Writing books is not really a good idea • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#431

Post by ghaff » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

synergy20 wrote: post #414

I thought about writing books (technical stuff) but then realized there is nothing I can do about piracy, pdf/epub/etc are just a few clicks away. unlike music and movies that you have some leagues to enforce IP laws once a while, for books there is essentially none. It's hard to get motivations considering writing books are so demanding.

I won't say piracy is a non-issue. OK, it's a non-issue. The issue is if no one knows or cares that you wrote a book on a tech topic. To the degree people do, the far bigger deal in general is that you have now written a book on tech-related topic that can be career-enhancing in many other ways. This is not universally the case perhaps, but it's the way to bet.

TBH, I find a downside of publishing through a traditional publisher is that I can't just freely distribute in digital form.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#432

Post by alphabet9000 » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

move 100% of books to ebooks and make them as obnoxious as possible. start adding things like loot boxes. pay a dollar to read a TOP SECRET crucial bit to the storyline that you simply wont get the Full Book Experience (tm). give it Social (tm) capabilities. show indicators where everyone else is reading and allow comments on any sentence in the book. feature self facing cameras on the ebook so you can live stream yourself reading. Allow users to Like your live streams and display metrics on every page.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#433

Post by la_fayette » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:42 PM UTC

markwisde wrote: post #424

peterarmstrong wrote: post #315

One thing to consider is royalty rate. If you sell 5000 copies for $20 and earn a dollar per copy, you've earned $5,000. (This math is based on 10% royalties on the publisher's portion, which is about half of retail. And no, fiction books don't sell for $20 typically, but I'm using this number to make the math easy.) Now, if you sell 5000 copies of an ebook for $20 and earn 80% royalties, you earn $16 per copy, and e…

Indeed. Royalties are the issue. I just published a book with a well-known editor and I’m making 10% per copy (ebook or print). The book is priced at more than 50$ and yet I’ll only make this amount by selling 10 copies (of course this is before tax). Interestingly, if your editor has an affiliate program you can make as much money by advertising some link that leads to purchases. So as a writer, if you do both you e…

Ok cool, congratulations to the security handbook! I have checked prices for printing books, because I am in the process of writing a regional mountain bike guide book. Although, I only find deals for 3-5$ per book... 1$ seems quite cheap to me.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#434

Post by spoonjim » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

snet0 wrote: post #233

kpwagner wrote: post #99

In the month it will take me to finish reading Storm of Swords, I will watch ~10 movies. Plus, I'm reading Storm of Swords, which needs no additional support from readers to be discovered or validated--though I still want to read it. Plus, I digitally loaned it from my local library. I own a number of books (~200) and have probably owned x4 that total in my lifetime. Maybe 1/3 of those I paid full price for new. The…

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but my assumption is that buying second-hand books gives no money to the author. I don't know, morally speaking if this should be the case. It does feel wrong for people to get the experience without paying the price of admission. Can this be solved logistically, though? And do publishers factor this into their RRP?

Well technology is solving this problem, e-books are not transferable so there is no secondhand market. Problem solved! (but don't expect to ever inherit a book collection that has titles you'd never heard of, that opens your eyes to different things).

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#435

Post by ellegriffin » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

chasingthewind wrote: post #138

I really enjoyed this @ellegriffin and it's something I wrestled with about twelve years ago when I wrote my first novel. I had gotten some positive feedback from a few friends and started to wonder if it was "good enough to publish." Luckily I moved very quickly from that question to "my" answer which was "no" and mirrors your thought: > If I can spend two to three years writing a novel and my best case scenario is…

This is the best thing I ever heard of. I want nothing more than permission to write badly and still love it.

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#436

Post by ellegriffin » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

DVassallo wrote: post #172

As an example of that middle ground mentioned in the article, I spent 2 weeks writing a short technical book about AWS, self-published it, and sold 6,587 copies and $133,030 in sales in 1.5 years.

This is great!

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#437

Post by ellegriffin » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #177

>The New York Times caused a stir recently when, in an article about pandemic book sales, it disclosed that “98 percent of the books that publishers released in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies.” this is somewhat misleading. It includes tiny publishers, niche publishers, niche non-fiction, and so on. Such as "top 100 hiking trails in the Bay Area" and niche stuff like that. Fiction debuts by top publishing houses te…

I disagree that fiction by top publishing houses tend to be more lucrative for the author. I wrote an article about that one too if you're interested. https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#438

Post by ellegriffin » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

tobias3 wrote: post #119

I don't know where she gets the idea that serial publishing isn't done currently. Pirateaba, creator of wanderinginn.com has 4342 patreons (10k per month at least). At that point who cares about the NYTimes bestselling list?

Very excited to check this one out. Thank you!

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#439

Post by ellegriffin » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #155

I'm a musician. Good luck with the creator economy. As they say in music, don't quit your day job.

Ha! I definitely won't...

Re: Writing books is not really a good idea

#440

Post by klelatti » Mon, May 10, 2021, 9:51 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #415

bluGill wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told that business books are 7 pages of content, and 242 pages of story so to get people to read the content pages.

Well, and to convince you that the content pages aren't some made up BS as supported by real customer experiences, academic research, etc. I could probably summarize a lot of business books (e.g. Crossing the Chasm) in a few pages with a couple drawings. But it would be missing a lot of nuance and, yes, would probably lack the story to make it stick.

There is actually an 18 page summary of Crossing the Chasm in my local Amazon store - it gets 2 star ratings.

I think that there are some potentially conflicting forces:

- a short exposition is probably better for the reader

- less than 200 pages is seen as poor value for money

- people generally expect to read from start to finish

For me I'd much prefer books which fail the read from start to finish test but have clearly signposted sections that I can choose to read and sample from.