[HN Gopher] Writing a book for O'Reilly
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Writing a book for O'Reilly
Author : daolf
Score : 107 points
Date : 2022-05-04 14:08 UTC (8 hours ago)
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| reuven wrote:
| I've had a fantastic time writing books (Python Workout and
| Pandas Workout) for Manning. They do great work, and are
| incredibly patient with me. They have helped to make my books far
| better than they otherwise would have been. I have no doubt that
| O'Reilly does a similarly good job. (I don't publish with
| O'Reilly, but I do teach for them online, and have been
| impressed.)
|
| That said: Writing a book is a long slog. It's hard and
| frustrating. And at the end of the process, you have an amazing
| feeling and some money -- definitely less than you would have
| gotten if you had done consulting during that time, though.
|
| I do corporate Python training. Do companies hire me because I've
| written books? Not really. But it definitely adds to my
| credibility.
|
| At the end of the day, I write because I enjoy explaining and
| teaching, knowing I'm helping people all over the world, and
| seeing my name on a book cover. If you're doing it for the money,
| you're almost certainly going to be disappointed. Knowing that
| I'm working with great professionals who share my goals and want
| to create the best possible product adds to my motivation.
| xrd wrote:
| John Resig (inventor of Jquery) has written books across a
| variety of publishers. He has also written extensively about how
| he fared financially. These are worthy counter points to the
| discussions here about "only 10%."
|
| https://johnresig.com/blog/programming-book-profits/
|
| https://css-tricks.com/so-you-want-to-self-publish-books-and...
|
| TL;DR: for a person as Internet famous as John, discoverability
| and getting a full click on the "buy" button are still very hard
| problems.
| duffpkg wrote:
| Author of "Hacking Healthcare" here. Myself and Fred were able to
| contribute to the discussions on our cover selection. I suspect
| some animals are probably much more in demand than others. Our
| editor was Andy Oram and he was outstanding. He is no longer with
| O'Reilly unfortunately.
|
| Having worked with different publishers in different contexts,
| 90% of your experience will be as a result of your relationship
| with your editor.
|
| I get asked sometimes by new authors, should I write for X or Y
| or Z. My answer is to always try and see who your editor will be
| and how well you think you can work with them.
| sathyabhat wrote:
| I've written couple of books for a publisher (Practical Docker
| with Python - first & second editions - published by Apress) as
| well a co-authored a self published book - The CDK Book.
|
| Apress has similar royalty tiers (10 to 20% of revenue, based on
| books sold) and I did get decent amount of copy edit support.
|
| With the co-authorship, despite being four of us, some things
| slipped through the cracks. That said, with self publishing we
| were able to get it corrected and shipped - we maintain/ed bug
| reports, feedback in GitHub issues, and even the book build
| process is done using GitHub actions.
|
| As I said elsewhere, the monetary aspect usually isn't the goal,
| you're far likely to spend more money in working on the book than
| recover it but it does give a nice boost if you wish to go the
| consulting route in terms of establishing authority/credibility.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| They aren't always great books. They're better now, but I
| remember over 25 years ago I bought "DNS & BIND" (Bat Book). I
| had to read the whole thing cover-to-cover three times before it
| began to make sense. It was so full of forward references that I
| just couldn't comprehend it, and I'm no stranger to technical
| content.
|
| The later edition is better.
| jnovek wrote:
| This is very interesting to me.
|
| I also (tried) to learn BIND via the bat book many years ago. I
| found it very hard to follow, and I was still early in my
| career so I just assumed that BIND was over my head and gave
| up.
|
| To this day, DNS is a very aggravating topic for me. I wonder
| if much of that is due to the bad experience I had when I first
| tried to learn about it?
| mhitza wrote:
| I used to love O'Reilly books, many years ago, and in my
| experience cookbooks and pocket reference guides were always a
| clear skip.
|
| But nowadays I thought they've started distancing themselves
| from book publishing, considering that they don't have an
| obvious link to books on their homepage. They've been trying to
| position themselves as a learning platform for some time now.
| mlengineerio wrote:
| I'm doing both.
|
| - I published my first book after 8 months of intense writing and
| editing. I wrote everything from scratch. For the format, I first
| started with markdown and converted to pdf. I later realized the
| latex formula is not well supported so I rewrote in Latex. I
| outsourced other tasks on fiverr: proofreading & grammar checking
| and editing (about $180), latex touch-up and restructure about
| $100, book cover $100. I self-published on Amazon and got 60%
| royalty. It's too early to say but I wouldn't be surprised if I
| can get 12k for the first year. In terms of time spent, I would
| probably better off do something else for better ROI.
