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I would say it depends a LOT on who it is. Packt books for instance, are mostly....not very good.
By "not very good", do you happen to mean that Packt is a content farm that produces low-quality information written by cheap labor?
Most technical authors don't write a book for the money -- they write a book for the prestige (and proportionally higher consulting rates).
I would add that, in many cases, a book is a book. People have short attention spans today anyway so for topics that don't require 100s of pages of code examples and screenshots etc. shorter may be just as good as longer. There are a lot of short books out there these days and they can be just as valuable as giveaways and credibility enhancers as a doorstop is.
- I have been working in a particular speciality long enough that I felt I had something worth sharing with others, and was also lucky enough to be in a company that allowed me to write about the work we had done.
- Just having done it, being able to see a book with your name on it on the shelf, give it away to friends and family etc.
Some observations:
- I did the book with co-authors. I have other colleagues who are attempting to write books by themselves, and are struggling with motivation under the sheer enormity of the task. If you have coauthors you not only cut the per-person workload down, but also get the benefit of peer pressure to keep things moving along. Being the lead author, I also learned a lot about managing and organizing a distributed group with strong opinions and different approaches, which was an education in itself.
- You mentioned you have existing technical articles. Having a starting point is a great leg up versus a blank page. Our book came out of a conference presentation for which we had to write up detailed notes. So we effectively had about 30% of the raw material ready before we started on the actual book.
- As others have said, it is a lot of work. Hofstadter's Law definitely applies.
- It forces you to really know your stuff, and to double and triple check things before committing them to immortality.
- The first royalty check is surprisingly decent, I believe due to initial sales to libraries etc, but it quickly drops off. As others have said, you are almost certainly not going to be doing this for the money.
- Publisher quality varies of course, but don't necessarily expect too much from them. In terms of editing, they will pick up on some typos, but not much else. We did everything in latex so there wasn't really much extra to do. But if you calculate how much money they make from the book, it is not surprising they do not allocate a lot of resource.
- You will get completely sick of reading and rereading the text, while still finding more errors.
If I was to do it again I think I would go the self-publishing route, just to try it, since I honestly don't think the publisher did much for us in terms of marketing or editing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By "not very good", do you happen to mean that Packt is a content farm that produces low-quality information written by cheap labor?
It mostly seems to be, but don't overlook the occasional pearl when they manage to trick a competent person to work for them.
What's worse is that their review process seems to be worse than useless. Recently tried to read one of their books, which credited maybe 10 reviewers, and every other line had me cringing so hard it was unreadable.
https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/writing-a-tech...
Since then, book sales have declined... particularly technical books. I wonder if things are now also worse than the experiences of other commenters? For example, David Flanagan, O'Reilly's star author on Java and Javascript, switched back to consulting because even he couldn't make enough money.
All that said, it's great to be a published author! I couldn't help but smile when I re-read some of my work recently.
I did a book a couple of years back. Motivations were: - I have been working in a particular speciality long enough that I felt I had something worth sharing with others, and was also lucky enough to be in a company that allowed me to write about the work we had done. - Just having done it, being able to see a book with your name on it on the shelf, give it away to friends and family etc. Some observations: - I did t…
To this point, you must must must have a paid copyeditor as part of your publishing process. Technical reviewers, friends and family, etc. can't be counted on to read carefully enough to catch editors even if they're decent writers.
My advice
1) Unless you are going to write a big hit, you are not going to earn match. You write a technical book for prestige, not money. Writing a technical book for money is the wrong reason to write it. Stop now.
2)You should really know your topic well. I mean REALLY know it.
3)The amount of effort it will actually take will be 6x the effort you think it will take.
4)Make sure that you have enough free time and you have discussed the matter with your significant other (and that she/he approves)
It seems like the people who are making money at this are the ones that have a following and sell PDFs of the books + addons (video training, a product) on their own. Manning and Leanpub are built around being able to ship chapters as you write them - I think the feedback while working would be a huge help for motivation. If you were choosing a publisher, I'd consider what the association with the publishers says abo…
I'm a Leanpub cofounder and just wanted to mention here that self-publishing a book while you're writing it is not necessarily incompatible with eventually going with a conventional publisher (though if you have a publisher in mind, you might want to ask them first if this would be acceptable to them). Publishing your book while you write it can help with motivation and the feedback you get from early adopter readers…
What is a fair, market-rate deal for a first-time technical author writing about a popular subject? You're going to be shocked and dismayed by the offer they give you. Let's get that out of the way now. This is the model: they'll tell you to not do it for the money, in exactly those words, prior to explaining to you terms which imply that they're not doing it for ~92.5% of the money. You will likely be offered someth…