The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

If I tried to self-publish my first book it would have never happened. I feel like there's too much to figure out I'd spend a year yak shaving and never produce a book. O'Reilly helped me focus on writing and making the content good and they took care of the rest. Coordination with editors, reviewers, and actual printing I'm sure would have taken me months to figure out and with O'Reilly it was just weeks.

Marketing had some push just because it was an O'Reilly book. Podcasts picked it up and that is where the sponsors started to get interested. If it were a self-published book I doubt it would have carried the same authority and not had as much interest. WRT sponsors, I did no work to bring in the sponsors or organize contracts. I only had to review the foreword and then was sent an "congratulations" email from O'Reilly that the book was sponsored. I did a webinar for one of the sponsors for free but haven't done any other work. We also were lucky enough to have CNCF marketing sponsorship who sponsored some of the book signings at events.

I still think O'Reilly added a lot to the process. Most of the extra work I did (website, affiliate programs, ad campaigns etc.) were minor work and didn't drive any meaningful sales.

Let me know if you have other questions.

The economics change completely if you self-publish or publish with a smaller firm that has marketing abilities (and better royalty rates).

Self publishing is awesome because you keep all the money, but it takes years to build an audience.

Honestly, writing the manuscript is the easy part. Building an audience, marketing it, keeping the book up-to-date is just as hard as the original manuscript. But it can really pay off.

I'm ready to share this now: our book on Angular 2 did $400k a revenue, per year, the first two years. BUT the reason this was possible was we had a huge audience that trusted us.

Email marketing is more powerful in this space than you might believe. Even today.

If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to sign up for Ramit Sethi's emails and watch how he markets. After that, get every book on copywriting you can and learn how to write copy.

(Also, if you're interested in writing books with me for 50% royalties, my email is in my profile. I want to do books on Python and Node this year.)

My experience in writing a book was that it was a long, hard slog, followed by a brief moment of self-congratulations before the "real" work begins. That might sound negative, but overall it's been a very happy and enjoyable experience. It's just the "writing the book" part of writing the book is just a small piece of it.

I did not find a publisher, although I think I could have. Instead, I used LeanPub and dove right into the nuts and bolts of creating content and finding an audience instead of filling out forms and making marketing pitches. There's nothing wrong with that. It probably makes for a more profitable book. But I wanted a book that I could wallow in. A book that would be me. I own and am responsible for every little period, piece of art, sentence fragment, and graphic in there. I wouldn't want it any other way.

Once I got rocking, I set up a beta list. Sent out links to a shared Dropbox folder and watched as the comments came in. (Meanwhile I was continuing to write.) I found reader feedback to be eye-opening. Because I was getting it as I went along, I was able to adapt and change to meet the audience where they were, instead of where I wanted them to be. This feedback process made me realize that I had to narrow the scope. So I did. No editors to get approval from. (And I love editors. They are the key to any good work. But as publisher, I get to choose strategy. LeanPub changes the dynamics.)

A few weeks back I had gotten to the end, edited and reworked each chapter a couple or three times, gotten feedback on most of it. Time to publish. Note that a bunch of stuff was crappy as hell: layout sucked, some of the footnotes needed changing, and so on. But this CI/CD applied to books. It was good enough for now, passed the smoke tests. Away it went.

I also tried various promotions. Facebook, as far as I can tell, is a complete scam. (But I don't know much.) When I target an XP programmer that knows Scrum and get likes from people in nursing homes who haven't posted in a year? That's not only fraud, that's somebody either blanket covering the entire FB audience with bots or having a direct feed to ads as they're purchased. I promoted a post with a link to the book. After 1500 people liked it, nobody looked at the book. Nobody commented. You can't have 1500 people look at something enough to like it without having any other interaction with it. That just defies reason.

Finally I settled on funny pictures on Twitter. I've collected funny pictures for years. It was a chance to make my own memes about the book. They seem to work okay. Nothing great, but it's a more honest experience than I got over on that other site.

The best part, aside from making something to help people, is that I completely own it. Sure, it might not be great now, but I can republish. In fact, I should republish. The book was as worse as it was ever going to be on the day I hit the publish button. From here on out it only gets better.

I know that there's a ton of the business part that I missed and am ignorant about. But you know what? I always screwed these things up by getting wrapped up in stuff like that. I'd spend a week rewriting one chapter and choosing a font. The LeanPub paradigm let me change and focus instead on getting the thing out the door while moving to align with the readers. The rest of that can be added on later.

Would I do it again? Sure! I've had a blast. But it was -- and remains -- a slog. This is no get-rich-quick adventure. It might be nothing more than a fancy business card. But I said and explained things nobody else was saying and explaining. It had to be done so I did it. The rest of it is just icing on the cake.

tl;dr The old economics models are going away. Instead we're seeing startup ideas applied to book publishing. That's good -- but it puts a lot more responsibility on the author.

99% of the people you're competing with in any given niche aren't willing to put in even that much effort.