|
| - I'm working on another book with Packt. They contacted me and
| the royalty is slightly higher (16%). They tend to push authors
| to meet deadlines etc. I still have no idea who the editors are
| and their background.
|
| So if you're passionate about something and you already have
| followers, you'd be better off with self-publishing.
|
| And here is the book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09YQWX59Z
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > proofreading & grammar checking and editing (about $180),
| latex touch-up and restructure about $100, book cover $100.
|
| It sounds suprisingly cheap
| jimmysong wrote:
| I wrote Programming Bitcoin for O'Reilly and it was published 3
| years ago. Some observations:
|
| * You won't make that much money directly, but I have probably
| made a good amount indirectly. The credibility from having
| published an O'Reilly book is not to be underestimated.
|
| * I got the animal I wanted (honey badger) by asking for it. I
| did justify the ask by showing my editor the Bitcoin honeybadger
| memes.
|
| * The book writing process was a grind. Because my book was so
| focused on programming exercises, I wrote my own suite of testing
| tools to make sure everything was consistent. It felt more like a
| software engineering project than a bunch of blog posts.
|
| * I have since introduced more people to my intake editor and
| they've published their own O'Reilly books.
|
| * I don't get much of a discount on my own book. I just buy them
| through Amazon.
|
| * They give you a framed picture of your cover when your book
| publishes.
| wackget wrote:
| Only 10% royalties? Seriously? Seriously?!
|
| That is _insanely_ low. Like, "why would anyone even remotely
| consider publishing with O'Reilly" low. Even if they have a large
| audience reach, 10% should be rejected out of principle.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Sure having a book published by O'Reilly is a good brag point
| on a resume. I wonder what other IT book publisher could offer
| similar (obviously smaller, but still) level of recognition at
| higher royalty rate.
|
| No Starch Press maybe?
| twox2 wrote:
| No Starch gives options for authors as far as
| advance/residual. Still not lucrative, but I think they have
| a strong brand and it's probably a good career move.
| tibbon wrote:
| Not all publishers do rates this low.
|
| Lost Art Press specializes in fairly niche woodworking content.
| All authors get the same 50/50 profit split deal. Their books
| are printed with great care and quality, and the content is
| some of the best woodworking content available.
|
| https://lostartpress.com/pages/about-us
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| Also, you can get a free PDF copy of The Anarchist's
| Workbench: https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/07/AWB...
|
| (I liked it so much that I ended up buying physical copies of
| all 3 books in the Anarcist's series)
| dhosek wrote:
| Of course that's 50/50 of the _profits_ vs 10% of the cover
| price.
|
| Bookstores pay 60% of the cover price to the distributor who
| typically pays around 50% to the publisher.
|
| Then there's the cost of actually producing the book. And
| presumably things like editing, etc. are considered costs and
| not part of the publisher's split. In the end, that 50/50
| split probably comes out pretty close to 10% for the author.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This is the going rate. I beasted MIT up to 12%. Same for
| Routledge. Really famous and prolific authors can make 15% if
| they're pushy.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| redwall_hp wrote:
| That's about normal for the publishing industry. 10-15% for
| hardcovers and 7-10% for paperbacks. It's also normal to be
| paid an advance against the royalties, so you may not even see
| any royalty checks if the book doesn't sell enough.
|
| Here are model terms from the Author's Guild:
| https://go.authorsguild.org/contract_sections/5
|
| Musicians are paid around 10% by labels as well.
| amelius wrote:
| But does it generate a better income than e.g. working a dayjob
| in IT?
|
| Did anyone ever get rich by writing a technical book?
| sathyabhat wrote:
| Rich is relative - I've written two books for a publisher and
| a co-authorship of a self-published book. In both cases, it
| was nowhere enough to recover the time spent on it. However,
| seeing the sales figures, seeing your work cited in
| publications and the reactions you get from people when they
| say "Oh _you_ wrote that? " - that is another feeling by
| itself.
|
| You have to remember that a lot of these books are written as
| groundwork for future plans - far easier to establish
| credentials saying "yeah I've written that book, you may have
| heard of it".
| bartvk wrote:
| If I remember correctly, such percentages are the reason that
| Andy and Dave started PragProg press. They quote "up to 50%":
|
| https://pragprog.com/publish-with-us/
| obiefernandez wrote:
| Prag offers 50% of profit versus 10-20% of gross revenue
| shared by traditional publishing houses. It's often a little
| more money, but not as big a difference as they want you to
| believe.
|
| Leanpub is a much better option these days in my opinion.
| ssttoo wrote:
| Motivation for writing is not money. Making a living (in the
| US) writing technical books is highly unlikely. 10% is a nice
| surprise "mailbox money", not something you depend on.
