
Ask HN: Is it possible to live off technical writing? - mtrn
I co-authored a book on Python last year and it was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. Does anyone have experience with writing part time or full time on technical topics? How would one get started?
======
mcone
I'm a technical writer at Fastly and a published author with No Starch Press.
I've worked full time as a technical writer since 2006. It's a great career
and I highly recommend it.

If you have a technical background and you've coauthored a book, you already
have what it takes to find full time work as a technical writer. There are
really two ways into this field. You start with a background in English or
professional writing and learn the technology, or you can start with a
computer science degree or something similar and learn how to write. It sounds
like you've done the latter.

The pay is good if you work for a company full time. Many technical writing
jobs these days are remote. (All of the tech writers that work for Fastly and
GitHub are remote, for example.) You could probably do freelance work, but
I've never been able to make that work. Most companies don't outsource their
documentation and I'm not entirely sure why, although I suspect it has
something to do with them wanting to build long term relationships with the
individual(s) documenting their products.

You will need to do some networking. You may want to consider attending Write
the Docs ([http://www.writethedocs.org/](http://www.writethedocs.org/)), a
conference for technical writers. Depending on where you live, you might also
be able to find an active STC group.

Or just start applying for jobs. :) Really good technical writers are hard to
come by, so if you know technology and you can write, you'll probably have the
job offers flooding your inbox. This recent posting at DataDog is a good
example of something you will want to keep a lookout for:

[https://www.datadoghq.com/careers/detail/?gh_jid=169167](https://www.datadoghq.com/careers/detail/?gh_jid=169167)

Hit me up if you have questions.

~~~
danso
If I can ask...what do you make as a technical writer relative to what you
could be making if you were an average person doing the actual technical job,
e.g. what is the work and wage like to write about JavaScript as opposed to
being a front-end developer at the average tech company?

~~~
mcone
I think wallflower is right: Technical writers generally get paid less than
what developers make. But every company is different. At Compose.io, for
example, I think it could be more of a blended position, which is to say that
you could be writing documentation and contributing to the codebase [1]. There
may not be much of a pay gap at companies like that.

There are also other benefits. Technical writing positions are generally
extremely low stress jobs where you have ample time to finish your work, learn
new technologies, etc. And as I mentioned before, many of these positions are
remote, so you have the opportunity to live in places with low costs of
living.

[1] [https://compose.io/jobs/#technical-content-
creator](https://compose.io/jobs/#technical-content-creator)

------
burritofanatic
As a full time job at a company, it'll pay less than your counterpart role in
development. As a solo person building a brand a la Michael Hartl (Rails,
Learn Enough), it's a business, and marketing is a big part of it.

In terms of getting a job at a company, I've seen people pursue technical
writing certificates. Though, I think a long list of open source contributions
will speak for itself when it comes to modern software gigs. It seems like you
have a bit of experience pursuing the second route already, so it's not a bad
idea to keep doing that, then lateral into a place of employment.

I think the likelihood of making a living as an indie developer is greater
than as an indie on the App Store for example. Tracy Osborn (Hello Web App)
said herself that one book wouldn't provide a living, though she surmised that
someone with multiple books might. The speaking engagements, networking, and
new opportunities will help overall in filling the gaps.

An in depth book may take 6 months to a year to write, but if the writing
process can be scaled down to 1 - 2 months per book, with the quality not
suffering too much, I don't see why it's not possible that a person can be
doing this full time/exclusively after a year of publications, with other
contract engagements. To clarify, a number of these books will likely address
to a specific framework du jour, or learn X in 1 week, but there can be some
that are absolute gems/labor of love.

Disclaimer: I'm just an observer, hoping to explore the same path.

------
ivan_ah
I've had fairly good success with my books on math and physics. It's not a
living yet, but definitely helps with the bills. Amazon (via CreateSpace) is
by far my best channel, though when I can bring traffic to the book's website
I have decent conversions too. The mailing list works great, though I'm
hesitant to milk it as I don't want to spam my readers.

