[HN Gopher] The economics of writing technical books
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The economics of writing technical books
Author : raju
Score : 134 points
Date : 2024-06-29 13:26 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (architectelevator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (architectelevator.com)
| Swizec wrote:
| Yes, don't write technical books for the money. But also do! If
| you approach the book as a business venture, there's plenty of
| money to be made.
|
| Here's my recap of making almost $400k over a few years of
| working on books-and-such as a sidebiz alongside a full-time job.
| Not all of it was from books directly, a lot was from
| opportunities that the books unlocked. And that's not even
| counting how the books enabled me to sponsor my own
| visa/greencard to come into USA and unlock oodles of
| opportunities.
|
| The main insight I've learned is that _the book is a product_.
| Write your thing _for someone to benefit from_. What [useful
| thing] will they be able to do after reading your book that they
| weren't able to before? How does it help them get more of what
| they want faster?
|
| https://swizec.com/blog/5-years-of-books-and-courses-or-how-...
|
| Sharing this to encourage, not to brag. We need more insightful
| and useful books out there.
|
| If you're gonna do this, I strongly recommend picking up a copy
| of Write Useful Books first. Wish it existed when I started.
| http://writeusefulbooks.com/
| drzzhan wrote:
| Awesome! I probably won't write book for money but at least I
| want it to be useful.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| How much is this income do you think was a result of your
| following? From here, you look quite established.
|
| My pet peeve is indie dev influencers who tweet "anyone can do
| it" while ignoring their own built up momentum. I don't know
| enough about you to ascertain either way.
| Swizec wrote:
| This is how I got established and built a following :)
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Lots of influencers out there claiming that anyone can follow
| their outlier performance. Super annoying but gets eyeballs
| (at least on LinkedIn).
|
| I've been writing books for over 10 years (have published
| over a dozen). If you keep at it, there is good money to be
| made. Because you learn how to market and treat it like a
| business.
|
| I now make more from my books than I make when I was in
| industry. But it took a long time. And a lot of work.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Writing a technical book is an extremely bad idea that could only
| be pursued by idealistic fools, blow hards and obsessive
| ideologues.
|
| Here's mine:
|
| https://hypermedia.systems
| abathur wrote:
| Thanks for the chuckle :)
|
| Good to see you here--I noticed your manuscript on GH (probably
| sometime last year?) during a ~vanity search because it quotes
| one of my blog posts. (https://hypermedia.systems/tricks-of-
| the-htmx-masters/#html-...)
|
| I went to check on it and noticed that the repo I have starred
| is archived and that there's a new one recently put up. I don't
| see an explanation--can you reflect on or link to anything
| about the update? (Is this a content update, just ~refactoring
| how the book is built, etc.?)
| deniz-a wrote:
| Co-author here. We rewrote the book in Typst. On the
| hypermedia.systems website, the new EPUB ebook release is
| built from the new codebase. I'm working on a blog post with
| details on why we switched and what the process was like. The
| content of the book has not meaningfully changed.
| abathur wrote:
| Thanks :)
|
| Generally curious about new authoring/markup tools and
| systems, so I'll keep an eye out for the post.
|
| (The quoted blog post is part of an effort to explain some
| work I've been doing to single-source documentation and
| output multiple formats while taking advantage of the
| idioms/affordances of each format. I spent quite a bit of
| time reviewing and trying markup systems before deciding
| what I wanted didn't quite exist. Typst wasn't released
| when I did all of that; I'm aware of it but I haven't read
| enough to pull it out of my blind spot.)
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I'm curious about using typst for printed technical books.
|
| What was the experience like? What features is it missing?
