Is this really how anyone under 60 learns technical information in 2024? I realize SWE job posts are down but... this is a terrible idea lol
As shocking as it may seem, you probably won’t learn compiler dev from TikTok.
The economics of writing technical books
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#32Yes, 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.
This is how I got established and built a following :)
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#33I 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 :-)
(I apologize in advance for offering unsolicited advice)
As someone who is interested in the topic of regexes and parsing, Perl in the subject made me... uninterested. I know this is a sample of size 1, but maybe splitting the principles / theory from the language would make sense?
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#34I don't think I'd have the stomach to spend a year writing something that I think is really good only for it to end up on libgen a couple days later.
... and for its contents to be interrogated by users of the LLM du jour without you seeing a single cent for your efforts
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#35In 2020 I wrote a book on FFmpeg after going through the entire FFmpeg documentation. I wanted to learn FFmpeg inside and out by actually using it to convert audio/video based on what the documentation offered. In the end I open sourced the results as an extension to the official docs[0] and then released in on Kindle as well[1].
In the last 4 years I've sold 743 books which is just shy of $2000. Still I love the fact that every month I'll get a KDP payout email and it feels more gratifying than my own FAANG+ paycheck for some reason.
[0] https://github.com/jdriselvato/FFmpeg-For-Beginners-Ebook [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087GYV15Y/
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#36In 2020 I wrote a book on FFmpeg after going through the entire FFmpeg documentation. I wanted to learn FFmpeg inside and out by actually using it to convert audio/video based on what the documentation offered. In the end I open sourced the results as an extension to the official docs[0] and then released in on Kindle as well[1]. In the last 4 years I've sold 743 books which is just shy of $2000. Still I love the fac…
> for some reason
Because it was entirely^ the fruits of your own labor!
^well everything is connected, I guess you didn’t write ffmpeg nor are you responsible for the creation of video encoding or camera technology, but I’ll go back to splitting my own hairs
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#37I'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.
Sharpe ratios are not equal across different opportunities for the simple reason that actors are irrational. Many people write books even when the expected return is negative, which drives down returns for everyone.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thanks :)
Generally curious about new authoring/markup tools and systems, so I'll keep an eye out for the post.
(The quoted blog post is part of an effort to explain some work I've been doing to single-source documentation and output multiple formats while taking advantage of the idioms/affordances of each format. I spent quite a bit of time reviewing and trying markup systems before deciding what I wanted didn't quite exist. Typst wasn't released when I did all of that; I'm aware of it but I haven't read enough to pull it out of my blind spot.)
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#39I'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..
Probably impossible to get close to a decent SW Engineer salary from writing at least in the US
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#40I'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:…
My guess is the average technical book is probably in the hundreds of copies over a reasonable lifetime. Mine's sold 91 copies in 5 months. It's a book about how machine learning works. Unknown author, I have no social media and zero advertising budget. It's just Amazon organic listings. The economics are definitely not good but I didn't write it for money. I wrote it mainly for more existential reasons that I wanted to put my words out there and leave something behind in the world.