81–90 of 151 posts
OK. Doesn't anyone else who read this now think, "Well gee why would I ever write a book then?" You could easily make $23 an hour as an entry-level server in a diner if you include tips.
We've published several books, and the author for our latest Vue book earned $20k on the opening weekend. The economics change completely if you self-publish or publish with a smaller firm that has marketing abilities (and better royalty rates). Self publishing is awesome because you keep all the money, but it takes years to build an audience. Honestly, writing the manuscript is the easy part. Building an audience, m…
That's phenomenal! I agree that building an audience is the hardest part and it's what traditional publishers bring to the table for most people. Just last week I saw someone self-publish some artwork in an area they have an audience and they made $4000 in a day. The only marketing they did was a single tweet. I don't think most individuals would be able to gain this level of authority without years of work and spend…
Link? I've been wondering about the current economics of (new) art lately.
I have also only written one book so I wasn't sure how "typical" my experience was, but I'm really surprised to hear that your book didn't receive the same level of support!
We've published several books, and the author for our latest Vue book earned $20k on the opening weekend. The economics change completely if you self-publish or publish with a smaller firm that has marketing abilities (and better royalty rates). Self publishing is awesome because you keep all the money, but it takes years to build an audience. Honestly, writing the manuscript is the easy part. Building an audience, m…
I'm ready to share this now: our book on Angular 2 did $400k a revenue, per year, the first two years. BUT the reason this was possible was we had a huge audience that trusted us. Helpful insights. What are the major factors you credit with getting the large audience? How large is "large"?
$400,000 / $20 = 20,000 purchasers at that $20 price point (which is probably low for the books I see around in the space). If you guess a conversion rate of 2-4%[0] you’re talking 500k - 1mm people. Obviously those numbers shift down with purchase price normalizing to what feels more standard in the tech space ($30-$40).
[0]: https://chrismcmullen.com/2017/11/03/book-marketing-by-the-n...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite a few people make this argument, thank you for mentioning it. My feeling is that this is a holdover from a time when there was a substantial barrier-to-entry for authorship. Back when publishers were the gatekeepers, anybody could write a book, but relatively few were published. People could vanity-press anything, but nobody would hear about them, because just as publishing was concentrated, so was marketing. -…
I don't think it's really as easy as you say. At the same time, it wasn't really hard to self-publish in the 20th century either; even self-marketing could be a matter of buying mailing lists and paying for help with bulk mailing. I had friends who did it and sold their books in local bookstores too. Putting a book together, as compared to many things, takes a lot of time and energy and definitely sends social signal…
That may appeal to some, but given the number of books written that are absolute dreck, the argument carries no more weight with the discerning audience than saying that you put in the work to get a CS degree, so you must be smart.
Now, if you write a book and get nice reviews, thatks a different signal. But absent that... I doubt it's more than an invitation to a conversation.
I wouldn't want to belong to any club whose sole requirement was that I had written and self-published a technical book.
I've written a book with Manning (Grokking Algorithms) and had a good editor experience: I had 2 editors that stayed with me through the whole book. They gave me a ton of great advice -- I even asked one of them if they would like co-author credit, it was that good. Manning regularly scheduled technical reviews and readability reviews, and I got a lot of comments from those as well. I have also only written one book…
This post is so accurate. I have nothing but good things to say about the O'Reilly staff. It didn't make a dent in my finances but was a good experience to understand the challenges in writing something like that.
The most meaningful experience for me was when someone reading the early access version found me on the internet and sent excited questions to me out of the blue: https://medium.com/@xrd/sending-two-signed-copies-of-my-book...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
We've published several books, and the author for our latest Vue book earned $20k on the opening weekend. The economics change completely if you self-publish or publish with a smaller firm that has marketing abilities (and better royalty rates). Self publishing is awesome because you keep all the money, but it takes years to build an audience. Honestly, writing the manuscript is the easy part. Building an audience, m…
I feel like I hit a wall writing thinks as they’re either technically accurate but incomprehensible, or they’re too doughy and carry too little meaning.
I feel like there is something I just don’t understand about this business, and everyone else just says, “start”.