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The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

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Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#101

Post by lsc »

jashmenn wrote: post #13

We've published several books, and the author for our latest Vue book earned $20k on the opening weekend. 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, m…

>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.

That is a big part of the value proposition of going through a publisher; Marketing is a big job... getting your book through to the various distribution channels is a big job. Personally, I'm okay giving up most of the monetary profit to have written a book that gets read and gets me recognition without having to do all that marketing work.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#102

Post by bpesquet »

The same kind of report, written a few days after releasing a self-published open source book: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/taking-off-the-successful-la...

Nine months later, the book earned a little more than $3,000 in Leanpub royalties. Like other said, marketing is definitely the hardest part, especially if (like me) you had no initial audience. Since the book is free to read on GitHub, I hoped word-of-mouth would be enough to make it widely known and popular. Boy was I wrong.

The experience was worth it for a number of reasons, honing one's skills being the number one. That said, would-be authors without an existing follower base should prepare themselves for a multi-year commitment in order to reap any significant rewards.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#103

Post by xx_alpha_xx »

arthev wrote: post #96
fusiongyro wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience, scaled down by a factor of 10 (it was a quick start book).

The level of depth of knowledge and research was at least 0.5x that of your day job? :) Genuinely curious about how hard the book was to write/research.

Yes, it was actually a lot more in depth than my day job. But I chose to write a deep technical book rather than a shallow "cookbook".

Unfortunately most readers today are more interested in the latter than the former.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#105

Post by pc86 »

> The contract stipulated that Kris and I own the copyright for the content, but O'Reilly has exclusive rights to use the content any way they see fit throughout the world now and in the future for the duration of the copyright.

I'm a little confused by this. Can Justin and Kris use the content they own? Or does O'Reilly's exclusive use rights supersede their ownership?

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#106

Post by pc86 »

struppi wrote: post #93
jashmenn wrote: post #13

We've published several books, and the author for our latest Vue book earned $20k on the opening weekend. 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, m…

Self publishing is awesome because you keep all the money, but it takes years to build an audience. I can totally relate to that. Some things about self-publishing were much easier than others. Building an audience is hardest so far. Experimented with Google and Facebook ads, stopped because it was too expensive. Right now, I am only doing content (blog posts, ...) and Twitter. Sales are low, but I am not losing mone…

I love the design of your site. Did you do it yourself? Did you get the illustrations from an artist you followed or something like UpWork?

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#107

Post by pc86 »

nerdwaller wrote: post #84
apo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Helpful insights. What are the major factors you credit with getting the large audience? How large is "large"?

Just guessing based on rough numbers: $400,000 / $20 = 20,000 purchasers at that $20 price point (which is probably low for the books I see around in the space). If you guess a conversion rate of 2-4%[0] you’re talking 500k - 1mm people. Obviously those numbers shift down with purchase price normalizing to what feels more standard in the tech space ($30-$40). [0]: https://chrismcmullen.com/2017/11/03/book-marketing-b…

This is why being able to write great email sales copy has an outsized effect on your success as an independent author. Think about how long it takes (and how many blog posts!) to add 500,000 email subscribers, even if you already have that many. That's the difference between 2% and 4%. Imagine you already have those million email subscribers and you can increase your conversions from 4% to 5% with a price increase from $20 to $25.

That's going to be much more effective to the bottom line of your business[0] than the best Facebook ad or marginally better SEO.

[0] Let's be honest if you're making half a million dollars with book releases, it's a business.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#108

Post by pc86 »

badminton1 wrote: post #92
jashmenn wrote: post #13

We've published several books, and the author for our latest Vue book earned $20k on the opening weekend. 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, m…

I don't approve of the "full stack" mindset, or the term. I gave it the benefit of the doubt but I am past that point now. The idea is that full stack engineers implement features "vertically" by maintaining various parts of a "stack" at the same time. Sounds good, but often the result is bad. A web frontend is very resilient, whereas backends are the complete opposite. If you apply the same mindset on both it better…

> A web frontend is very resilient, whereas backends are the complete opposite. If you apply the same mindset on both

Even if I accept your premise (which I don't), nobody is suggesting you apply the same mindset to two different things. I consider myself a full stack developer, but if I had to pick one it would be back end as that's where I started, where my strengths lie, and if I never wrote another line of JavaScript in my life I'd be pretty happy overall. But your characterization of full stack devs does not match up to my reality.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#109

Post by pc86 »

osteele wrote: post #61
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised. Even having the wherewithal to put together the content, put up a site and publish is a huge differentiator. 99% of the people you're competing with in any given niche aren't willing to put in even that much effort.

As a former hiring manager, I weighted highly any evidence of an ability to sustain work on projects and bring them to completion (which could be demonstrated on technical and non-technical projects); and evidence of actual interest in technology beyond that it pays the rent (which evidence was more typically a software project, but could be writing or speaking). Beyond these attributes as proxy measures for job-rela…

I would expect technical books would be great from a hiring perspective. In addition to the pros you mention (sustained work, etc) if the technology from the book lines up with the job, someone technical can review parts of the book and tell pretty quickly where the person was technically at the time they wrote it. The potential downside for the author being that if they've grown significantly that won't be borne out in the text.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#110

Post by maxxxxx »

slothario wrote: post #21
BrentOzar wrote: post #16

My experience in writing a technical book 8 years ago was the same: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/01/the-economics-of-w... I made more money from Amazon affiliate fees linking to our book than I did the actual book. Way more. If you’re out to make money short term, you’re better off writing book reviews then books. Having said that, the book gave me some credibility with clients for a couple of years when I…

That's the main reason I would write a book: to tell people that I wrote a book. You can literally say, "I wrote the book on that."

Very true. Write a book or speak at some conferences and you are suddenly much more worth.
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