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| As the article correctly states, writing a book is a good idea
| for many reasons, but generating income isn't among those.
|
| My personal experience: during the golden days of the technical
| book market, a good 15-20 years ago, writing a chapter would net
| you $1500 (for, like, 2-3 weeks of work, better pay than a
| magazine article that would take approximately the same time but
| pay a bit less) an entire book maybe $25K, but that would take
| you at least 6 months to complete.
|
| Of course, that was just the upon-completion payment, with the
| promise of later royalties if the book did well, but, unless you
| were _very_ lucky, that pretty much never happened.
|
| Still, a payment of $2500-in-todays-dollars for less than a month
| of work isn't entirely bad, and being a published author did have
| its perks for getting consulting gigs.
|
| But these days, "a magazine or book deal that pays actual money"
| just isn't a thing anymore, so, yeah...
| Harmohit wrote:
| I enjoy reading posts like this. Very thorough description. I am
| wondering if someone has insights into how the publishing model
| for more traditional publishers like Wiley and Elsevier work.
| Those guys are selling books for more than $200. Does the author
| get more money from their sales or is it all absorbed by the
| publisher?
| alberth wrote:
| 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)
| henrikeh wrote:
| I think Mathematica's documentation is beyond excellent. Here
| is the documentation for the Flatten function:
|
| https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Flatten.html
|
| Just look at the amount of examples and details for this
| function. It is like that for every function.
| nomilk wrote:
| I haven't used mathematica but look forward to learning it
| one day as an indulgence. I code mostly in R, and it's
| renowned for having some hurdles to jump through in order to
| get a package published on its primary repository (CRAN), but
| what that high standard means is you can download almost any
| library and expect to find extremely well documented
| functions with examples that can be run with minimal (usually
| zero) additional data/dependencies. It's a real treat, and I
| miss it massively when using languages with less rigorous and
| less uniform approaches to documentation.
| beej71 wrote:
| 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. :)
|
| But there is another path available to many of us, one that isn't
| driven by money. Remember the old hacker ethic!
| dinkleberg wrote:
| This does seem like the better path for a lot of people. A good
| article on this is https://sive.rs/balance.
| costco wrote:
| I don't think I'd have the stomach to spend a year writing
| something that I think is really good only for it to end up on
| libgen a couple days later.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| ... and for its contents to be interrogated by users of the LLM
| _du jour_ without you seeing a single cent for your efforts
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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 heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a
| success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one.
| According to this blog, 96% of books (mostly fiction) sell less
| than 5000 copies per year. For technical books, it may be worse.
|
| I've heard that 10k number before. I've also been told by one of
| my publishers that 2k copies is the break even point for them.
| While I've had the fortune of three out of four of my prior books
| selling more than 2k copies (and one selling many, many more), it
| seems that a significant number of traditionally published
| programming books do not. And I'm sure that ratio is even worse
| for self-published books.
|
| In fact, I think the "Reality Check" section of the article is
| not harsh enough. The author cherry-picked some data on very well
| selling technical books, which doesn't make the point well. The
| reality is simple: the vast, vast majority of programming books
| do not sell "well" (let's consider "well" 10,000 copies) and many
| don't even break the 2,000 copy barrier, even from traditional
| publishers.
|
| So, what are the economics of technical book writing? Not good.
| And it's only going to get worse as the market gets flooded with
| LLM-generated garbage.
|
| So, do it because you really want to do it for another reason
| (career, teaching, etc.). Not to make money.
| richrichie wrote:
| I disagree. This is the case for anything entrepreneurial. Vast
| majority of ventures fail. Reward/Risk ratio (in finance we
| call it Sharpe ratio) generally equalises across the spectrum.
| That is there is no free lunch. You can choose an activity that
| has better odds of making money. But you will make leas money
| on average.
| hilux wrote:
| I think you underestimate the cost of writing a well-
| researched book.
|
| Pre-publication, the process consumes lots of time and energy
| and money while generating zero revenue, output, or other
| benefit. Very different from most business ventures.
|
| Source: I have written a book, and have also started my own
| business and have worked for many startups. (VC-backed
| startups pay their employees.)
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| Sharpe ratios are not equal across different opportunities
| for the simple reason that actors are irrational. Many people
| write books even when the expected return is negative, which
| drives down returns for everyone.
| ska wrote:
| Sharpe ratio is fairly useful in roughly apples to apples
| comparisons, e.g. investment opportunities, and basically
| useless when it's applied to broadly to human endeavours.
| Mostly because people are a) not economically rational in any
| pure sense and b) not primarily motivated by financial
| factors.
| gumby wrote:
| I agree that a bookshould be written for its intrinsic value,
| but it's possible to have an extrinsic value as well: even if
| you don't sell many it could be a credibility tool for a
| consulting or ( _shudder_ ) 'influencer' campaign.
| trueismywork wrote:
| How much pay per hour do you think it will make it worthwhile
| to consider the book a success from authors point of view?
|
| I'm thinking of a scenario where people are paid to write the
| book rather than from book sales..
