The economics of writing technical books
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The economics of writing technical books
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Re: The economics of writing technical books
#2Yes, don’t write technical books for the money. But also do! If you approach the book as a business venture, there’s plenty of money to be made.
Here’s my recap of making almost $400k over a few years of working on books-and-such as a sidebiz alongside a full-time job. Not all of it was from books directly, a lot was from opportunities that the books unlocked. And that’s not even counting how the books enabled me to sponsor my own visa/greencard to come into USA and unlock oodles of opportunities.
The main insight I’ve learned is that the book is a product. Write your thing for someone to benefit from. What [useful thing] will they be able to do after reading your book that they weren’t able to before? How does it help them get more of what they want faster?
https://swizec.com/blog/5-years-of-books-and-courses-or-how-...
Sharing this to encourage, not to brag. We need more insightful and useful books out there.
If you’re gonna do this, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of Write Useful Books first. Wish it existed when I started. http://writeusefulbooks.com/
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#3Writing a technical book is an extremely bad idea that could only be pursued by idealistic fools, blow hards and obsessive ideologues.
Here's mine:
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#4As the article correctly states, writing a book is a good idea for many reasons, but generating income isn't among those.
My personal experience: during the golden days of the technical book market, a good 15-20 years ago, writing a chapter would net you $1500 (for, like, 2-3 weeks of work, better pay than a magazine article that would take approximately the same time but pay a bit less) an entire book maybe $25K, but that would take you at least 6 months to complete.
Of course, that was just the upon-completion payment, with the promise of later royalties if the book did well, but, unless you were very lucky, that pretty much never happened.
Still, a payment of $2500-in-todays-dollars for less than a month of work isn't entirely bad, and being a published author did have its perks for getting consulting gigs.
But these days, "a magazine or book deal that pays actual money" just isn't a thing anymore, so, yeah...
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#5I enjoy reading posts like this. Very thorough description. I am wondering if someone has insights into how the publishing model for more traditional publishers like Wiley and Elsevier work. Those guys are selling books for more than $200. Does the author get more money from their sales or is it all absorbed by the publisher?
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#6Slight OT: can anyone recommend websites that have good technical documentation?
What I mean by “good”, is the design & layout of the technical documentation is easy to consume and visually appealing.
(I’m revamping my customer facing tech reference docs and wanting have a visually appealing doc but not so much visually appeal it becomes distracting)
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#7Yes, don’t write technical books for the money. But also do! If you approach the book as a business venture, there’s plenty of money to be made. Here’s my recap of making almost $400k over a few years of working on books-and-such as a sidebiz alongside a full-time job. Not all of it was from books directly, a lot was from opportunities that the books unlocked. And that’s not even counting how the books enabled me to…
Awesome! I probably won't write book for money but at least I want it to be useful.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#8Slight OT: can anyone recommend websites that have good technical documentation? What I mean by “good”, is the design & layout of the technical documentation is easy to consume and visually appealing. (I’m revamping my customer facing tech reference docs and wanting have a visually appealing doc but not so much visually appeal it becomes distracting)
I think Mathematica’s documentation is beyond excellent. Here is the documentation for the Flatten function:
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Flatten.html
Just look at the amount of examples and details for this function. It is like that for every function.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#9On that note, you can just do it for the good of the world. A lot of us have high-paying day jobs that can support us and good writing can be done on the side.
Benefits include not needing to hit some page count (so you can be concise), and bug reports from the community.
I don't look down at people who make money from books at all. I admire all writers and editors. (Some publishers can go f themselves, though. :)
But there is another path available to many of us, one that isn't driven by money. Remember the old hacker ethic!
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#10I don't think I'd have the stomach to spend a year writing something that I think is really good only for it to end up on libgen a couple days later.