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The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

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Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#31

Post by sytelus »

TLDR; the books on specific tech is lighly sold, gets out of date fast and publishers are ripping off authors by throwing them 10% revenue share.

Because we co-authored the book we each got 5% of revenue for physical books and 12.5% for ebooks and digital access (10% and 25% for individual authors).

So far I have received $539 over 5 months.

On average, the book has sold 222 copies per month which is greatly skewed by the first month which had 930 sales. The last month (March) had 34 physical book sales. I suspect that number will go down even more over the next few months.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#32

Post by megaman22 »

rco8786 wrote: post #25
macintux wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the other reason $400k in revenue was possible: you were writing about a popular JavaScript framework. There aren't many topics with such a wide audience.

> There aren't many topics with such a wide audience. What now? The number of people who develop in angular actively is probably in the low 6 figures. In the context of the world that's a very small audience.

In the context of programming languages and tech stacks, that is an astronomical audience though.

I work in a niche where there are two books that have ever been written, by the same author, and there might be a couple thousand people total in the whole world that use this particular SDK. Most technical books appeal to an incredible narrow slice of the already small pie that is software people.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#33

Post by jseliger »

It's a bit dated, but Philip Greenspun's "The Book Behind the Book" is also good on this topic: http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story

I myself have thought about it when I think about writing a grant writing book: http://seliger.com/2011/03/06/why-youre-unlikely-to-see-seli...

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#34

Post by mrbill »

JustinGarrison wrote: post #28
mrbill wrote: post #22

I've never written an ENTIRE technical book, but I've written a number of chapters for multi-author titles (namely, Solaris certification study books). I don't remember making more than $500 from any single chapter I wrote - but even that sure came in handy at the time. It was usually done as work-for-hire plus I got a couple copies of each finished book. Ended up being worth more as lines on my resume than anything…

Did you change jobs? Were you able to negotiate a higher salary because of the book? Seeing as this book was just published in November I'm curious to learn how to leverage it into a more long term success.

I've been a career sysadmin, so having chapters authored in a couple of Solaris certification study books certainly looked good on my resume and was relevant to my experience; nobody ever told me if that helped cinch the deal when moving onward and upward, though.

I know that for one position (where I spent 12 years and lived in two different cities) part of why I got the job was that an interviewer said "He's one of the guys that maintains the Sun-Managers mailing list!" (they still had a large number of Sun boxes at the time).

I will say it was weird writing about the VI editor but then having to submit to the publisher in Word/DOC format. Of course I used free/OSS tools to convert to DOC before submission.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#35

Post by fao_ »

slothario wrote: post #21
BrentOzar wrote: post #16

My experience in writing a technical book 8 years ago was the same: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/01/the-economics-of-w... I made more money from Amazon affiliate fees linking to our book than I did the actual book. Way more. If you’re out to make money short term, you’re better off writing book reviews then books. Having said that, the book gave me some credibility with clients for a couple of years when I…

That's the main reason I would write a book: to tell people that I wrote a book. You can literally say, "I wrote the book on that."

Hi, you've been shadowbanned, which is a shame because your last three or four comments have been perfectly reasonable (I vouched for them so they'd show up). I'd contact a moderator or something if I were you.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#36

Post by darkkindness »

sytelus wrote: post #31

TLDR; the books on specific tech is lighly sold, gets out of date fast and publishers are ripping off authors by throwing them 10% revenue share. Because we co-authored the book we each got 5% of revenue for physical books and 12.5% for ebooks and digital access (10% and 25% for individual authors). So far I have received $539 over 5 months. On average, the book has sold 222 copies per month which is greatly skewed b…

Isn't the typical rate for royalties around 10%? Given that it's 'specific tech' that is not likely to be sold as much, 10% is pretty good.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#37

Post by petercooper »

chubot wrote: post #3

Really useful, thank you! I had saved this post of John Resig's from 10 years ago (!), which also gives some numbers: 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 retr…

Since you appear to be into publishing stories, here's mine from back in the day: http://peterc.org/beginningruby/#post-21

I made about $19K on about 9000 sales of the first edition of my book published with Apress at the point I wrote that (many years ago). Since then, I've written 2nd and 3rd editions with diminishing returns each time, but even now over 10 years later it's perhaps $1000 a year in residuals.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#38

Post by mharrison »

This sponsoring is cool. I wonder if they would work with self-published books.

Writing a book is a huge effort (I'm the author of a couple Python books, one of which is on the current Python Humble Bundle). From speaking with (many) other Python authors, most would do better financially self-publishing. There are few titles that sell very well from publishers (they do 2nd, and 3rd versions), but these would probably do even better if they were self-published.

Of course, there are other reasons for publishing. (People really want their name on an animal book). One of those reasons is that a book is a really good business card. This is especially useful for consultants or when looking for a job. "Why yes, I do know about ...., in fact, I wrote a book on it".

I could blame quite a bit of my business (I do consulting and corporate training) on writing books.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#39

Post by neolefty »

sytelus wrote: post #31

TLDR; the books on specific tech is lighly sold, gets out of date fast and publishers are ripping off authors by throwing them 10% revenue share. Because we co-authored the book we each got 5% of revenue for physical books and 12.5% for ebooks and digital access (10% and 25% for individual authors). So far I have received $539 over 5 months. On average, the book has sold 222 copies per month which is greatly skewed b…

Missed the most important points. For example:

I’m extremely happy with the how things have turned out. We’ve got a lot of great feedback and some average reviews on Amazon (please leave us a review!). I’m grateful that people are reading it and I hope it’s helping them in some way. We worked hard and wanted to help engineers get better at running infrastructure.

And

My April 2018 statement (sales from December — March) says I’ve made $11,554.15 which roughly breaks down to $23 per hour for the estimated 500 hours of work. Without the three sponsorships that would have been $5.29 per hour. Luckily that number only gets better with time. I’ve heard 2nd editions are a better rate per hour because they have less time investment with similar sales as the original, but I don’t have any experience.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#40

Post by synack »

tedyoung wrote: post #12
justherefortart wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's DosBook?

Typo: should be DocBook. O'Reilly (used to?) use DocBook and now seems to prefer AsciiDoc (Atlas). Some info about it (and other useful style info for writing ebooks) is here: http://oreillymedia.github.io/production-resources/styleguid...

The open source AsciiDoc Python tools support translating it into fairly reasonable DocBook XML. I assume that's what O'Reilly's doing behind the scenes with Atlas.
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