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Probably impossible to get close to a decent SW Engineer
| salary from writing at least in the US
| ghaff wrote:
| It's more like writing technical books at least somewhat on
| the side help enable that decent SW Engineer salary or tech
| professional more broadly.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| 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 to put my words out there and leave something behind in
| the world.
| fire_lake wrote:
| Maybe put the whole text on GitHub?
| paulpauper wrote:
| Write a book to build credibility and opportunities, not the
| money.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I think this is a valuable post for those people here that love
| Z-library and think they should have access to these sorts of
| books for free.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| 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 for
| authors who can crank out passable technical content serially
| for series such as "...for Dummies": if you have ten books
| generating royalties in parallel, it might be worth your time.
| But one or two books? Absolutely not, you'll make more working
| a minimum-wage job.
|
| This doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but it's basically a hobby
| for folks who have something to share, and have a daytime job
| to pay the bills. Plus, yep, the sucky part is that books
| piracy is widespread, and that even people who benefit from
| your writing and have the means to pay are just accustomed to
| sharing bootleg copies for free.
| Zigurd wrote:
| I wrote several books. My first book was terrible but sold very
| well because there was no Stackoverflow, OS platforms did not
| spend enough to support developers, and their documentation
| sucked. None of these are true anymore. Also printed books as a
| medium is in sharp decline. My later books were much better books
| but sold fewer and fewer copies.
|
| Now I do tiktoks on current topics of interest mixed with my
| project management content. That will probably turn into a series
| of YouTube long form video lessons.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| I took the liberty of looking up your books from your Hacker
| News profile. Perhaps they are not all listed there, but the
| most recent one you listed I think is on a much more niche
| topic ("Enterprise Android" as opposed to say your prior title
| "Programming Android") than the prior ones. Even if it's a
| better book, that won't outweigh that there's just a much
| smaller audience.
|
| Personally, I think my first book, 10 years ago, was my best
| book but it sold much worse than my later books because the
| topic was too niche.
|
| Also, there are many, many more programmers now than there were
| before. Maybe they don't read books as much as their
| predecessors did, but to say Stack Overflow and open source
| platforms killed technical book publishing is highly
| inaccurate. I honestly think you're projecting a "you"
| situation to talk about the whole market. Please don't take
| that as an attack, but just as an additional perspective.
| Zigurd wrote:
| My first book _C Programing Techniques for the Macintosh_ was
| pretty niche. For example, it required third-party compilers
| and other tools to do self-hosted development on a 512k Mac.
| But you had to buy it because Apple 's documentation had no
| tutorial content at all, just an API reference.
|
| If you look at Google's documentation of Android now, you
| don't need to supplement it.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > If you look at Google's documentation of Android now, you
| don't need to supplement it.
|
| Which speaks to the lack of need for books in certain
| elements of the Android market, but not to technical
| publishing more generally.
| perlgeek wrote:
| > My later books were much better books but sold fewer and
| fewer copies.
|
| This resonates with me. I've written and published a few books,
| and the one I'm most proud of has sold the last.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/1484232275/ has a 5.0 star rating on
| Amazon (at 20 ratings), and I've gotten lots of positive
| feedback about it via email, chat and in person. The topic is
| just so niche that virtually nobody cares :-)
| bornfreddy wrote:
| (I apologize in advance for offering unsolicited advice)
|
| As someone who is interested in the topic of regexes and
| parsing, Perl in the subject made me... uninterested. I know
| this is a sample of size 1, but maybe splitting the
| principles / theory from the language would make sense?
| CalChris wrote:
| Donald Knuth's _Mathematical Writing_ had a lecture from Jeffrey
| Ullman, _On Getting Rich_.
|
| https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematic...
|
| Things haven't changed much. The absolute numbers are similar and
| discounting for inflation, worse.