To reiterate patio11's comments, make sure _you_ run the business (80%
marketing + 20% pushing the book to distribution channels), as this will give
you very interesting margins, like 45% of the list price. In comparison, if
you were to write for an established publishing company, you'll get < 5% of
list price, so totally not worth it (unless you think they have a magical
marketing department that can sell 10x more product than you could on your
own).

I totally recommend it as a career option, though keep in mind writing a
quality book takes a lot of time, like a year per book... Feel free to email
me if you need further advice (or a LaTeX template). Be sure to also check out
[https://github.com/softcover/softcover](https://github.com/softcover/softcover)
Michael Hartl's kick-ass ePub/mobi production toolchain.

------
selmat
I am part-time author of books and articles from IT area. Nowadays I am
writing my third book. Article take me just a few hours during evening. Books
around 250 pages takes ma around one year, written mainly during evenings and
nights (my wife is getting insane from this).

In regards to money...no, you can't pay your mortgage from it.

In regards to fun .. yes, it is fun, usually I learn a lot with every book.

In regards to development....yes, it can help me get better job since it is
some kind of marketing, and there are not so much candidates with same
portfolio. Another thing is that it helps me develop my skills, language and
thinking.

In regards how to start ... get in touch with some chief editor, they have a
list of topic they and possible readers are interested in. I always send them
resume with short description of my previous work and projects.

~~~
umanwizard
My uncle is a technical writer (full-time job) and it certainly pays his
mortgage.

~~~
selmat
From my experience writing articles for magazines, documentation, technical
analysis on daily basis might be enough for your bills.

But writing books (if it's not bestseller) isn't so highly evaluated. You
receive only 8-15 % (depends on contract) from final book price.

------
futuremeats
I can't speak to the people writing books on coding, etc., but I have written
a lot of product documentation and am thinking about doing it full time as an
independent consultant.

The small startups where I have worked have had woefully bad documentation.
Developers and support reps never have time or want to write it. I would say
the most useful thing I have done for these companies has been to set them up
with a basic Zendesk account and just start writing articles to answer the
most basic support issues and how-to guides.

I have found these topics to be not very prone to political word-smithing.
People are just grateful for the documentation to be written. The company word
smiths and bulls __t artists would rather fight over the copy for the front
page of the website than type up "Troubleshooting CentOS Client Installation".
It's uncontroversial stuff.

You would have to offer a turnkey solution (set up a Zendesk or Confluence
knowledge base for them, perhaps as a value-added reseller), propose a list of
articles to be written, then knock it out in a couple weeks, with add-on work
to keep the documents fresh with future releases.

Your sweet spot would be companies with 25 employees or fewer who don't have
the money to bring in a full time technical writer.

I don't think you could make F-U money, but you could do much of it remotely,
and it would be less stressful than other types of work. Your clientele would
have to come largely based on personal reference.

Curious if others think this is viable...

~~~
IanCal
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Doing this properly is often not the most fun thing that people can be doing,
but is extremely important for getting others using your, well, whatever. I
remember working with an older colleague who was excellent at building up good
documentation and we'd follow whatever instructions were there, hit problems
and solve them, add something to the docs then go back to the beginning and go
through everything again. In doing so, we could often create scripts to
automate sections and improve the setup process itself.

It's a task that can be hard to get devs to spend their time on, requires
skill in a few different areas and has some clear benefits (reduce dev setup
time / onboarding costs, improve customer support, etc). There's no lock-in
and progress and completion can be pretty clear.

There might be a good source of bounties for the same kind of thing for open
source projects too.

~~~
futuremeats
Thanks for the advice. I once read that if everybody thinks something is
boring, but you find it fun, then it might be a lucrative niche. That's how I
feel about documentation.

------
gregorymichael
I serve on the evangelism team at Twilio. Technical writing is a big part of
our job. We also spun up a Developer Education team last year which writes in-
depth tutorials and the docs.

