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The economics of writing technical books

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Re: The economics of writing technical books

#11
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Slight 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.

I haven't used mathematica but look forward to learning it one day as an indulgence. I code mostly in R, and it's renowned for having some hurdles to jump through in order to get a package published on its primary repository (CRAN), but what that high standard means is you can download almost any library and expect to find extremely well documented functions with examples that can be run with minimal (usually zero) additional data/dependencies. It's a real treat, and I miss it massively when using languages with less rigorous and less uniform approaches to documentation.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#12
I've had four technical books published and I've finished writing my fifth which I'm in the midst of negotiation with publishers about distributing.

I've seen many similar articles to this one before, but I want to complement the author by saying that this one rings the most true and is the most comprehensive of all of them.

However, I want to emphasize a paragraph from his article, that I think needs more emphasis:

> I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one. According to this blog, 96% of books (mostly fiction) sell less than 5000 copies per year. For technical books, it may be worse.

I've heard that 10k number before. I've also been told by one of my publishers that 2k copies is the break even point for them. While I've had the fortune of three out of four of my prior books selling more than 2k copies (and one selling many, many more), it seems that a significant number of traditionally published programming books do not. And I'm sure that ratio is even worse for self-published books.

In fact, I think the "Reality Check" section of the article is not harsh enough. The author cherry-picked some data on very well selling technical books, which doesn't make the point well. The reality is simple: the vast, vast majority of programming books do not sell "well" (let's consider "well" 10,000 copies) and many don't even break the 2,000 copy barrier, even from traditional publishers.

So, what are the economics of technical book writing? Not good. And it's only going to get worse as the market gets flooded with LLM-generated garbage.

So, do it because you really want to do it for another reason (career, teaching, etc.). Not to make money.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#13
I wrote several books. My first book was terrible but sold very well because there was no Stackoverflow, OS platforms did not spend enough to support developers, and their documentation sucked. None of these are true anymore. Also printed books as a medium is in sharp decline. My later books were much better books but sold fewer and fewer copies.

Now I do tiktoks on current topics of interest mixed with my project management content. That will probably turn into a series of YouTube long form video lessons.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#15
post #13

I wrote several books. My first book was terrible but sold very well because there was no Stackoverflow, OS platforms did not spend enough to support developers, and their documentation sucked. None of these are true anymore. Also printed books as a medium is in sharp decline. My later books were much better books but sold fewer and fewer copies. Now I do tiktoks on current topics of interest mixed with my project ma…

I took the liberty of looking up your books from your Hacker News profile. Perhaps they are not all listed there, but the most recent one you listed I think is on a much more niche topic ("Enterprise Android" as opposed to say your prior title "Programming Android") than the prior ones. Even if it's a better book, that won't outweigh that there's just a much smaller audience.

Personally, I think my first book, 10 years ago, was my best book but it sold much worse than my later books because the topic was too niche.

Also, there are many, many more programmers now than there were before. Maybe they don't read books as much as their predecessors did, but to say Stack Overflow and open source platforms killed technical book publishing is highly inaccurate. I honestly think you're projecting a "you" situation to talk about the whole market. Please don't take that as an attack, but just as an additional perspective.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#16
For anyone else interested, I highly recommend reading through Rob Fitzpatrick's "Write Useful Books":

https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonf...

It isn't about technical books exactly but it does speak mostly on how to write recommendable non-fiction, some of which can obviously be technical. It's got a lot of practical advice for the actual "doing" of the book, and has inspired me to at least start dipping my toes in.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#17

I've had four technical books published and I've finished writing my fifth which I'm in the midst of negotiation with publishers about distributing. I've seen many similar articles to this one before, but I want to complement the author by saying that this one rings the most true and is the most comprehensive of all of them. However, I want to emphasize a paragraph from his article, that I think needs more emphasis:…

I disagree. This is the case for anything entrepreneurial. Vast majority of ventures fail. Reward/Risk ratio (in finance we call it Sharpe ratio) generally equalises across the spectrum. That is there is no free lunch. You can choose an activity that has better odds of making money. But you will make leas money on average.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#19
post #13

I wrote several books. My first book was terrible but sold very well because there was no Stackoverflow, OS platforms did not spend enough to support developers, and their documentation sucked. None of these are true anymore. Also printed books as a medium is in sharp decline. My later books were much better books but sold fewer and fewer copies. Now I do tiktoks on current topics of interest mixed with my project ma…

I took the liberty of looking up your books from your Hacker News profile. Perhaps they are not all listed there, but the most recent one you listed I think is on a much more niche topic ("Enterprise Android" as opposed to say your prior title "Programming Android") than the prior ones. Even if it's a better book, that won't outweigh that there's just a much smaller audience. Personally, I think my first book, 10 yea…

My first book C Programing Techniques for the Macintosh was pretty niche. For example, it required third-party compilers and other tools to do self-hosted development on a 512k Mac. But you had to buy it because Apple's documentation had no tutorial content at all, just an API reference.

If you look at Google's documentation of Android now, you don't need to supplement it.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#20

I've had four technical books published and I've finished writing my fifth which I'm in the midst of negotiation with publishers about distributing. I've seen many similar articles to this one before, but I want to complement the author by saying that this one rings the most true and is the most comprehensive of all of them. However, I want to emphasize a paragraph from his article, that I think needs more emphasis:…

I agree that a bookshould be written for its intrinsic value, but it's possible to have an extrinsic value as well: even if you don't sell many it could be a credibility tool for a consulting or (shudder) 'influencer' campaign.
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