[HN Gopher] Programming Book Profits (2008)
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Programming Book Profits (2008)
Author : max_
Score : 68 points
Date : 2021-02-24 06:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (johnresig.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnresig.com)
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| I feel bad that writers of quality programming books don't get
| paid more for their efforts.
|
| Yet I too am guilty of finding ebooks for free, maybe I'm a
| hypocrite.
|
| The problem with paying for books is its like PS30+ up front
| before you find out if the book is any good or not. And lots of
| programming books are very badly written.
|
| You might make more money by making a series of Youtube videos
| than writing a book?
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| I too have downloaded a lot of e-books, but really have a hard
| time with managing them. Several years ago I decided to
| subscribe to Packt's e-book service, at $10/mo it's a pretty
| safe investment to try out. I honestly found the fact that it
| manages the book for you (favorites, folders, keeps the right
| page amongst multiple devices, history, etc) was pretty much
| worth the price. After the first year I upgraded to
| SafariBooksOnline, which is quite a bit pricier, but has all of
| the Packt, Orieley, and more books. There are still a lot of
| books that suck, or aren't what you're looking for, but you do
| get to look at the whole thing before investing any more money
| or time into it.
| darkpicnic wrote:
| I wish more blog posts were like this. Just really useful, real-
| world information packaged as a set of bullet points. Bravo.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| this chart is missing the benefits of being labelled as as
| subject matter expert in the industry.
| dd82 wrote:
| https://martin.kleppmann.com/2020/09/29/is-book-writing-wort...
|
| Martin Kleppmann, the author behind Designing Data Intensive
| Applications, wrote about his experience as well, and it shows an
| interesting contrast with Resig's experience with digital
| publishing. As you can see in Martin's graph, ebook sales
| starting Sept 2014 were a _major_ part of his royalties due to it
| being available as "early release", and integration with the
| O'Reilly platform increased his exposure, and therefore
| royalties.
|
| Its hard to guage accurately, but it seems O'Reilly + ebook sales
| contributed to about 2/3rds of his overall royalty returns, which
| is a pretty darn good result!
|
| Of course, Kleppmann and Resig are writing about very different
| eras in terms of publishing, but I can't help but wonder if Resig
| would have a different experience if he was able to publish an
| equally relevant work in 2015 vs 2008.
| mamon wrote:
| Tangentially related: there's a guy in Poland running a blog
| about personal finance (i.e. some advice how to save money on
| your bills, or how to start investing in stocks, etc.) Some
| time ago he self-published a book, promoted it through social
| media, and of course through his blog. Later he made a blog
| post about how much money he made on that book. Believe it or
| not, but in 3.5 years, on the limited Polish market (the book
| was in Polish, so no more than 40 million people speaking the
| language worldwide) he grossed $2M in revenue, over $1M after-
| tax profit for about 90k copies sold.
|
| For those of you who speak Polish (or are willing to go with
| Google Translate) here's the link:
|
| https://jakoszczedzacpieniadze.pl/ile-zarobila-ksiazka-finan...
|
| https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=pl&tl=en&u=htt...
| jacques_chester wrote:
| Adding another data point.
|
| I wrote a book[0] (published yesterday!) and, so far, sales are
| about 3:1 digital to print+digital. For me the biggest sales
| figures so far occurred when early access (MEAP) was launched.
|
| [0] https://www.manning.com/books/knative-in-action
| schwinn140 wrote:
| I knew this in loose terms but it's insane to see the revenue
| sharing percentages going to the creator vs. the publisher.
|
| "My contract with the publisher specifies that I get 25% of
| publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing,
| 10% of revenue from print sales, and 5% of revenue from
| translations."
|
| Imagine a world where the creators actually are the primary
| financial beneficiaries and the pipes/infrastructure (aka
| Publishers) are compensated appropriately for their value.
| Without creators, Publishers cannot exist.