|
| Whatever the motivation, you want to best product you can
| deliver, right? That's where a professional publisher comes in.
| O'Reilly is best of the three publishers I've worked with. My
| editors were great, they tighten the prose so much and I
| learned a lot about writing along the way.
| ssttoo wrote:
| Oh, one more thing - translations. I get extra money when the
| book rights are sold for translation. And seeing your book in
| a different language is a unique feeling.
| andi999 wrote:
| 10% of what? Endsales price? Not too bad.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Or you can keep 100% of your own self publication monies. If
| 10% of whatever you think O'Reilly can get you is more it might
| be a reasonable deal?
| Finnucane wrote:
| Out of which you pay for editing, copyediting, proofreading,
| typesetting, printing, warehousing, distribution, promotion.
|
| You will be doing pretty well if you still have 10% left
| after that.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, you do pretty much need to pay at least something for
| editing and copyediting. (Also possibly at least cover
| design.) But you probably shouldn't be expecting a
| publisher to be doing heavy editing for you either.
|
| As for the others, you also shouldn't be expecting the
| publisher to mail out review copies, arrange book signings,
| etc. Or other promotion that goes beyond just being part of
| the publisher's stable of books. That's going to be on you.
|
| As for the others, with print on demand someone can order a
| book through Amazon. No involvement on your part.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Where I work, we still do all those things, but it's
| academia. POD is pretty high unit cost. Good luck with
| that.
| ghaff wrote:
| The printing cost for a 200 or so page 6"x9" softcover in
| Kindle Direct Publishing with color cover and B&W
| interior is about $4. So if you sell it for $10, you
| collect about 50%.
|
| However, in my case, I give away an eBook. The book is
| mostly on Amazon so physical books can be ordered for a
| book signing at an event. I have it priced just a bit
| above cost.
|
| One key with editing is that you need someone willing to
| put in the time to do a careful job. In my experience,
| asking a co-worker tends not to work well. About the only
| time I get carefully edited (mostly copyediting) is when
| I'm actually working with an editor.
| tptacek wrote:
| The economics of writing a technical book for a publisher are
| very poor, even with better royalty rates. There's an adverse
| selection problem: many of the people most qualified to write a
| book bill out at rates that make sinking time into a book
| project irrational.
|
| It's a reason I take self-published technical books more
| seriously than "major" publisher books; the incentives are
| better lined up. 20 years ago, you could make an argument that
| working with a publisher would get your book on shelves at
| brick and mortar stores. But it's 2022 and to a first
| approximation 0% of technical book readers shop at Barnes and
| Noble.
|
| The other reason you can imagine someone writing a "major"
| publisher book is that they lead a project they want to
| generate attention for. An O'Reilly book about your web
| framework has the benefit of implicitly endorsing the framework
| as something mainstream. That's a valid reason to do it --- for
| the author. But the incentives aren't lined up well for the
| reader!
| ryanklee wrote:
| What are some exemplary self-published technical books that
| you've read?
|
| Are there any platforms that allow for discovery of such
| works?
| tptacek wrote:
| _Mastering Emacs_ seems like a good example. I also feel
| like _Practical Common Lisp_ was self-published before
| Apress published it?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Book Depository allows this in its Advanced Search box.
|
| https://www.bookdepository.com/search/advanced
|
| Enter "Independently Published" for publisher, then
| whatever keyword you want. Using "network" turns up a
| really good one I'm currently working through:
|
| "Beej's Guide to Network Programming: Using Internet
| Sockets"
| Narann wrote:
| I have bought "Patterns in C" on Leanpub and have been
| surprised by the writing.
|
| https://leanpub.com/patternsinc
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| Barnes and Noble (at least, the one near me) stocks No Starch
| Press. I've definitely impulse bought those books there more
| than once.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| > What Animal Will I Get?
|
| > I have no idea, and neither does anyone else. The editing team
| have no say in which animal goes with which book. Aparently
| there's a team somewhere in O'Reilly whose job is to make the
| Animal selection. It'll be determined close to release date -
| some time next year.
|
| 15 years of wondering answered in a single blog post.
| [deleted]
| ssttoo wrote:
| My anecdotal experience: I didn't care for the first book, then
| my kid was doing a school report on a Hawaiian bird and asked
| if I can use that bird on a cover. I asked O'Reilly and they
| said yes, the animal wasn't taken. I guess chances are higher
| when the animal is more obscure.
| OReillyAuthor wrote:
| O'Reilly Author here on a throwaway account.
|
| This is how it works currently due to the volume of manuscripts
| they are working on at any given time.
|
| My editor told me that you used to be able to ask or try to
| make a case for a specific animal.
