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Ask HN: Making extra income with books

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Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#31

Post by mhartl »

The Ruby on Rails Tutorial (http://railstutorial.org/) has been a successful product business (six figures per annum), and in fact I've recently taken the core publishing technology and turned it into a platform called Softcover. It's currently in private beta; sign up for an invitation here:

http://www.softcover.io/

As part of developing Softcover, I plan to write more about the details of making and publishing the Rails Tutorial (including a more detailed discussion of revenue numbers) starting some time next year. Stay tuned.

Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#32

Post by dougmccune »

dalai wrote: post #29
Qworg wrote: post #11

I'll give a "failure" story. I was lead author for ebook/print book through Apress - _Hacking the Kinect_ - http://amzn.to/1aljFwQ It was distributed in stores and online, as well as in ebook form. It has text, graphics, and code. It generated not much past the initial upfront payment of ~$8000, spread across myself and 3 coauthors. Reasons? 1) Niche topic, badly addressed. It was pretty hot at the time, but the numb…

Why a failure? As you say this is a niche topic and if the info is correct on Amazon, it has only been out a year and a half. I am an author of a robotics book in an even more niche topic and I doubt our royalties totaled more than ~$5000 in the 4 years its been out (no upfront payment). I've always considered it as something to put on the CV more than anything else.

I assume he means failure from a financial perspective, given the OP was asking about writing books specifically as a form of income. I have largely the same story, I wrote a tech For Dummies book that sold a few copies but was largely a flop. Overall it was definitely worth it from a CV perspective and as something I can say I've done in my life. But we only got a small advanced (I cleared $4.5k) and then never made enough in royalties to get out of the advance hole. So if looking at things purely from an income level it was a complete failure. But of course there are a lot of decent reasons to write a book besides the money.

Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#33

Post by biscarch »

ivansavz wrote: post #24
michael_nielsen wrote: post #19

I'm currently working on my third book, a book about neural networks and deep learning. Here's the first chapter: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html It'll be free online once complete, but I raised money with an Indiegogo campaign (about 10k). I'm self-publishing, in part because I wanted full control over the book. This gives me the ability to experiment with in-text videos, and with other tricks. F…

Hi Michael, I didn't know you were on HN! For those who don't know, "Nielsen and Chuang" is the bible of the field of quantum information science. The eqref-expanded-in-margin is a very cool idea. It could probably make sense for referencable environments like theorems and lemmas. Do you have any recommendation for the .tex --> .html conversion?

You may want to check out pandoc[1]. It's what I'm using for conversions for a book I'm writing.

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#34

Post by joachimhs »

I am currently writing Ember.js in Action (http://manning.com/skeie). This book is, of course, through a traditional publishing company. Combined with the fact that this is my first technical book, my royalty rate is pretty low (10%). This is OK, as the book will reach a wider audience that I would on my own! So far, the book is approaching 2000 units in pre-sales (MEAP - Manning Early Access Programme), which make it the 5th most sold Manning MEAP of 2013 :)

I have started work on my next book project, which will be completely free and open sourced. This book will teach JavaScript programming to kids through building a Raspberry Pi powered remote controlled car (or or other vehicle). The content for this book is not yet available online and most of it will be created through a hands on 7-part course that I am teaching during the spring of 2014. You can find a bit more information about this book here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open-source-programming-bo...

Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#35

Post by thirdtruck »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #19

I'm currently working on my third book, a book about neural networks and deep learning. Here's the first chapter: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html It'll be free online once complete, but I raised money with an Indiegogo campaign (about 10k). I'm self-publishing, in part because I wanted full control over the book. This gives me the ability to experiment with in-text videos, and with other tricks. F…

Would you have any resources to recommend in regards to using LaTeX? I work with plain-text source as my default (Markdown, etc.), but haven't used LaTeX specifically.

Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#36

Post by mooreds »

I wrote a book on Cordova CLI (a niche within an niche): https://leanpub.com/developingwithcordovacli/ (Cordova is the open source version of PhoneGap, which lets you build mobile apps with js/html/css).

It was an ebook, written with Leanpub (very cool publishing platform for ebooks.

I didn't investigate other distribution platforms; I'm just using leanpub--they take care of all kinds of things (refunds, shopping carts, distributing updates to the ebook if/when I publish them) that I didn't want to. They have a pretty nice royalty structure, but you then have to do the marketing yourself.

I created a couple of graphics myself. I think they add something to technical books.

Income: I think I have made 250 bucks since October. Fun to make some money, but obviously not paying the bills.

One thing I didn't see you mention is: how do you market the book? This is a very important thing to think about. Far more important, in my opinion, than the questions you asked.

Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#37

Post by mooreds »

triberian wrote: post #4

If one does something and he does if often and with passion he definitely has something to write about. I started writing and finished https://leanpub.com/Privacy_in_Digital-Era still waiting editor to finish and after repairs it goes online. Published are http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HFGSB3K and https://leanpub.com/opensourceencryption Digital editions for now, print is planed and should be available in month or so.…

Thumbs up for leanpub!

Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#38

Post by Procrastes »

I coauthored a book on Radio Frequency Identification[1]

My Co-Author and I probably made about $10,000 each over the years. We would have made more working a minimum wage job during the time we spent writing, but the learning, friendships in the field, public attention and discussions were priceless career builders for each of us.

  * Traditional publisher (online and in stores)
  * O'Reilly created the Safari ebook edition
  * A large number of graphics
1. Glover, Bill and Bhatt, Himanshu. RFID Essentials. O'Reilly Media 2006. Print, Safari Books online. http://rfidessenstials.com

Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#39

Post by michael_nielsen »

ivansavz wrote: post #24
michael_nielsen wrote: post #19

I'm currently working on my third book, a book about neural networks and deep learning. Here's the first chapter: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html It'll be free online once complete, but I raised money with an Indiegogo campaign (about 10k). I'm self-publishing, in part because I wanted full control over the book. This gives me the ability to experiment with in-text videos, and with other tricks. F…

Hi Michael, I didn't know you were on HN! For those who don't know, "Nielsen and Chuang" is the bible of the field of quantum information science. The eqref-expanded-in-margin is a very cool idea. It could probably make sense for referencable environments like theorems and lemmas. Do you have any recommendation for the .tex --> .html conversion?

For tex -> html I use Mathjax to do the hard work, and a hand-rolled script to do the rest. I'm starting to experiment with d3 and AngularJS for features beyond what LaTeX alone can offer.

Re: Ask HN: Making extra income with books

#40

Post by michael_nielsen »

thirdtruck wrote: post #35
michael_nielsen wrote: post #19

I'm currently working on my third book, a book about neural networks and deep learning. Here's the first chapter: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html It'll be free online once complete, but I raised money with an Indiegogo campaign (about 10k). I'm self-publishing, in part because I wanted full control over the book. This gives me the ability to experiment with in-text videos, and with other tricks. F…

Would you have any resources to recommend in regards to using LaTeX? I work with plain-text source as my default (Markdown, etc.), but haven't used LaTeX specifically.

I use a pretty vanilla LaTeX setup - edit in emacs, display using Yap, and version control with Git and (sometimes) Github. I use the MikTeX distribution for Windows, but use few advanced features - for me, LaTeX is pretty good out of the box.
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