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Writing a book: is it worth it?

martin.kleppmann.com

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Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#171

Post by lentinjoseph »

ArcMex wrote: post #138
lentinjoseph wrote: post #113

I'm an author of 8 books in Robotics. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this. Pros 1) Great visibility in the robotics community 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income) 4) People start identifying me in conferences 5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities 6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots 7) Knowledg…

How much and what ways did your motivations change from writing book 1 to say book 4? At that point, what's keeping you going the most? By the time you sit down to plan book 8, what's going through your mind especially when you factor in the cons? Thanks.

Interesting question. Here is the story.

I got an invite to write a book in 2014. Initially i thought it was very easy and can complete within 3 months. By this assumption, i agreed and start writting. When I start writting, i understood that, it is not easy at all. As a first time author, i was litterally struggling. The only factor that pushed me was, I already spent months for this, so If leave the project, I will lose that months. So I kept going.

After 1.5 years, my first book poped up and it was well recieved. Immediately after that, I got the next invitation to write second book. The thing is, the book subject was very good. So I agreed again by understanding all the cons of writting. I have spent 6 full months (full time for completing the next book. And I am keep on getting invitation and because of the experience of first book, I could easily draft the other books. It was a tough time for me too. Only less income, but only motivation was, I am doing something challenging and I am learning lot of stuff, also I am writting about the technology I like the most.

These factor pushing me for writting me again :)

Sorry for the typo and grammatical errors. :)

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#172

Post by ghaff »

thewebcount wrote: post #168

It's really stunning to see the percentage take from writing a book vs. putting something on the app store. People complain about Google and Apple taking 30%, but for these books, they're taking 75% for electronic books and 90% for print! 30% doesn't sound so bad to me compared to that. (I realize for print their costs are higher, but still - 90%?)

(In theory) publishers are doing more for you than Apple is. At a minimum they're providing some level of editing services and (maybe) validation of a quality floor. They also have distribution deals that you mostly can't get on your own.

Remember too that publishers aren't seeing a big chunk of the list price which is going to discounts and middlemen of various sorts.

That said, publishers in general don't do as much as they used to and independent publishing will be the right answer for many people--understanding they'll probably have some money out of pocket to make up for the services publishers provide.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#173

Post by simonw »

I have a total cheat for book writing: find a project where you can contribute a single chapter. It's an order of magnitude less work then writing a full book, and you get to add "author of a book on X" to your resume.

It's pretty much the other end of the scale in terms of overall benefit from what Martin is describing here, but it's worth remembering that it could be a much less stressful and time consuming opportunity.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#174

Post by filmgirlcw »

I had a contract to write a book about Google Wave. I was almost finished with it when Google decided to kill the project.

I got a kill fee (which was almost nothing) and a great story to tell, but it taught me a good lesson about how to balance an advance vs going for more residuals on the backend (this is true primarily for technical books. For traditional publishing, get as big of an advance as you can get).

The secondary lesson was to not sign contracts for books about Google products (only slightly joking), or really any upcoming product or language without understanding the risk you as the author take if the project is canceled or delayed or there is some other fundamental change.

I was 25 when I got the Wave book and it was a lot of work and research for nothing, but I can look back and laugh at the experience.

I’ve turned down technical books over the last few years, just because unless you sell 100,000 copies, it can be hard to make the economics work — unless I would be willing to take it on as a side-gig. That said, if it is a hit, the speaking fees/workshops/consulting options from that book can pay dividends, as I’ve seen from many of my friends.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#175

Post by lentinjoseph »

milancurcic wrote: post #149
lentinjoseph wrote: post #113

I'm an author of 8 books in Robotics. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this. Pros 1) Great visibility in the robotics community 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income) 4) People start identifying me in conferences 5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities 6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots 7) Knowledg…

Regarding Con 5), it's generally true with some exceptions. I wrote a Fortran book ( https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortran ) and expect it to stay fresh for at least several years thanks to the slow pace and the unusually high maturity of the technology. On the downside, it's a relatively narrow niche so I don't expect high total number of sales. For instance, about 800 copies have been pre-ordered in the firs…

The issue is, if we are writting from 2020, we may publishing in 2021 or 2022. In the meantime, there may be lot changes in the technology that we are working on. So we may have to change lot of things in the book content even we finish all the chapters. This happened to me always. The version of software framework (ROS) is changing and to keep up the new version I will keep on changing all the chapters ( mainly commands and all).