I think you may have been asking if it's possible to live off of freelance
technical writing, in which case, I can't answer that based off of personal
experience. But there absolutely are jobs out there that require a competent
developer with exceptional communication and teaching ability.

~~~
hobolord
Hey I'm curious about how your team evaluates technical writing talent, what
does the process for hiring look like?

------
mathattack
I'm not a technical writer, but I've been at a few firms that have hired them.
A couple observations:

1 - There's an enormous gap between great technical writing and so-so
technical writing, but it is hard to get paid for the great work unless you're
working for yourself. (Hard for a company to pay one technical writer $50K and
another $100K, but they can pay $100/hour part-time vs $50K full-time to
someone who can do clearer work in a quarter the time)

2 - Many people write books with secondary agendas (to promote their day-
career) so it's hard to just make money off the book. A well-written book is a
fantastic calling card, though, and beats any resume.

3 - For better or worse, some of the coolest folks in tech are the writers. I
don't know why. Perhaps because they're in it for interest rather than getting
rich?

4 - I don't know any dabblers who have made a career of it, but I know several
who have said "This is who I am" and have made a decent living.

How to start? Start writing a blog! Then share your portfolio. Meet people
until you find one that has a need. It's a different field than engineering
where every company has holes. It's more like there's 0 or 1 spot, and you
want to be top of mind to someone who has 1.

Good luck!

------
habosa
I work on Developer Relations at Google. My team alone employs ~30 full time
Technical Writers in Mountain View, San Francisco, and Kirkland. These 30 are
largely responsible for writing developers.google.com and
developers.android.com. There are a few hundred at Google all told.

If you're interested: samstern [at] google

------
strongai
UK-based full-time employed tech writer here. Been shaping my experience
towards that magic 50% programming (Java, JavaScript, Python) and 50% writing.
Current gig pays well but doesn't offer the amount of programming I would
like. I've been a freelancer (10 years) before, and it's a little feast-or-
famine, but averages out at least equivalently to being employed, with the
added bonus that you usually get decent, long breaks between contracts.
Various UK government-based initiatives (e.g. IR35, recent dividend
legislation) have slightly taken the lustre off the freelancing lifestyle, but
not so much that I wouldn't reconsider it for the right kind of work.

I've been seriously considering some outreach to young startups who wouldn't
need a full-time writer. Great docs really help to distinguish great software
- would Django have become so mainstream if its docs weren't so good?

Edit: typo

------
JacobAldridge
My memory may be a little hazy, but check out /u/GrinchofSR on Reddit for
someone who has spun technical writing into a long term location independent
career - and not the 'it costs me $1,000/mth to squat here' Digital Nomad, I
recall him sharing average months of around $20,000 income which is 'making a
living' by pretty much every standard.

~~~
vijayr
that user doesn't seem to exist anymore on reddit

~~~
yxlx
I made a web search for that name but didn't find it. I think parent commenter
must have misspelled it.

I found something else, though, through that search:
[http://www.nackerhews.com/news](http://www.nackerhews.com/news). Be sure to
follow the link to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism)
at the bottom (or here where I just repeated it) to understand what it's all
about.

------
bliti
I spent about a year writing technical documentation for clients as an add on
service to consulting. It was a really nice experience. It was the main source
of income for some months. People would try and hire me for writing but I
wanted to focus on code. One trick I learned is to find not well documented
projects or APIS and write tutorials about them. Then turn those tutorials
into cookbooks. That sold well directly to companies. I would sell them the
cookbook for their own project. It was easy and fun money.

~~~
mooreds
Hmmm. Very interesting. Mind if I ask a few questions?

Would you publicize the tutorials and cookbooks to the public (via a blog or
project email list) before you sold the cookbooks to the companies?

How many of these did you do?

What was the level of effort for each of the cookbooks?

