many of the ideas for that company came directly from what I learned during the writing process. As a bonus, the book is also a nice sales and marketing tool.

* It opens doors. People treat you just a little differently when they find out you are a "published author." They are more willing to listen. You get more opportunities for jobs, talks, meeting people, and so on.

* It feels good. I love teaching and sharing knowledge. I love seeing something that I created have a positive impact, even a tiny one, on someone's life. I love creating things. It feels wonderful to see positive reviews; to get emails from readers telling you how much the book meant to them; to hold your book in your your hands for the first time; to give your parents a copy; to find it on shelves at bookstores and famous libraries (my book is at Harvard, Oxford, etc!); and so on.

I'm friends with the owner of No Starch Press, but I'd consider their published royalty schedule to be quite fair and a good sign of the upper-middle of the industry.

https://www.nostarch.com/writeforus.htm

15 percent royalty with no advance 12 percent royalty with $5,000 advance 10 percent royalty with $8,000 advance

HN's link recognizer misjudged the length by one, and so is including the ">" end delimiter in the href.

Here is the correct link: https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/d-cookbook

It would probably be a good idea for HN to recognize and "URL", since those are specifically mentioned in RFC 3986 as common ways to delimit URLs in text.