Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The economics of writing technical books

architectelevator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#81

Post by BlueTemplar »

doe_eyes wrote: post #54
WoodenChair wrote: post #12

I'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:…

Right. That was my takeaway too. Some of the examples of success stories he gives aren't technical at all - they're business books. It would be absolutely exceptional for a software engineering book to sell 100k copies. If you're writing about a specific technology, selling a thousand would be a pretty typical result. And this happens over the course of years. There's just no money in this. There is a small market fo…

Yeah, "technical" here seems to mean "computer-related" - where are the other examples like, say, car repair, housebuilding, or "agriculture for dummies" ? (Yeah, I know, these might involve computers too these days, but you get my gist.)

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#82

Post by WillAdams »

alberth wrote: post #6

Slight OT: can anyone recommend websites that have good technical documentation? What I mean by “good”, is the design & layout of the technical documentation is easy to consume and visually appealing. (I’m revamping my customer facing tech reference docs and wanting have a visually appealing doc but not so much visually appeal it becomes distracting)

The Gitbook layout seems a workable baseline --- the free level is moderately customizable --- I use it for:

https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d

The paid option includes an export to PDF which is okay for a quick print or free PDF to put on a tablet, but would need a lot of work to make a book.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#83

Post by codetrotter »

elric wrote: post #67
WoodenChair wrote: post #12

I'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:…

> as the market gets flooded with LLM-generated garbage That's already happening, and getting published. Recently read an awful tech book that was obviously generated by an LLM, it was so bad that I reached out to the publisher, who assured me that this was just the author's style, and that they promised no LLMs were involved. All lies, of course. Apparently publishing awful books can somehow generate revenue.

Before LLMs became widespread it was already a bit risky to buy technical books, with some books on Amazon being nothing more than a collection of vaguely related Wikipedia articles collected into a “book”.

And even without that, there are publishers like PacktPub which had a lot of poor quality hand written books. I know because I signed up for this thing where they were giving away a new book every day, and a lot of those books were just so bad. There were some gems in there too, hence why I kept looking at those free books. But I’d say 85 to 90% or more were just not worth even trying to read.

I remain hopeful though that even in the face of LLM generated garbage, quality publishers like O’Reilly and Manning will keep the bar high for what they publish.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#84

Post by rebeccaskinner »

danielovichdk wrote: post #74
rebeccaskinner wrote: post #60

I think this is a fairly accurate article, although I think it overlooks the indirect benefits of writing a book. My book, Effective Haskell ( https://pragprog.com/titles/rshaskell/effective-haskell/ ), is a pretty well reviewed book on a fairly niche technology. It's been in print for about a year, and was in beta for around 6 months before that. I'd estimate I spent around 4,500 hours over 5 years writing my book a…

As a person, you, having written a book on FP, would you consider this book an okay starting point for a programmer, me, with very little FP knowledge ? Kudos for spending so many years on this, that's very inspiring.

Yeah, my goal with the book was to write something accessible to anyone with some programming experience. I don’t assume any FP experience, nor any experience with typed languages. The goal is to help the reader get an intuition for how to think about FP naturally and understand how and why we approach problems in a particular way.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#85

Post by jimnotgym »

IMSAI8080 wrote: post #40
WoodenChair wrote: post #12

I'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…

Whilst a shameless plug is clearly beneath you, feel free to put a link to it in your bio!

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#86

Post by julianeon »

WoodenChair wrote: post #12

I'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 always want to put an asterisk by "not to make money" when I see this topic being discussed. I think you can write a technical book to make money, but the monetization path is not "by selling books." It's "make money by selling a few books, which then establishes your credentials, which opens the way to speaking gigs and, from there, to the actual money: consulting jobs."

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#87

Post by WalterBright »

onlytime wrote: post #73
WalterBright wrote: post #58

The prospects for making money selling as an artist (author, painter, athlete, musician, actor) are so poor why do they care so much about copyright law? The route to riches for, say, a musician is to become famous and charge for the coliseum seats to hear him play. To become famous doesn't it make more sense to give the music away? Being famous means you get high consulting rates, get paid for personal appearances,…

I am anti-copyright, but I think you're considering this through the lens of a computer scientist/rocket engineer instead of someone who's had to work a worthless desk job or wait tables or paint houses. As someone who recently (and probably unsustainably) got out of the cycle of worthless jobs and knows a handful of musicians, here's my perspective: Indie (and indie label) musicians can actually do fairly well with…

I'm surprised they can even reach $800/mo.

But there are multiple other avenues for revenue. One can sell merchandise, such as the ever-popular band t-shirt. And there are still many who will want to buy an official cassette rather than just download a song. There are also paid gigs - a live performance is not replaceable with a download. One can livestream a performance, and get paid for the ad placements.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#88

Post by TheRealPomax »

elric wrote: post #71
TheRealPomax wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped tracking how many books I'd sold once my POD publisher was sending me monthly order reports that numbered in the ten. Not tens. Just ten.

I guess that means printing on demand was the way to go here. Out of interest, are you willing to share the name of the publisher? And how was the print quality?

Lightning Source, now part of Ingram. Wouldn't recommend them for working with you to get your book on shelves, and this was before POD really took off so I'm sure there's better alternatives these days. The print quality was top notch though.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#89

Post by lofaszvanitt »

beej71 wrote: post #9

On that note, you can just do it for the good of the world. A lot of us have high-paying day jobs that can support us and good writing can be done on the side. Benefits include not needing to hit some page count (so you can be concise), and bug reports from the community. I don't look down at people who make money from books at all. I admire all writers and editors. (Some publishers can go f themselves, though. :) Bu…

Nah, people should pay, at least a minimum amount for others's work. Look at open source, it's a mess, exactly because of the nonexisting payment layer. And what they used open source code? To bootstrap llms, for free.

Re: The economics of writing technical books

#90

Post by jdriselvato »

at_a_remove wrote: post #65
jdriselvato wrote: post #35

In 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…

This has been in my "to buy" for a while. I am decent with ffmpeg but I could always learn more.

The ebook (.epub or pdf) is for free on the GitHub: https://github.com/jdriselvato/FFmpeg-For-Beginners-Ebook/tr...
Post reply on HN