All the best for your new book :)

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#176

Post by jacques_chester »

thewebcount wrote: post #168

It's really stunning to see the percentage take from writing a book vs. putting something on the app store. People complain about Google and Apple taking 30%, but for these books, they're taking 75% for electronic books and 90% for print! 30% doesn't sound so bad to me compared to that. (I realize for print their costs are higher, but still - 90%?)

Typically your royalty is calculated against the final sale price of the book -- after publisher and retailer have taken their cut. Usually the retailer takes the biggest cut.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#177

Post by wiremine »

thewebcount wrote: post #168

It's really stunning to see the percentage take from writing a book vs. putting something on the app store. People complain about Google and Apple taking 30%, but for these books, they're taking 75% for electronic books and 90% for print! 30% doesn't sound so bad to me compared to that. (I realize for print their costs are higher, but still - 90%?)

My wife is a published author (and ghost writer) and my sister-in-law is a VP and acquisitions editor for a small publishing house.

The different between 30% and 75% is mostly historical, and the app market vs. the publishing world run on different models: There is not really an equivalent of advances or physical publishing in the app world. Royalties and app revenue splits are are roughly equivalent, though.

As an author, your leverage on advances and royalties is your personal brand equity. "Becoming" by Michelle Obama is almost an automatic winner due to her brand. If you're not well known, your publishing deal is abysmally standard.

It costs some money to print and distribute a physical book vs. a digital book. This is slowly changing as digital distribution flexes up. But print is still the preferred model for people. [1]

And there are additional layers of writing a book in the traditional model: acquisitions, developmental and copy editing being some of the big ones. And you'd be shocked how many non-fiction books have a ghost writer.

Finally, there's the reality that the publisher is taking a risk: their high percentages are covering all the books they took a loss on.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/physical-books-still-outsell...

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#178

Post by mceachen »

aliceryhl wrote: post #118

I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point. I honestly wish I was a…

I think you're fighting activation energy.

I'd find a way to make it cheap for you (in time and energy) to iterate such that the one-off content that you're providing can be used as stepping stones to a paragraph, and then a chapter, and then a book.

As an example, I've written thousands (!) of customer support messages, via email, chat, or reddit, to help my PhotoStructure beta users.

I've found that the second or third time I answer a question, either I need to fix the product so the question doesn't show up again, or I transcribe my response onto a new page on photostructure.com. In my case, it's just `hugo new content/faq/post.md` and then I dump the new content into the new page.

It doesn't have to be an elaborate post. Perhaps a bit more nuance or detail than my customer support reply, but not much more than that. Sometimes it's only 1 paragraph.

I've found that these "humble starts" can then be iterated on fairly easily, as inspiration comes to you.

As an example, according to git, I've made 15 commits to https://photostructure.com/faq/library/>. The first iteration was just a handful of sentences I wrote as a response to what I meant by "library."

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#179

Post by lentinjoseph »

langitbiru wrote: post #140
lentinjoseph wrote: post #113

I'm an author of 8 books in Robotics. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this. Pros 1) Great visibility in the robotics community 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income) 4) People start identifying me in conferences 5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities 6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots 7) Knowledg…

I can not fathom how you could write 8 books. I have written one book and got it published on Packt. It was a very tiring process. > 5) Books will outdate very easily (Technical books) I feel you. I wrote a blockchain programming book. It was becoming outdated soon just after the book was being released. The pace of the blockchain technology is very fast.

I have started writing in 2014 and done by 8th book in 2019 I guess. It was just a roller coaster ride. I really like the technology I am working on and very interested in writing tutorials. I think that was the main overriding factor of writing books even though it's having a lot of cons. Still planning to write a book, but this time I will go with self-publishing.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#180

Post by wiremine »

jacques_chester wrote: post #176
thewebcount wrote: post #168

It's really stunning to see the percentage take from writing a book vs. putting something on the app store. People complain about Google and Apple taking 30%, but for these books, they're taking 75% for electronic books and 90% for print! 30% doesn't sound so bad to me compared to that. (I realize for print their costs are higher, but still - 90%?)

Typically your royalty is calculated against the final sale price of the book -- after publisher and retailer have taken their cut. Usually the retailer takes the biggest cut.

> Usually the retailer takes the biggest cut.

Retail markup is usually 35% to 55%, but what a lot of people don't realize is that retailers usually have a method of returning their unsold stock, which the publisher is on the hook to liquidate somehow.

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