So you’re thinking about self-publishing an I.T. book?

Trust me, I know people are buying (I've made nearly as much as or more than Amy off my eBooks other than the authoring one). The volume for something that sells well isn't the issue. It's really that people don't want to pay as much for eBooks as one would hope/think.

Part of the problem is the "I don't get something tangible for my money." Never mind you're receiving a lot of, you know, information or anything. People want something they can point to and be like "Yo, I bought that." That's hard to do with eBooks, so you have to consistently price them lower.

Also, marketing to programmers/the HN crowd is significantly harder than a mainstream crowd because you have to deal with the Nick Burns Effect: you are an idiot and I could totally do everything better than you in a weekend. Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook? Received hate mail for weeks about how I should have made it free, how I charge too much, how the book isn't available in HTML, how they could write the whole thing in a weekend using an automated script (seriously), etc. I still get the occasional e-mail about how "I'm probably going to write my own FREE AND OPEN SOURCE guide (which is MORALLY SUPERIOR TO YOURS), so you should just give me a free copy of yours to help you fix any errors." It's a culture issue that's difficult to work around.

Even worse, selling them on something that isn't essential to their job function is difficult (most people don't write eBooks for a living), and the problem with http://authoringebooks.com is compounded with the fact that I'm competing against people who are entrenched and SEO'd out the butt. I don't have time to sit around and tweak my SEO stuff all day, so my organic Google traffic is significantly lower than what it would be if I were more visible.

And also, the market for those who want to write a technical ebook may not be as big as I originally anticipated. :)

So, uh yeah, I agree. Pathological customer bad.

My cofounder at Leanpub wrote up his experience publishing "Flexible Rails" here: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=266

Here's the tl;dr: * Peter made $48k from Flexible Rails. * $34k of that was from sales of the PDF.

I'm biased, but it seems to me that giving away the PDF (where you make close to 100% profit) to sell a paper book (where you make much less -- The 40% profit from the article is by far the highest I've ever seen) is crazy.

If you have an audience and a good book, you should be able to do well on an e-book. Keir Thomas in the article has both, but he gave away 500 000 copies of his ebook and only made $9k on the paper book. Yikes! He could've sold the book for 2$ a pop and got 1% of the downloads and still made the more.

Keir is right that you have to give away something for free. So, give away a good chunk of the book (say, 1/3 or so) as a PDF and sell the full thing.

Or, give away the whole book for free as HTML and sell the PDF. That's what Eric Ries http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned and Nivi and Naval from Venture Hacks are doing (http://leanpub.com/venturehacks) and they're doing quite well.

Really, I don't meant to be too hard on Keir. It was a good post, with interesting data. I think he has shown that giving away the e-book and selling the print book is not necessarily the way to go.

I'd love to see a lot more experiments and write-ups about this. I truly believe that authors can and will soon be able to make good money self publishing technical e-books.

Ditto here, particularly with regards to blogging. Community participation also has helped me, although it was one of those "overnight success in five years" stories.

He climbed a bit steeper hill than he would have had to climb otherwise because he chose to create something that has lots of free acceptable alternatives already easily findable and useable, and it's (effectively, though not strictly speaking) a commodity product. It might be a pretty darn good one, but it's still something that just fills a commodity need, for most people.

On a related note, I myself have developed a rule of thumb policy to don't buy technical books anymore because there is almost always an acceptable free way to get the info I need, and therefore this frees up more cash for getting things I can't get for free otherwise, or at least, to get higher quality or more convenient things. Like food, shelter, computer equipment, etc. I am still very willing and do frequently buy fiction books, in part because I know how hard it is to write fiction, how poor the pay often is, and because my interest is not a commodity/generic interest but rather a specific one for a particular story or author that is attractive. (I gladly pay for Stephenson, Scalzi and Simmons, for example.) Also, I don't like to handle dirty/secondhand books, and I've read a pretty big percentage of old public domain literature that I'm interested in -- if I haven't read something written before say 1850 there's a pretty good chance I never will because I've passed on it several times already, whereas there are still tons of books written even in the last 20 years that sound attractive from a distance but I still haven't gotten around to reading yet. When I want to Get Something Done I can often do tactical lookups in man pages, help docs, online pages, Googling around, asking somebody, etc. and very rarely have no other recourse than a retail book.

I'm also coming from the perspective of someone who did previously frequently buy technical books and build up a pretty large library of computer/software-related ones, and found that only a small percentage of them were fundamental enough to still be useful and must-keepable today (think Stevens TCP/IP Illustrated, many Addison-Wesley UNIX/Internet tomes). Whereas a lot of them were too tied to transient/temporary/version-specific technology (most of my O'Reilly buys, for example -- even though I love O'Reilly) such as Java 1.2-era books, old versions of Perl, early HTML books, books on Solaris (heck just saying a book on Solaris is antique and useless makes me feel old, I remember when I ran into it at lots of companies before the coming of the Linux wave), etc. Book buying is also a highly discretionary line item in my budget. Whenever there's any sense of a cash crunch or big upcoming need to spend money on more important things, book buying is one of the first things to disappear. Gas prices up 75%? A few less technical books bought and you're back in balance for quite a while.

All this said, I admire writers because I know how hard it is. And I think there will always be a non-zero-dollar market demand for quality written technical books, even if only in purely electronic form. I just think writers will need to increasingly be aware of what their competitors are, because there's going to be an increasing number of good free alternatives to their work, as well. And an increasing percentage of people are going to be giving away portions of their work for free on the web as a sort of resume++ and lead generator.

I was offered a gig being the co-writer of a book on Python by Manning. I turned it down ultimately for a variety of reasons, but in part because I thought it would be a lot of work for the likely pay, and partly because there were (what I considered to be anyway) several good and free alternatives already. Looking back, I might have accepted and done it, because I have heard it leads to more publicity and helps you get more paying work, which indirectly compensates for it. You asked about whether blogging might have created opportunities. In my case, I think it has, I know I've had folks look both at my writing and the rest of my online presence and that was a big factor in getting new paying work and opportunities. Everything helps. Just giving tangible evidence that you Have Skills and can Get Things Done, in whatever field, is huge.