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The economics of writing technical books

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Re: The economics of writing technical books

#21

Post by hilux »

richrichie wrote: post #17
WoodenChair wrote: post #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 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.

I think you underestimate the cost of writing a well-researched book.

Pre-publication, the process consumes lots of time and energy and money while generating zero revenue, output, or other benefit. Very different from most business ventures.

Source: I have written a book, and have also started my own business and have worked for many startups. (VC-backed startups pay their employees.)

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#22

Post by WoodenChair »

Zigurd wrote: post #19
WoodenChair wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Which speaks to the lack of need for books in certain elements of the Android market, but not to technical publishing more generally.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#23

Post by dinkleberg »

beej71 wrote: post #9

On 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. :) Bu…

This does seem like the better path for a lot of people. A good article on this is https://sive.rs/balance.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#24

Post by mattgreenrocks »

Swizec wrote: post #2

Yes, 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…

How much is this income do you think was a result of your following? From here, you look quite established.

My pet peeve is indie dev influencers who tweet “anyone can do it” while ignoring their own built up momentum. I don’t know enough about you to ascertain either way.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#25

Post by abathur »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #3

Writing a technical book is an extremely bad idea that could only be pursued by idealistic fools, blow hards and obsessive ideologues. Here's mine: https://hypermedia.systems

Thanks for the chuckle :)

Good to see you here--I noticed your manuscript on GH (probably sometime last year?) during a ~vanity search because it quotes one of my blog posts. (https://hypermedia.systems/tricks-of-the-htmx-masters/#html-...)

I went to check on it and noticed that the repo I have starred is archived and that there's a new one recently put up. I don't see an explanation--can you reflect on or link to anything about the update? (Is this a content update, just ~refactoring how the book is built, etc.?)

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#26

Post by trueismywork »

WoodenChair wrote: post #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:…

How much pay per hour do you think it will make it worthwhile to consider the book a success from authors point of view?

I'm thinking of a scenario where people are paid to write the book rather than from book sales..

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#28

Post by perlgeek »

Zigurd wrote: 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…

> My later books were much better books but sold fewer and fewer copies.

This resonates with me. I've written and published a few books, and the one I'm most proud of has sold the last.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1484232275/ has a 5.0 star rating on Amazon (at 20 ratings), and I've gotten lots of positive feedback about it via email, chat and in person. The topic is just so niche that virtually nobody cares :-)

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#29

Post by deniz-a »

abathur wrote: post #25
recursivedoubts wrote: post #3

Writing a technical book is an extremely bad idea that could only be pursued by idealistic fools, blow hards and obsessive ideologues. Here's mine: https://hypermedia.systems

Thanks for the chuckle :) Good to see you here--I noticed your manuscript on GH (probably sometime last year?) during a ~vanity search because it quotes one of my blog posts. ( https://hypermedia.systems/tricks-of-the-htmx-masters/#html-... ) I went to check on it and noticed that the repo I have starred is archived and that there's a new one recently put up. I don't see an explanation--can you reflect on or link to…

Co-author here. We rewrote the book in Typst. On the hypermedia.systems website, the new EPUB ebook release is built from the new codebase. I'm working on a blog post with details on why we switched and what the process was like. The content of the book has not meaningfully changed.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#30

Post by djaychela »

I have written a textbook on using Cubase (a DAW), but including all the background that I think you need to be well-rounded (music theory, audio concepts, mixing, effects, instruments, etc).

It took me 2 years to write, one of which was all my spare time, so probably about 9 months to a year's full-time work.

Then I found out no-one bought it! Only pure chance led to it being promoted by someone in the industry, maybe 2 years later. I've kept it updated (started on Cubase 6, now on Cubase 13), and it sells reasonably well; maybe £400 a month in revenue, typically for me. So it's not a big earner, but it pays some of my bills, and means it's worth the 2 weeks of work (average) to update it each time Cubase releases a new version.

All of this is selling via Amazon, worldwide, print-on-demand. Previously on Lulu but they were really just sub-contracting on Amazon and while you get less money per copy on Amazon, it out-sells Lulu by 3x (and then Lulu discontinued the sizes I was using so it was a no-brainer).

I've done another book (which is less of a seller in terms of price and numbers), and quite enjoy them, but it's difficult and I think it's more a case of "if I have the time spare I can put this work in and eventually it will pay me back" - possibly over a year or two...

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