Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Writing a software book and making over $100k

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 124 posts

Re: Writing a software book and making over $100k

#11

Post by mac01021 »

vladmihalcea wrote: post #2

I'm the book author, so if you have any questions, let me know.

Thanks!

Under what circumstances would you expect someone to discover your book (they can't buy it if they don't know about it).

If I want to learn a particular software tool (Kafka, Kubernetes, git). I might go to Amazon or Google and search the name of tool, possibly with "book" appended.

If I want to learn how to do functional programming, I'll search for "functional programming book" or something like that.

What's a search term that I'd be likely to use that would lead me to your book? Or is there one?

Re: Writing a software book and making over $100k

#13

Post by vladmihalcea »

mac01021 wrote: post #11
vladmihalcea wrote: post #2

I'm the book author, so if you have any questions, let me know.

Thanks! Under what circumstances would you expect someone to discover your book (they can't buy it if they don't know about it). If I want to learn a particular software tool (Kafka, Kubernetes, git). I might go to Amazon or Google and search the name of tool, possibly with "book" appended. If I want to learn how to do functional programming, I'll search for "functional programming book" or something like that. What'…

That's where my blog, https://vladmihalcea.com/blog/ or my StackOverflow answer, https://stackoverflow.com/users/1025118/vlad-mihalcea come into play.

Most of my readers get to know me from these resources prior to knowing about my book.

Re: Writing a software book and making over $100k

#14

Post by vladmihalcea »

paul_f wrote: post #8
vladmihalcea wrote: post #2

I'm the book author, so if you have any questions, let me know.

If everything in the book was also in your blog posts, didn't that dampen sales of the book? This is my fear, if I give it away, no one will buy it.

No, that's not an issue at all. I have hundreds of articles on my blog that are also covered in the book:

https://vladmihalcea.com/tutorials/hibernate/

But reading the book is easier than browsing the articles because the book has a certain structure while the articles focus on a single topic only.

Re: Writing a software book and making over $100k

#15

Post by vladmihalcea »

YetAnotherMatt wrote: post #10
paul_f wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything in the book was also in your blog posts, didn't that dampen sales of the book? This is my fear, if I give it away, no one will buy it.

I would assume that his blog posts are what convinced quite a few people to actually buy the book. That said, I'm not too familiar with the book sales industry. I am familiar with consulting. Initially I thought that giving all special knowledge away for free would be the worst thing I could possibly do. Boy was I wrong. Nowadays I give presentations detailing step by step exactly what people need to do in order to a…

That's true. My blog is thd front-end to every product or service that I'm selling. It's a very useful marketing tool.

Re: Writing a software book and making over $100k

#16

Post by vladmihalcea »

barry-cotter wrote: post #9
paul_f wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything in the book was also in your blog posts, didn't that dampen sales of the book? This is my fear, if I give it away, no one will buy it.

Packaging, convenience, lack of redundancy and logical structure are worth a lot if your time is valuable. ConversionXL sell video courses for $600 each that have ~the same content as their endless series of blog posts. But the video course has a beginning, middle and end. It’s a polished finished product. The blog posts are raw material. Plenty of academics do similar things when writing books. There’s vanishingly l…

Exactly.

Re: Writing a software book and making over $100k

#17

Post by vladmihalcea »

kranner wrote: post #6

Thanks, this is inspirational. Glad to see writing about "a niche in a niche" as you put it in one of your tweets can do so well for an individual author (provided they do it as intelligently as you did).

I didn't expect much when I started. However, traffic grew over time, and I got to learn more about marketing, so in the end, it turned out to be a good investment.

Re: Writing a software book and making over $100k

#18

Post by ThePhysicist »

As another point one could add "Write about a reasonably popular subject and write for beginners". From my own experience of analyzing popular content and people that have successfully built a large follower base (in tech) it seems that almost all of them produce content about subjects that a lot of people are interested in (e.g. Javascript, CSS, web development, basic Unix/Linux functionality) and target mostly beginners.

Re: Writing a software book and making over $100k

#19

Post by xchaotic »

I consider this a success story similar to an NBA star making it. So if 100k is very successful in terms of computer book revenues, then I’d say money should not be the main motivation to do it, as there’s better, more reliable ways to earn money in the software industry - working for any SP500 company will easily get you the same amount of money in less than a year, more or less guaranteed. I know it’s not either or situation, just that it proves that money should not be main motivator for writing a book.
Post reply on HN