The Economics of Writing a Technical Book • Hacker News Board

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#61

Post by osteele » Mon, May 07, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #19

BrentOzar wrote: post #16

My experience in writing a technical book 8 years ago was the same: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/01/the-economics-of-w... I made more money from Amazon affiliate fees linking to our book than I did the actual book. Way more. If you’re out to make money short term, you’re better off writing book reviews then books. Having said that, the book gave me some credibility with clients for a couple of years when I…

You would be surprised. Even having the wherewithal to put together the content, put up a site and publish is a huge differentiator. 99% of the people you're competing with in any given niche aren't willing to put in even that much effort.

As a former hiring manager, I weighted highly any evidence of an ability to sustain work on projects and bring them to completion (which could be demonstrated on technical and non-technical projects); and evidence of actual interest in technology beyond that it pays the rent (which evidence was more typically a software project, but could be writing or speaking).

Beyond these attributes as proxy measures for job-related abilities, having someone like this around can also help attract and retain other quality engineers — so long as the side hustle doesn't displace the work responsibilities (unless the job is re-cast such that those coincide).

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#62

Post by JustinGarrison » Mon, May 07, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #41

JustinGarrison wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

author here From what I hear from other O'Reilly authors my experience was more negative than most. We got very little support from our editors because of various situations (job change, maternity leave, etc.) If I tried to self-publish my first book it would have never happened. I feel like there's too much to figure out I'd spend a year yak shaving and never produce a book. O'Reilly helped me focus on writing and m…

Thanks, I do see that there's value in having a "turn-key" proven process like O'Reilly's. Yak-shaving might be the stage I'm in now :) Did you have any technical diagrams in the book? If I were to write a book, I would want some, but I'm not sure if I should invest the time to make them myself. I imagine that most publishers can help with that.

Yes, there were a few diagrams. We gave rough sketches and descriptions of what we wanted an they had someone create the diagrams for us.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#63

Post by JustinGarrison » Mon, May 07, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

millerm wrote: post #57

Wow, I must say that was one of the most informative articles I have ever read about the topic. I've known a few technical book authors but none have given such an awesome breakdown of the process. Thank you!

I'm glad you liked it. I wanted to write down all the information I wish I had a year ago before I started writing the book.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#64

Post by jedberg » Mon, May 07, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

JustinGarrison wrote: post #8

maerF0x0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume that this effect will bring 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more money over his career if correctly capitalized on.

author here Do you have examples on how you would correctly capitalize on this expertise? I put some things that have happened since writing the book in the outcomes section but so far they have all been free speaking engagements.

The free speaking engagements is the first step. After you do enough of those, you will get invited to international and big name conferences as a keynote speaker (if you're good at it).

At that point, hiring managers will start contacting you about new jobs with big name companies, for big time salaries. That is where you get the leverage. You'll also start getting offers for paid speaking gigs for both public and private talks. The private talks are nice because they pay well and you almost always walk out with a gift and a job offer.

I never finished the book I started because the publisher pulled the contract when 12 (yes 12) books on the subject came out in the same month.

But I did all those other steps and it worked out pretty good for me.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#65

Post by antirez » Mon, May 07, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

TLDR: Unless you are dying to have the O'Reilly animal in your book cover, go self-publishing or alike, and earn some real money. The OP doing earning-per-hour math on the task of writing a book is very very odd. You write a book investing what you learned in a life or in many years at least, the amount of time to write it is not a meaningful metric.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#66

Post by chubot » Mon, May 07, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #65

TLDR: Unless you are dying to have the O'Reilly animal in your book cover, go self-publishing or alike, and earn some real money. The OP doing earning-per-hour math on the task of writing a book is very very odd. You write a book investing what you learned in a life or in many years at least, the amount of time to write it is not a meaningful metric.

Hm I think you might be misunderstanding what kind of book we're talking about.

I think it's helpful to divide computer books into 2 categories: those with a short shelf-life and those with a long shelf-life.

Most (all?) O'Reilly books are in the former category. They probably sell 90% of their volume in the first couple years (at least one comment in this thread said something like that).

How many copies a year do you think jQuery books are selling right now? Especially if they haven't been updated since 2009? Are publishers even asking for updates for those books?

jQuery was extraordinarily popular and a real innovation -- probably more popular in relative terms than Angular is now.

So time spent writing it probably matters. It probably makes sense to get the book out when the technology is on its upswing, which may only be a window of a few years. Especially with frameworks, less so for languages like Python or C.

I think this is fundamental to the subject of programming. On the other hand, computer science is knowledge that lasts longer. I think it's justified to spend more time on a computer science book, but perhaps not a programming book. Of course many books are a mix of both.

I have several old programming books, like "Programming Pearls", "The Awk Programming Language", Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. Although I have to say that I have no problem finding those books used, so I don't need to buy new copies.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#67

Post by jeffwass » Mon, May 07, 2018, 9:58 PM UTC

jashmenn wrote: post #13

We've published several books, and the author for our latest Vue book earned $20k on the opening weekend. The economics change completely if you self-publish or publish with a smaller firm that has marketing abilities (and better royalty rates). Self publishing is awesome because you keep all the money, but it takes years to build an audience. Honestly, writing the manuscript is the easy part. Building an audience, m…

Have you done any fiction? Or exclusively technical books?

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#68

Post by fusiongyro » Mon, May 07, 2018, 10:15 PM UTC

xx_alpha_xx wrote: post #59

Author here of a technical book published with Packt several years ago. I had the first mover advantage as the only book of significance covering a Java library that was (and is) very widely used. Total page count was ~350-400. It took me approximately 600-800 hours of research, authoring, editing, and final to complete the book. I had a full-time job and so spent about 6-9 months of nights and weekends. I actually h…

I had the same experience, scaled down by a factor of 10 (it was a quick start book).

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#69

Post by wink » Mon, May 07, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

I once did a technical review for one of those small O'Reilly books (the German ones went for 10-15 EUR) - it was a lot of fun. I was paid in store credit, not cash, but it was a good deal because I did it mostly for the experience and then enjoyed some reading material. Sadly I've no clue how much the author made and if it was worth it financially.

That said, just the thought of having to write a book makes me want to run away screaming. Producing my diploma thesis was the least enjoyable part of all the years of school and university. I'm absolutely ok with writing technical documentation for my dayjob, but this rigid form with a threshold of pages to reach... bah

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#70

Post by jurassic » Mon, May 07, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #45

syedkarim wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1000/day is $125/hour, which is a standard hourly rate for software developers. I would expect authorhood/extreme-subject-matter-expert to yield at least a 2x premium.

> a standard hourly rate for software developers Maybe in SF or NYC, but even then I don't think $125/hr or $260K/year at 40 hours/week is "standard" even there.

I know of at least one consulting shop that bills corporate clients $250/hr for mostly general software development in SF. The employees only see about ~1/3 of that amount. As a bonafide expert with a significant addressable market (expertise isn’t valuable unless you’re solving problems people have) and a knack for self promotion, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear $500/hr in SF/NY. It really depends on who your clients are and what kind of track record you’ve got to point to.