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The economics of writing technical books
41–50 of 97 posts
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
It’s more like writing technical books at least somewhat on the side help enable that decent SW Engineer salary or tech professional more broadly.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#43Is 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.
I'm all about scrolls and slates. As shocking as it may seem, you won't learn philosophy from a printing press.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#44It would seem like the real $ in in Substack. Lots of writers making >$50k year of passive, recurring income to write maybe one or two articles a month. Good work if you can get it, compared to writing a full-blown technical book and earning less.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#45I'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:…
Write a book to build credibility and opportunities, not the money.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#46Pretty good article.
Publishing anything these days is a long tail game. Outliers make $.
If you want to make money from a book, you need to promote it, self published or not.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#47Earlier 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.
I'm curious about using typst for printed technical books.
What was the experience like? What features is it missing?
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#48Yes, 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.
Lots of influencers out there claiming that anyone can follow their outlier performance. Super annoying but gets eyeballs (at least on LinkedIn).
I've been writing books for over 10 years (have published over a dozen). If you keep at it, there is good money to be made. Because you learn how to market and treat it like a business.
I now make more from my books than I make when I was in industry. But it took a long time. And a lot of work.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#49I wrote and contributed to several programming books, back in the glory days when your local bookstore had shelves of 1500 page tomes on programming topics. It really is true that you didn't do it for the money - up to six months work for a couple of £k up front and then meager royalties if it sold. ISTR that in my case 6k sold was when the royalties kicked in.
I did it mainly because I was starting up as a consultant and trainer, and having your name and picture on a book was a huge plus. A second benefit was that you learn a lot when writing a book; not just about the dark corners of the topic, but also about long form writing and how to express yourself.
But publishers, though... I'll just say that if I was going to do another book I'd try self-publishing, make more from my labour, and save myself a lot of hassle.
Re: The economics of writing technical books
#50I'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 ratio is fairly useful in roughly apples to apples comparisons, e.g. investment opportunities, and basically useless when it’s applied to broadly to human endeavours. Mostly because people are a) not economically rational in any pure sense and b) not primarily motivated by financial factors.