| kkukshtel wrote:
| For anyone else interested, I highly recommend reading through
| Rob Fitzpatrick's "Write Useful Books":
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonf...
|
| It isn't about technical books exactly but it does speak mostly
| on how to write recommendable non-fiction, some of which can
| obviously be technical. It's got a lot of practical advice for
| the actual "doing" of the book, and has inspired me to at least
| start dipping my toes in.
| telepathy wrote:
| Is this really how anyone under 60 learns technical information
| in 2024? I realize SWE job posts are down but... this is a
| terrible idea lol
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| As shocking as it may seem, you probably won't learn compiler
| dev from TikTok.
| telepathy wrote:
| I'm all about scrolls and slates. As shocking as it may seem,
| you won't learn philosophy from a printing press.
| djaychela wrote:
| I have written a textbook on using Cubase (a DAW), but including
| all the background that I think you need to be well-rounded
| (music theory, audio concepts, mixing, effects, instruments,
| etc).
|
| It took me 2 years to write, one of which was all my spare time,
| so probably about 9 months to a year's full-time work.
|
| Then I found out no-one bought it! Only pure chance led to it
| being promoted by someone in the industry, maybe 2 years later.
| I've kept it updated (started on Cubase 6, now on Cubase 13), and
| it sells reasonably well; maybe PS400 a month in revenue,
| typically for me. So it's not a big earner, but it pays some of
| my bills, and means it's worth the 2 weeks of work (average) to
| update it each time Cubase releases a new version.
|
| All of this is selling via Amazon, worldwide, print-on-demand.
| Previously on Lulu but they were really just sub-contracting on
| Amazon and while you get less money per copy on Amazon, it out-
| sells Lulu by 3x (and then Lulu discontinued the sizes I was
| using so it was a no-brainer).
|
| I've done another book (which is less of a seller in terms of
| price and numbers), and quite enjoy them, but it's difficult and
| I think it's more a case of "if I have the time spare I can put
| this work in and eventually it will pay me back" - possibly over
| a year or two...
| jdriselvato wrote:
| 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 fact that every month I'll get a KDP
| payout email and it feels more gratifying than my own FAANG+
| paycheck for some reason.
|
| [0] https://github.com/jdriselvato/FFmpeg-For-Beginners-Ebook [1]
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087GYV15Y/
| sameoldtune wrote:
| > for some reason
|
| Because it was entirely^ the fruits of your own labor!
|
| ^well everything is connected, I guess you didn't write ffmpeg
| nor are you responsible for the creation of video encoding or
| camera technology, but I'll go back to splitting my own hairs
| paulpauper wrote:
| It would seem like the real $ in in Substack. Lots of writers
| making >$50k year of passive, recurring income to write maybe one
| or two articles a month. Good work if you can get it, compared to
| writing a full-blown technical book and earning less.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Pretty good article.
|
| Publishing anything these days is a long tail game. Outliers make
| $.
|
| If you want to make money from a book, you need to promote it,
| self published or not.
| julian_t wrote:
| I wrote and contributed to several programming books, back in the
| glory days when your local bookstore had shelves of 1500 page
| tomes on programming topics. It really is true that you didn't do
| it for the money - up to six months work for a couple of PSk up
| front and then meager royalties if it sold. ISTR that in my case
| 6k sold was when the royalties kicked in.
|
| I did it mainly because I was starting up as a consultant and
| trainer, and having your name and picture on a book was a huge
| plus. A second benefit was that you learn a lot when writing a
| book; not just about the dark corners of the topic, but also
| about long form writing and how to express yourself.
|
| But publishers, though... I'll just say that if I was going to do
| another book I'd try self-publishing, make more from my labour,
| and save myself a lot of hassle.
| ryanbigg wrote:
| I have written a few tech books:
|
| https://ryanbigg.com/books
|
| Off these, I've made $65,000USD. That's over 13 years. None of
| these books have sold anywhere near as close to the Unicorn
| Project! (Which imo is fanfic for the tech-inclined)
|
| The money is nice, but hearing from people who've read the books
| (especially those who ask questions!) is the best part.
|
| Huh, maybe it is the friends we make along the way after all.
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