Writing a book: is it worth it? • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#241

Post by shaklee3 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 4:44 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #104

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you realize who the author of that reply is. There’s nothing HN typical about him :)

I don't know either. His history shows some extensive knowledge about the types of things I'd expect readers of hacker news to know. Or course there are a lot of beginners, but the goal is to discuss things people like him are interested in. I aspire to write posts as helpful and detailed as his comment history shows.

His books are excellent, especially the latest bpf one. Highly recommended.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#242

Post by asicsp » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 4:54 AM UTC

MrPowers wrote: post #40

I wrote two books this year, Beautiful Spark being the more popular of the two: https://leanpub.com/beautiful-spark My book writing experience was much different: * just took a few weeks of part time work, mainly just organizing blog posts * Leanpub pays much higher royalties (80%) Books are a great way to learn more about the topic and help others. It makes training and employee onboarding a lot easier. You can tell…

>Leanpub pays much higher royalties (80%)

I don't use leanpub to create my book, but I still put it on both leanpub and gumroad. In case you aren't aware, gumroad [0] gives better returns and holds your payment for 1-2 weeks instead of 45-75 days on leanpub.

[0] https://gumroad.com/features/pricing

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#243

Post by asicsp » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 4:56 AM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #228

MrPowers wrote: post #40

I wrote two books this year, Beautiful Spark being the more popular of the two: https://leanpub.com/beautiful-spark My book writing experience was much different: * just took a few weeks of part time work, mainly just organizing blog posts * Leanpub pays much higher royalties (80%) Books are a great way to learn more about the topic and help others. It makes training and employee onboarding a lot easier. You can tell…

Just curious: what kind of software did you use to write your books?

Not the person you asked. I use pandoc to create pdf/epub from GitHub style markdown: https://learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#244

Post by avinassh » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 4:58 AM UTC

alextheparrot wrote: post #3

Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation. Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.

On similar topic, what are some good books like DDIA?

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#245

Post by asicsp » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:01 AM UTC

bambax wrote: post #184

Just finished my first novel (in French); will be sending it to publishers next week. If they reject it IDK what I'll do (dump it or auto-publish). But, I'm super happy to have done it. I wrote poems and novellas when I was younger. A complete novel is something else entirely. Even if it doesn't go anywhere, the feeling of having done it is really great.

Please consider self-publishing or putting it on your own blog. Share it on your social media, here on HN, reddit (there are specific subreddits for self-pub, free books, kindle unlimited, etc) and so on. You never know, even a single heartfelt review will be worth the effort. As a reader, I try to help out lesser known authors, here's an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/izhhoa/hardest_of_...

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#246

Post by bonestamp2 » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:11 AM UTC

You don't write a book to make money from the book. You write a book to make money from the aftermath.

My best friend has written a couple of NYT best sellers and a number of others that weren't best sellers. Even after his first best seller, his next advance was only around $100K. For about 6 months work (over a 1 year time period), that's not a great wage for many of the engineers here. But, he makes over $1 million/year on the aftermath (mostly speaking).

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#247

Post by jwr » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

alextheparrot wrote: post #3

Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation. Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.

Very much so. I wish there were more books like that. Heavy on content, light on dogma, with very well weighted opinions and suggestions. Excellent book!

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#248

Post by unishark » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:11 AM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #167

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 wrote a book, too (career advice for new devs). I had previously written a technical ebook (about Cordova) and wanted to write something that had a longer lifespan, but was still focused on developers. Writing a technical book was great, but, like you said, it became outdated very easily. That said, if you want to anchor yourself as an expert in a space, I can't think of a better way to do it than to write a book.…

Teaching the topic to students is the best way to learn it thoroughly because it closes the loop and you are challenged from many different angles. Something you understand weakly will be something you explain poorly, and be a big sticking point you'll need to revisit repeatedly.

The blog approach might get a similar benefit if you can get a lot of feedback and discussion for each one. But it seems like it would have a degree of self-selection of readers, where you only get the most motivated commenting on any given post.

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#249

Post by matdehaast » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:29 AM UTC

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…

Having had you reply to multiple questions of mine I just want to so thank you!

Re: Writing a book: is it worth it?

#250

Post by asicsp » Wed, Sep 30, 2020, 6:39 AM UTC

>The feeling of knowing that you have helped a lot of people is gratifying. The personal growth that comes from taking on such a challenge is also considerable. And there is no better way to learn something in depth than by explaining it to others.

An apt conclusion that resonates well with me.

>My contract with the publisher specifies that I get 25% of publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing, 10% of revenue from print sales, and 5% of revenue from translations.

Self-publishing is relatively new compared to the history of traditional publishing. If someone wishes to write a book and hasn't been able to land a deal with a publishing company, I'd definitely suggest self-publishing. Returns are much higher and you retain the rights to do interactive course, translations, video course, etc. The downside is that you have to do marketing, get reviewed, etc all by yourself. One of the main reasons self-publishing is attractive to me is that I can easily update for newer versions and I can give them away for free whenever I want.