The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

The Economics of Writing a Technical Book
medium.com

https://johnresig.com/blog/programming-book-profits/

(I'm not sure if my expectation is reasonable, but I would have thought that a book the most popular JS framework author would have sold more / made more in profit.)

I know you said you weren't planning to write another book, but I wonder if in retrospect you would have self-published? I feel like the publisher provides a few things:

1) Editing

2) Marketing

3) Writing tools, typesetting, etc.

It seems like you had to take control of #1 yourself to some extent. As for #2, you got unexpected "sponsorships" income, which is very interesting, but it seems like you also had to take control of it yourself.

I was surprised that between the 2 of you, you would only make about $2 per physical book and $1 per e-book for a $40 book. If you end up having to do work in areas #1 and #2, why have the publisher at all? I would have expected them to give you more of a sales bump.

Here are some other posts I saved:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13876514 How I Made $70k Self-Publishing a Book about Ruby on Rails

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334845 Why We Are Self-Publishing the Aviary Cookbook

Anyway, thanks for sharing! I am just trying to think of what the publisher adds. The main thing I think would be marketing / sales / distribution. It's better to make a smaller amount on a larger number of copies than a large amount on a small number of copies. But it doesn't feel like it adds up in general, and in this particular case?

EDIT: also http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2007/10/081247.html Hard Work, No Pay: What's the Point?

(Not trying to be negative, just sharing sources I found. I have read at least one book by Petzold.)

Generally, typesetting is a given. Outline design and line (grammar) editing is usually a given, but may vary in quality and depth. Customer marketing is often non-existent.

Publishers don't think of book buyers as customers. They think of book stores and book chains as customers. With a few exceptions, that's where marketing spend is usually directed.

Access to book chain buyers is how publishers justify their existence.

Kindle was a revolution because it gave authors direct access to a huge potential audience. Kindle can be great for fiction, but it's pretty much useless for professional technical non-fic unless an author has a significant social following.

If you want to publish a book you can do it on Leanpub, or you can try to sell PDFs from your own site. Leanpub is probably a better bet, but nothing will help you more than that solid social following.