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

The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 151 posts

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#91

Post by megaman22 »

no_wizard wrote: post #89
megaman22 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the context of programming languages and tech stacks, that is an astronomical audience though. I work in a niche where there are two books that have ever been written, by the same author, and there might be a couple thousand people total in the whole world that use this particular SDK. Most technical books appeal to an incredible narrow slice of the already small pie that is software people.

What niche? It’s almost a disservice to your niche not to mention it by name! The books too

Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business development. Michael Greenleaf has written a couple books, and there are maybe a double handful of people blogging about it.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#92

Post by badminton1 »

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…

I don't approve of the "full stack" mindset, or the term. I gave it the benefit of the doubt but I am past that point now.

The idea is that full stack engineers implement features "vertically" by maintaining various parts of a "stack" at the same time.

Sounds good, but often the result is bad. A web frontend is very resilient, whereas backends are the complete opposite. If you apply the same mindset on both it better be a backend mindset:

- what happens if you leak memory in a web page? well, eventually the user will navigate away, and all resources would be freed, making everything fine. You do it on a server? your server will eventually collapse.

- What happens if you don't handle an exception on a webpage? Not a lot. But on a server? many things can happen... you can crash a server process, leak memory, etc.

- Security is similar. Browsers have restrictive defaults whereas servers don't. And the list goes on and on.

This is why "full stack" to me is a red-flag. Full stack to me equates "competent at front end, has some knowledge about servers but requires supervision".

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#93

Post by struppi »

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…

    Self publishing is awesome because you keep all the money, but it takes years to build an audience.
I can totally relate to that. Some things about self-publishing were much easier than others. Building an audience is hardest so far. Experimented with Google and Facebook ads, stopped because it was too expensive.

Right now, I am only doing content (blog posts, ...) and Twitter. Sales are low, but I am not losing money anymore ;)

For my React-Book, that's OK. But with my other book about "Agile Anti-Patterns", I invested some money in Illustrations and other stuff: https://www.quickglance.at/agile_antipatterns.html So it would be nice to get that money back some time ;)

    Email marketing is more powerful in this space than you might believe. Even today.
I stopped that, too, because it did not work too well for me. And also there are quite a few legal implication when you do that in my country (always have been, not necessarily GDPR related).

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#94

Post by struppi »

slothario wrote: post #21
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…

That's the main reason I would write a book: to tell people that I wrote a book. You can literally say, "I wrote the book on that."

You are right, that's a very positive effect. But it was not my main reason.

Also, don't do it for the money. Some people do quite well with books, but for me, at least, it's more of a prestige thing so far.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#95

Post by vesak »

darkkindness wrote: post #36
sytelus wrote: post #31

TLDR; the books on specific tech is lighly sold, gets out of date fast and publishers are ripping off authors by throwing them 10% revenue share. Because we co-authored the book we each got 5% of revenue for physical books and 12.5% for ebooks and digital access (10% and 25% for individual authors). So far I have received $539 over 5 months. On average, the book has sold 222 copies per month which is greatly skewed b…

Isn't the typical rate for royalties around 10%? Given that it's 'specific tech' that is not likely to be sold as much, 10% is pretty good.

No, more like 15-20%. If you're getting 10%, you're being ripped off.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#96

Post by arthev »

fusiongyro wrote: post #68
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).

The level of depth of knowledge and research was at least 0.5x that of your day job? :)

Genuinely curious about how hard the book was to write/research.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#97

Post by flaviocopes »

mkl wrote: post #82
JustinGarrison wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's phenomenal! I agree that building an audience is the hardest part and it's what traditional publishers bring to the table for most people. Just last week I saw someone self-publish some artwork in an area they have an audience and they made $4000 in a day. The only marketing they did was a single tweet. I don't think most individuals would be able to gain this level of authority without years of work and spend…

> Just last week I saw someone self-publish some artwork in an area they have an audience and they made $4000 in a day. Link? I've been wondering about the current economics of (new) art lately.

That must be Julia Evans, she's awesome! https://twitter.com/b0rk

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#98

Post by jongold »

egonschiele wrote: post #83

I've written a book with Manning (Grokking Algorithms) and had a good editor experience: I had 2 editors that stayed with me through the whole book. They gave me a ton of great advice -- I even asked one of them if they would like co-author credit, it was that good. Manning regularly scheduled technical reviews and readability reviews, and I got a lot of comments from those as well. I have also only written one book…

I _love_ that book so much - thank you!

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#99

Post by Cthulhu_ »

macintux wrote: post #15
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…

Well, the other reason $400k in revenue was possible: you were writing about a popular JavaScript framework. There aren't many topics with such a wide audience.

Can confirm, the subject matter is really important. I accidentally wrote the most-read blog post on our company blog, and this might be my humility / impostor syndrome speaking but, it wasn't due to the content as much, but because it was using the right keywords in the title at the right time.

Re: The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

#100

Post by anothergoogler »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #24

I authored and co-authored some books. I wrote a book on Akka for Packt that has made maybe 5k. Packt is out of India and they have some different standards around topics and contents, but the experience wasn't much different from O'Reilly overall. And there was a mini book for O'Reilly that netted a couple k, mostly because of later sponsorship. Writing a book is a really tough experience. I found it taxing. It's in…

> Packt is out of India and they have some different standards around topics and content

That they do. I pretty much won't buy a Packt book anymore, burned too many times. And it's shameful the way they astroturf Amazon reviews.

Post reply on HN