|
| If you are writing a book about something that has an official
| animal or something, I am sure you can have some sway, but for
| the long tail of titles, you get one assigned randomly at some
| point.
|
| If you are planning to publish a book, they are great to work
| with since they work with more engineer authors than other
| publishers may have experience with. A big part of it are the
| editors you work with there.
| gnulinux wrote:
| > If you are writing a book about something that has an
| official animal or something, I am sure you can have some
| sway, but for the long tail of titles, you get one assigned
| randomly at some point.
|
| Wouldn't that potentially be a copyright violation? E.g.
| using elephant for PHP could be seen as trying to copy PHP's
| logo? [1] (Not a lawyer, this is just a question)
|
| [1] This is likely a terrible example, as I don't think
| elephant is PHP's official logo, just an associated mascot
| like Java's Duke? Still... I don't know if this can be
| copyrighted.
| snapetom wrote:
| This would be a trademark, not copyright.
|
| And assuming PHP trademarked it's elephant, it has to be
| _THE_ PHP elephant to be a violation, not an O 'Reilly
| drawing elephant. Duke is a bad example, too because
| there's not real Duke to make a drawing of.
| macksd wrote:
| Incidentally, an elephant was used in their first big
| Hadoop book (and I would find it hard to believe that was
| coincidence): https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hadoop-
| the-definitive/9.... There's a Hadoop-the-elephant logo
| that's trademarked by Apache, but elephant puns and even
| other drawings of yellow elephants abound in that
| community, and I'm not sure that's the kind of thing that
| trademark law could be enforced against even if the ASF
| wanted to.
| Bostonian wrote:
| If you want to propose a book to O'Reilly, who do you contact?
| MarcScott wrote:
| Wow, that process seems great.
|
| I wrote a kids programming book for Bloomsbury and it was a
| nightmare. I wrote in org-mode, converted to docx and then sent
| off the copy. It was then commented on in Word, which I didn't
| own, so I had a weird libre-office back to org-mode workflow that
| was just painful. Then proofs were sent through as PDFs that
| inevitable messed up simple things like indentation, which I then
| had to fix, via comments on the PDFs.
|
| Never again.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > I wrote in org-mode, converted to docx and then sent off the
| copy
|
| Did you expect them to redline it in something other than word
| if you sent a docx file?
|
| All traditional (fiction/non-fiction) book publishing houses
| will use Word redlining. It is the defacto standard in the
| industry. Traditional publishing has 0 interest in switching to
| new software as far as I know.
|
| Technical book publishers, and some university presses, will
| allow you a lot more leeway, but even some of those will
| ultimately redline on Word.
| paulpauper wrote:
| a lot of work and not much $ lol
|
| I guess it's good for building one's brand though, probably
| helping to get talks and consulting gigs.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Listen kid, you probably think lots of crazy stuff goes on in
| there, but this is just a place of business.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjlDDZkGONs
| sithlord wrote:
| why would anyone write a book for o'reily (or anyone) for such
| low royalties?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Nobody is getting rich off writing a tech book. At some point a
| 10% or 50% royalty on a niche book for some random technology
| doesn't really matter.
|
| People author these books to increase the value of their
| personal "brand" or out of a passion for whatever technology
| they write about. If they are hoping to get rich or get a
| "livable" wage... they are going to be very disappointed.
| julianeon wrote:
| It's prestigious, and arguably the value of the prestige is
| worth more than the projected cash.
|
| How much money is there in "Game Programming for Haskell",
| really? You release with O'Reilly and you get 10% or $1,000.
| You self-publish and you make more per sale, much more, but
| make much fewer sales - so, let's say $3,000.
|
| But publishing with O'Reilly, you get accepted on the speaker's
| circuit and start getting asked to do contract work; publishing
| on your own, you don't (as much). It's arguably worth losing
| out on a one-time gain of $2,000 for that.
| ghaff wrote:
| I haven't published with O'Reilly but I have published a
| couple editions of a book with Apress. Yeah, you don't write
| a technical book (or tech-adjacent) book for the money. But
| my observation is that a lot of people seem to be more
| impressed by a book for a known publisher than something you
| do through Kindle Direct Publishing.
|
| I'm not sure that attitude is deserved. There are pros and
| cons with going through a publisher and am very unlikely to
| do it again. (Reputational benefits are pretty irrelevant to
| me at this point.) But no one should go in thinking it's
| about the money.)
| [deleted]
| kingnothing wrote:
| 10% of something is better than 100% of nothing. Same reason
| people raise money for their startups.
| parenthesis wrote:
| There's even a song that says that (Double Exposure - Ten
| Percent).
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