| benrbray wrote:
| I can think of at least one bearded individual from Germany
| who would likely agree with you. :)
| spoonjim wrote:
| The thing is, can a publisher more than quadruple your sales?
| I think the top ones can.
| julian_t wrote:
| 5% from translations... ha! I remember getting told by a
| foreign publisher that they were publishing a version in
| their native language. No royalties, they just thought I'd
| like to know. They did, however, send me a free copy, which
| was nice.
| hvs wrote:
| You could always self-publish if you don't think publishers
| provide any value.
| wishinghand wrote:
| I haven't made a book with them, but Newline splits 50% on
| profit.
| jonsen wrote:
| The publisher is gambling. I don't know much about non-
| fiction, but regarding fiction they actually loose on most
| books and win big on a few. Would you think it's better if
| publishers only published if they were really sure it would
| sell?
| munificent wrote:
| _> The publisher is gambling._
|
| The quantity of risk they take on is generally lower in
| non-fiction and has been going down dramatically over the
| past few decades. The publisher/author financial model was
| built for a world where:
|
| - The publisher had to use expensive presses to print and
| bind hundreds of books at a time.
|
| - The publisher had to maintain relationships with
| thousands of independent bookstores and ship boxes of books
| to them using relatively primitive logistics and shipping
| channels.
|
| - Data on consumer demand and sales was hard to get and
| slow to update.
|
| - Typesetting a book required expensive hardware,
| specialized skills, and tons of labor.
|
| - Consumers had little information when choosing what books
| to buy, so a publisher's "brand" was an important and
| valuable signal for quality.
|
| None of this is true any more. Authors are expected to
| produce near copy-ready manuscripts. Desktop publishing
| makes typesetting dramatically easier. Books can be printed
| on demand one at a time near the location where it is sold.
| Shipping today is highly optimized. Bookstores have
| consolidated into a small number of mega-chains, and most
| people are simply buying from Amazon today anyway.
| Consumers have access to reviews and lots of other data to
| make informed choices so couldn't care less what publisher
| logo is on the back of the book.
|
| The fact that royalty rates have not changed to accommodate
| all of this is simply because authors are mostly unaware of
| this and let them get away with it.
| julian_t wrote:
| The publishers definitely take a risk, but back when I was
| involved in this, way before ebooks, the biggest part went
| to the booksellers. IIRC I got about 6% on book sales. If I
| ever do anything like that again, I'll be self-publishing,
| because the contractual shenanigans have left me very wary
| about dealing with publishers.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (a bit):
|
| _Programming Book Profits_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101483 - Jan 2008 (4
| comments)
| impostervt wrote:
| I publish non-fiction books on Amazon KDP, a way to self-publish
| paperback & kindle books without a traditional publisher.
|
| When a customer orders a book, you make 60% of the profit, minus
| the cost to print the book. The cost to print the book varies. My
| books run 30-40k words and cost between $3-4 to print. I sell the
| books between $11 and $14, so I make a few bucks from each book.
| It isn't a lot if you consider the price of the book, but it's
| better than traditional publishers by a LOT, and I don't have to
| print any books ahead of time. My upfront costs are just getting
| the books written and the covers made. Then I pay for ads on
| Amazon as a continuing cost. And I get complete insight into how
| well my books are selling on a day-by-day basis.
|
| I miss out on things a traditional publisher can do, like
| marketing and real in depth book design, but from what I
| understand they don't do much marketing unless you're someone
| famous anyway. I also don't get an advance.
|
| I do keyword research before creating a book, and I've looked at
| technical books, and he's right, they just don't sell very well.
| Maybe they used to, before stack overflow, but they're just not
| worth the investment. If you're thinking of writing one, do it
| only as a resume builder, or to build a community around
| something you love.
| munificent wrote:
| _> I miss out on things a traditional publisher can do, like
| marketing and real in depth book design, but from what I
| understand they don 't do much marketing unless you're someone
| famous anyway._
|
| I've heard the same about marketing and that was my impression
| when I was interacting with O'Reilly and Apress several years
| ago. For technical books today, they expect the author to bring
| the audience.