What did the company do with the cookbook? Put it up on their website?

~~~
bliti
>Would you publicize the tutorials and cookbooks to the public (via a blog or
project email list) before you sold the cookbooks to the companies?

I did not (only did it a handful of times). Although it would be the smart
thing to do. It would put you in an advantageous position to market the book
to all interested parties.

>How many of these did you do?

About five in total. None of them were ultra-long and detailed cookbooks. They
were short, but to the point. Less than a hundred pages.

>What was the level of effort for each of the cookbooks?

It was rather easy because cookbooks don't require a lot of explanation. They
were just me showing people how to do things with whatever technology. If the
cookbook was for an API I already had a formula. Start with authentication and
work my way through the endpoints. Including code examples for every step in
various programming languages (mostly Java, PHP, and Python). Super easy.

What did the company do with the cookbook? Put it up on their website?

They would either put it on their website or distribute it as a PDF. Though
all these companies are now dead except one. And that last one did a complete
rewrite of their stuff.

Overall, the whole thing was fun and easy money. I've been working with
technical documentation since the 80s so it came kind of naturally. I stopped
doing it because I wanted to code more. But I would not mind doing it again
someday. I'm actually working on some books myself, but those are a scheduled
for much later this year. :)

Best of luck!

------
orionblastar
It is hard to find work, I've applied to technical writing jobs only to not
hear back from them. Jobs that usually pay $100 per article you write for them
on a blog.

I've tried self-publishing books, but they don't sell. I can't afford to
market them. If you build up a lot of social network followers you can promote
your books and blog links to them.

I had websites but they are down now because I couldn't afford to keep them
up. It is really hard to get noticed and your writing and grammar has to be
near perfect.

I am writing a book on technology trends, but as soon as I write a chapter it
is obsolete. For example I was writing about Windows 8.1, Mac OSX 10.9 and
others and new versions came out and changed how they worked. I was writing
about the operating system wars between commercial companies and FOSS
projects. It changes so fast that what I write is obsolete before I can get it
ready to publish.

~~~
Dolores12
start with evergreen niches

------
solresol
Finding a tech geek who can put together a coherent sentence is hard, and
there are always manuals to write, tutorials to create and deep blog posts to
make -- many of which need the kind of in-depth understanding that only a tech
geek can bring.

It doesn't always need a technical background -- a friend of mine found a job
writing drug trial instructions even though she had no background in medicine
or biology. But she was pretty exceptional, and very quick on the up-take so
she probably absorbed a couple of years of medtech education in the first few
months she was there.

So yes, you can make a career out of that. Apply for jobs and say "I want a
role where I can program 50% of the time and write all your public-facing
words the other 50% of your time". There are many employers who would pay a
premium for that unique combination of skills which you have already
demonstrated.

As for freelance authoring... I'm writing book #8 now. The first 6 are all
deeply technical books on backup and managing IT
([http://www.ifost.org.au/books/](http://www.ifost.org.au/books/) ); the
seventh was a collection of mathematics/computing/physics poetry (
[http://www.ifost.org.au/books/outlinks/medusa](http://www.ifost.org.au/books/outlinks/medusa)
).

These are rather small niches, but in most of these areas I'm one of the
leading experts in the field -- usually because there's no-one else writing
anything.

Based on what I'm getting from my work so far, I'd estimate that I would need
to get to 50-100 books written before I could stop relying on other sources of
income. I live in an expensive city and have a family, so you might be able to
do slightly more easily than me. Also, if I wrote something less niche, I
might have a bigger market (but probably face more competition).

