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

Why my book can be downloaded for free

blog.plover.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–67 of 67 posts

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#61

Post by zrail »

adrianhoward wrote: post #30
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

It is surprising to see a blog post like this published in 2014. Admittedly is refers to a 9 year old book, but the point it makes has been rendered moot by developments since. A publisher recently contacted me to explore the possibility of me writing a book for them. The terms, which I believe are fairly standard, are you make about $1 for every book sold, or about 5% of the total revenue. A technical author can exp…

"A publisher recently contacted me to explore the possibility of me writing a book for them. The terms, which I believe are fairly standard, are you make about $1 for every book sold, or about 5% of the total revenue. A technical author can expect to make about $10'000 if their book sells well. The publishing house makes about $200'000 on this, with the rest going to distribution and book stores." I'm not directly in…

Just to add another data point here, I just crossed $40k gross revenue on my self-published book in a year and change. I sell entirely from my own site, bypassing Amazon entirely.

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#62

Post by jholman »

marijn wrote: post #18

This has worked very well for Eloquent JavaScript as well -- I suspect it'd have remained obscure if it hadn't been available online (as a proper, web-friendly HTML page). As it is now, it's being read by a lot of people online, and though I suspect less people read it on paper than online, it is also being recommended and bought enough to financially compensate the time that went into it.

Thank you so much for Eloquent JavaScript, Marijn! It's a really great book, and it has given me a lot of value.

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#63

Post by alxndr »

mjd wrote: post #53
pasbesoin wrote: post #49

I've been out of touch for many years, now, but the Perl community was one of the most generous I encountered. And they were relatively early to this, setting many an example that has been carried forward by other communities. (There were earlier communities, of course, but the Perl community seemed to be ascendent around the time that "programming" became "mainstream". + CPAN + YAPC -- a progenitor of the "just cove…

It's always been a good community. I think a lot of that comes from Larry.

LIGASWAG?

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#64

Post by Tepix »

munificent wrote: post #43
adrianhoward wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A publisher recently contacted me to explore the possibility of me writing a book for them. The terms, which I believe are fairly standard, are you make about $1 for every book sold, or about 5% of the total revenue. A technical author can expect to make about $10'000 if their book sells well. The publishing house makes about $200'000 on this, with the rest going to distribution and book stores." I'm not directly in…

> Almost everybody I know who has gone the self-publishing route has ended up with the high-hundreds and single-digit-thousands. For what it's worth, I self-published my programming book[1] about a month ago and I'm beyond that threshold already. This is (depending on how you look at it) despite the the fact that the book is also freely available on the web, or in large part because of it. (I believe the latter.) Eit…

Wow, the price for the ebook varies greatly!

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#65

Post by crpatino »

sampo wrote: post #12
sly010 wrote: post #8

Of course the case would be very different if you wanted to publish your book as audio, which is probably much more expensive to produce.

> if you wanted to publish your book as audio Higher-Order Perl as an audiobook would be quite an experience!

If play a simple "99 bottles of beer" backwards three times, it will awaken Cthulhu.

Re: Why my book can be downloaded for free

#66

Post by ksearsbooks »

To add some data around the self-publishing space overall, the best source by far is Authorearnings.com which is run by Hugh Howey (who is most famous for having become a success by giving away his book "Wool"). According to his data, the small press, indie authors and alternative press options are dominating the Amazon top 100 lists compared to prior years where traditional publishers owned 90% of the market (genre fiction doing the best overall).

On the other hand, to self-publish non-technical books, assuming you use quality service providers, you are probably looking at about $10K before factoring in marketing (according to people like Guy Kawasaki). Juxtapose that against the fact that 400k self-pubbed ISBN's were issued last year, and the true indie success story seems like the proverbial unicorn.

* Although clearly in deep technical knowledge, there will be less competition for the quality material (short supply and all that).

Of course to further muddy the issue, what market share will go to the subscription services as they become more popular? According to Authorearnings, early data shows they are grabbing a lot of eyeballs from those top-tier super-users.

Post reply on HN