|
| _> I also don 't get an advance._
|
| Sure, but that's just a small loan. If you're in the economic
| bracket of a typical HN reader, you don't need this.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| Is there a survey with data about what the economic bracket
| for the typical HN is?
| klelatti wrote:
| Thank you for an interesting perspective. Could you say any
| more about how you think about the timing of your book sales -
| are you looking to maximise sales shortly after publication by
| concentrating on subjects that are topical or do you focus on
| sales over a longer period?
| impostervt wrote:
| I tend to focus on long term sales, vs seasonal books. That
| said, the first 30 days after a book launch is critical to
| convincing Amazon that people want your books (or so people
| like me believe, I haven't seen any real data), so I tend to
| run freebies and $0.99 kindle sales, and promotions to email
| lists that cater to people interested in those things. I also
| start off the books at a low price, and raise them as the
| month goes on.
|
| There are other people who focus on "low content" books like
| journals, log books, and children's activity books. They tend
| to more often do seasonal books.
|
| I have done one "topical" book, about a new term that is
| trending on google over the last year, but it basically gets
| no sales. My mistake for not following the formula.
| klelatti wrote:
| Many thanks - that's really interesting.
| jesperlang wrote:
| Interesting quote!
|
| > No one buys eBooks. You'd have to be pretty... special... in
| order to not be able to find a free ebook of Pro JavaScript
| Techniques.
|
| Funny how things changed, today I would prefer the ebook version
| over physical for reading on an eink display. Actually, these
| days I hardly do any kind of reading on a regular light emitting
| display (only coding and video). It's just so much more
| comfortable to read e-ink despite its short comings. Does wonder
| with focus as well. I even started reading short form articles on
| my e-reader after first saving them on Pocket.
| UtahDave wrote:
| Which e-reader do you use?
| jesperlang wrote:
| Kobo Clara HD, has Pocket support!
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| I've only had bad experiences trying e-readers for
| programming/math related content. The text is great, but the
| Kindle does not do a tolerable job mixing in math, images, or
| programming content. Generally any math equation was displayed
| as an image, and the Kindle had no concept of how to keep the
| letters in the image related to the size of the text. Literally
| some books would have just the letter X take up the whole
| screen, while others it was literally invisible.
| CalChris wrote:
| Donald Knuth wrote the criminally under-appreciated _Mathematical
| Writing_ [1] [2] which was the collected lectures from a class at
| Stanford. One of the guest lectures was _Jeffrey Ullman On
| Getting Rich_. In it, he discusses the economics of book writing
| and compares its pay with that of other 'professions'.
|
| [1] https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-
| papers/knuth_mathematic...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydsutR72lsg
| svat wrote:
| Direct link to specifically Ullman's lecture, in context of the
| playlist:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmnQoDjsWDA&list=PLOdeqCXq1t...
|
| Direct links (if your browser/workflow supports it) to the
| transcript of that lecture:
| https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematic...
| or (though it doesn't matter for this lecture) https://www-cs-
| faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/cs1193.pdf...
|
| Takeaways (as of 1987):
|
| - "it takes around a thousand hours of labour to write a book
| [...] All in all, our talented specialist or so-so generalist
| can expect to net maybe $8000 over his book's lifetime of
| perhaps five years."
|
| - "you need to aim for ten thousand domestic sales; say two
| thousand a year for five years. That's 5-10% of the entire
| market in a topic like compilers or operating systems. There's
| nothing off-the-wall about this, provided you find the right
| niche: Let yours be the hardest book on the subject, or the
| easiest."
|
| - If you drive a hard bargain with your publisher, increase
| your royalties, and sales: "your efforts can net you as much as
| [...] say $100 per hour".
|
| (I imagine some of these numbers will no longer be accurate as
| of 2021, and even the nature of the publishing industry has
| changed in perhaps substantial ways...)
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(page generated 2021-02-25 23:02 UTC)