In other words, I might be able to write full-time in 10-15 years' time if I
keep up the current output. That is something I am aiming to do, but it's
obviously not a short-term goal.

~~~
stan_rogers
Small niches are almost the rule. With apologies to Emo Phillips, you may find
that if you're preaching Northern Conservative Baptist, Great Lakes Region
(Council of 1912) and your audience is Northern Conservative Baptist, Great
Lakes Region (Council of 1879), you'll be metaphorically pushed off the bridge
(you heretic).

------
bebraw
I just self-published my first book
([http://survivejs.com/](http://survivejs.com/)). Writing books is way harder
than people think. Writing isn't enough as you need to tackle other aspects,
such as marketing and sales, as well. If you are not native, you have the
extra challenge of learning to write.

In short, it's definitely possible to earn a living out of technical writing.
Getting started is the hardest part. If you don't have a reputation, you will
need to build one. Growing audience will take time, but it will pay dividends.

To keep this comment short, I'll just link to a series of articles (and
presentation slides) I've written about my experiences. Hopefully these help!
Here we go:

* [http://agile.fi/survivejs-writing-a-book-in-a-lean-way/](http://agile.fi/survivejs-writing-a-book-in-a-lean-way/)

* [http://survivejs.com/blog/succeed-at-technical-books/](http://survivejs.com/blog/succeed-at-technical-books/)

* [http://survivejs.com/blog/survivejs-interview/](http://survivejs.com/blog/survivejs-interview/)

* [https://survivejs.github.io/how-to-write-a-book-and-survivej...](https://survivejs.github.io/how-to-write-a-book-and-survivejs-it/) (Chrome works the best)

Best of luck!

------
andrenotgiant
Not sure if you are strictly interested in branching out on your own, but if
you are interested in writing at a startup, DigitalOcean has an amazing team
of writers, and is currently hiring Technical Writers
[https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers#technical-
write...](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers#technical-writer)

Disclaimer: I work at DO!

~~~
mooreds
They didn't mention a salary range in the job posting. Us that something you
can share?

------
qzxvwt
I was a product architect in advertising for a brief period. About half the
job involved writing all sorts of technical documentation, including
functional specifications for developers, internal and user-facing API docs,
and user guides for websites, apps, and installations we built. I loved this
part of the work because of how it was a mix of both info design (you're
practically a graphic designer in this respect) and rigorous research that
usually involved consulting the designers and devs for knowledge, but
sometimes external specialists as well.

To be a product architect you need to:

\- Express interest/expertise in learning (constantly) about existing and
emerging products/systems/technologies

\- Be creative (product definition is _your_ job after all)

\- Understand all the moving parts of software development (what do the BE
developers do, what do the UX designers do and when, etc)

\- Be business savvy

IMO the broad skill-set requirement and critical nature of the position makes
it a hard job, but if you love technical writing and already know a bit about
software/programming then you could easily fall in love with this line of
work.

------
patio11
A few folks have covered the full-time employment option.

I'll speak regarding the "sell your own stuff" option, which is fairly well-
represented in my social circles.

Short version: yes, you can write part-time or full-time on technical topics
as an independent technical writer. It requires operating a technical writing
business, the key word in which is more often _business_ than _technical
writing_.

There exists a tremendous demand in the world for industrial inputs. Technical
writing is often an industrial input. If your book/e-book/video
course/screencast/sample source/etc saves an engineering team weeks, it is
worth tens of thousands of dollars. If it saves a single team member two days
of reading Free Information On The Internet (TM) it handily sails over $50.

You're going to want to write things which are chosen to be about topics which
are actually required by folks trying to get things shipped at their day jobs.
This suggests aiming at a sweet spot of technologies which are past their up-
and-coming-hotness phase and getting taken up rapidly, but are still not
terribly understood. Think React, but perhaps not Rust. (Though one could
certainly make a lot of money with Rust books.)

Writing independently involves, above all things, cultivating an audience and
then selling into it. This almost invariably means _get people 's email
addresses_ and sell primarily via email. The easiest way to get people's email
addresses voluntarily is to write about related topics in a free and open
fashion (on your own web presence to maximum extent possible) and include a
call to action which gives people some valuable thing for free in return for
their email and permission to email them ~2X a month with other things they'll
enjoy. That "valuable thing" is often a short, concise guide on a topic (maybe
a downloadable React cheatsheet or 10 quick anti-patterns) and the "things
they'll enjoy" is simply blog posts about the topic delivered regularly until
you launch.

