Ask HN: Making extra income with books

I was lead author for ebook/print book through Apress - _Hacking the Kinect_ - http://amzn.to/1aljFwQ

It was distributed in stores and online, as well as in ebook form. It has text, graphics, and code.

It generated not much past the initial upfront payment of ~$8000, spread across myself and 3 coauthors.

Reasons?

1) Niche topic, badly addressed. It was pretty hot at the time, but the number of people looking for a intermediate - advanced level text on 3D sensing was not as high as the number of people looking for "cool demo I can type in and make my SparkFun robot drive around a Coke can".

2) Published through agency. I appreciated Apress' work on marketing my book. Everything else I could have handled myself (and probably the marketing too). They also have tough terms - you have to be a knockout (4k+ units[1]) success in the technical book industry to really make money through publishers.

3) Bad print copy. The grayscale used for my book was too dark, blowing away some images. Apress did not want to fix this. I recommend the Kindle version to everyone I can.

Worth it? Yes. It is a great means to open doors and market yourself. Financially worth it? Not through a publisher.

[1] I can't cite this off the top of my head, but that's the number I recall from a few years ago.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

http://www.amazon.com/Sell-More-Software-Conversion-Optimiza...

I published it through Hyperink, which is not a traditional publisher. They bring the software and editors (plus associated trades) to get the book put together, I brought the words. No advance, more equitable royalties than traditional publishers would offer, and they handle the mechanics of getting it into Amazon and whatnot.

I haven't run the numbers recently but recall selling somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,X00 copies. I haven't done the math on royalty payments for the year, but would ballpark them in the $5k range?

It would be, ahem, extraordinarily difficult to get a traditional publisher to greenlight publishing on as niche a topic. If I had, I would expect them to offer me $5k as an advance, as that is roughly market for first-time non-technical authors. (At the standard prices and royalty rates 2k units would not nearly earn out a $5k advance, which means that absent additional substantial sales I would expect to never receive any royalty payments beyond the $5k advance.)

I didn't publish the book primarily for economic reasons. If I had, I would have done something a bit closer to the Nathan Barry / Brennan Dunn / etc model. Prominent elements thereof: email marketing as a distribution channel, markedly higher prices ($49 vs. $9), multiple tiers (e.g. book @ $49, book + supplementary materials @ $99, book + supplementary materials + some interactive component at $249), and likely self-published 100% because I'd need more control over the pricing / marketing / etc than any publisher would care to allow me to have.

Other authors on HN have been extraordinarily generous at writing about exactly what is required tactically for successfully marketing books. I'd highly encourage you to read their posts / comments, as they will make it wildly more lucrative for you, if that is part of your reason for writing the book. If you just want the published author merit badge, traditional publishers are a way to get it, and they seem to be totally willing to financially exploit you in return for offering it to you.

http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html

It'll be free online once complete, but I raised money with an Indiegogo campaign (about 10k). I'm self-publishing, in part because I wanted full control over the book. This gives me the ability to experiment with in-text videos, and with other tricks. For instance, when a reader clicks on an equation reference in the text, the relevant equation appears in the margin, as a reminder. Clicking on the marginal equation will take you to the context in which the equation originally appeared. This cuts down on tedious back-and-forth.

My two earlier books were both published in the traditional way:

+ A book for general audiences about networked science, "Reinventing Discovery: the New Era of Networked Science": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691160198 Published by Princeton University Press.

+ A textbook about quantum computing, jointly with Ike Chuang: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Annive... Published by Cambridge University Press. No e-book at all when first published (2000)!

Both were written with LaTeX, and included many illustrations. "Reinventing Discovery" was actually rekeyed entirely by the publisher, but the textbook was produced from our LaTeX copy.