This provides your future customers with demonstrative evidence that you know
what you're talking about and that they'll enjoy your writing, which makes it
vastly easier to sell them a book in the cozy little space you've created for
yourself than putting the book with 250 other books on a shelf at Barnes and
Noble.

You're typically going to sell your book in a multi-package format: $49 for
the book proper, $99 for book-plus-something, $249 for book-plus-more-
somethings. Often those options include multimedia -- screencasts of you
walking through things or executable code samples are fairly common, as are
recorded interviews with people relevant to your audience. I tend to think
screencasts/code samples are higher value but interviews are high perceived
value and _very_ easy to produce.

After you've launched, congratulations! Now you just keep doing what you're
doing -- write more blog posts, send more emails, occasionally add new
products to the mix using the same rough formula.

There exist quite a few people who make substantial money as self-published
technical authors. Many come out to events like BaconBiz and/or Microconf. I'm
not sure whose numbers I have permission to quote off the top of my head, but
people post postmortems to HN on a fairly regular basis. Suffice it to say
many did better than I did last year, or "competitive with mid-career software
engineering jobs in the Bay Area" as a different (higher) bar.

Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, and Nathan Barry have copious blog posts about the
practical life of an Internet-enabled author, virtually all of which extends
directly to technical writing. (All of them write or have written in a self-
published format on topics directly adjacent to technical writing. I'm
recommending them less to tell you how to break down concepts about Python and
more for advise on sales/marketing of information as a product.)

[Edit to add: I mentioned self-published several times above, but to
reiterate: if you take on the risk of business execution, your upside goes
way, way, way up from doing this. If you go through a publisher, you will be
offered a $5k advance check and get totally shellacked on royalties. Midlist
self-published authors work as authors; midlist published authors need day
jobs.]

------
whockey
We ([https://plaid.com](https://plaid.com)) - are currently looking for some
contract or full-time technical writers. Shoot me an email (william [at]
plaid.com) if you're interested!

------
swalberg
I've written/cowritten 3 books and a whole lot of articles over the past ~15
years on a freelance basis. Most of the good work came through an agency,
StudioB, though I had pitched magazines and other places from time to time on
my own.

My experience is that a lot of the good sources of ad-hoc work have dried up.
That's not to say there is nothing now, but it's not the shooting-fish-in-a-
barrel it was a few years ago. The demand has gone up and down over the years
so I'm sure it'll be back.

As you've seen it's a lot of fun. I always treated it as a way to get other
people to pay for me to learn the stuff I would normally have done in my spare
time anyway. The money was good for the time invested, but I make far more
just working a day job.

If I wanted to make an income from it, I'd be finding a company or two to
attach myself to rather than piecework.

I've found that the industry is very focused on your portfolio, so continue to
build upon that.

Also, be very nice to the editors you work with. They provide a lot of
feedback to the people making the decisions, and no one likes a prima donna.

~~~
ghaff
In general, I think it's fair to say that freelance writing has gotten
tougher. A lot of the people who used to have full-time journalism gigs are
now freelancing in various ways (or working for companies doing evangelism,
editing, etc.) I'd also agree that the people I know who probably make the
most money directly from writing get most of their business from a small group
of clients.

However, for the vast majority of people I know who write computer-oriented
books (including myself), it's essentially a branding exercise to support
either their full-time employment or a consulting business of some sort.

------
CyberFonic
I used to be part of a small tech writing firm. The bulk of our work was RFQs,
tenders, req specs, user manuals, procedures manuals - all corporate
wordsmithing. It paid pretty well, but I found it very tedious. And the
politics and the PHB attacks were draining to say the least. Creative and Fun
are two words that positively do not come to mind about that phase of my life.

~~~
tomcam
What's a PHB attack?

~~~
sah2ed
PHB = Pointy Haired Boss

~~~
CyberFonic
I thought all HN readers also read Dilbert :-)

------
silly1
My wife writes documentation full time for open source software (Red Hat), she
was making enough to live off it.

------
blt
I'm a programmer, but I worked on products that had multiple full-time
technical writers. Think of expensive commercial software that people use to
make money. Video editing, engineering simulation, etc. Those companies are
likely to have technical writers on staff.

------
jason_slack
I am the Community Evangelist for Cocos2d-x. Technical writing is a big part
of my job.

I really enjoy it. I am always looking for ways to improve what we write. One
downside is that I don't get a lot of freedom to chose what I write. The
topics are usually given to me.

------
hyperpallium
I wrote some chapters. Great fun, but not worth it in terms of money.

David Flanagan (java in a nutshell etc) couldn't do it any more, so it seems
hard. He blogged about it somewhere...

As always, if you make your expenses low enough, maybe...

~~~
marvel_boy
Ironically his
blog([http://www.davidflanagan.com](http://www.davidflanagan.com)) says right
now: "My site was hacked and was hosting malware. So its down until I can
rebuild it."

------
a-saleh
While a student I was writing for a Linux e-zine. Paid 20$/article, at least
700 words(?) a.f.a.i.k. Not a good source of income, but fun and easy to get
into, I just emailed the editor that I am attending a conference, and would
write few articles for them. Usually sites like these will tell you if they
are looking for writers, and whether they are willing to pay for them :)

------
MicroBerto
We employ a "technical" writer of a different sense. The answer is yes.

To get started, find industry blogs or websites with an aggressive content
strategy that are willing to pay. Build up that resume and keep moving up and
making contacts within your field.

All the better if you can snazz up the content with good-looking HTML/CSS and
images so that the editor has less work to do.

------
fatlasp
At my last sfw eng job we had two full time writers mostly working on
documentation and legacy system diagrams. These people were both contractors,
but were employed full-time there before I started and after I left (4+
years.) Like the other poster they may have come from writing firms or just
done individual contracting. Maybe contact some head hunters?

------
Havoc
Friend of mine does technical translations (English > German). That seems
sufficiently niche to be financially viable.

------
JeffMerlet
In silicon valley, an experienced tech writer doing contract jobs get at least
$60/hour (self-employed).

------
apollo5
Not sure about a living, but I'm keen to hire a technical writer. aaron dot
davis at exploration io

------
bewe42
Are there any non-native speaker who make a living as technical writers? I
absolutely love writing about tech but I'm wondering if I'd put myself at a
too big disadvantage to compete with writers whose first language is English.

~~~
selmat
I cant answer your question but I am also intersted in if this is possible.

From my point of view, since we are not native speakers we are still loosing
some points.

As #bebraw mentioned below,it‘s worth to hire or at least cooperate with some
native speaker or skikled translator. They can help you correct grammar and
give you valuable insight how to in more native manner. Question might be a
cost of this cooperation.

One point from my experience. I am publishing via established publisher who
has own verified and skilled translators. So i can and they also require to
write manuscript in my native language and they will translate it to final
language in which books will bevpublished. Even my and 'destination' language
are very close and we can understand each other without any issues. Reason of
trnaslation is pure business. Second language has better revenue than mine.

------
DougN7
I knew of a guy that did this. He had a website and asvertised that he could
write your software documentation. It was nice having a techie do it because
he understood complex software without needing to have everytbing spelled out
for him.

------
staceydonnar
Great site. Visit us for exceptional assignment help by UK.
[http://www.theassignmenthelp.co.uk](http://www.theassignmenthelp.co.uk)

------
josegonzalez
I'm actually looking for a FT technical writer (though you may not be
interested since it is for PHP). Feel free to tweet at me (@savant) for more
details.

------
calinet6
On the product/company employment side of things, technical writing is a rich
field, with many people who excel and push the boundaries of making the
previously inaccessible clear as day. There's a living to be had there as well
if you strive for the latter; you can advance and prove your value in any
company.

For an anecdote, as a product person, I would kill for a technical writer who
works really hard to understand our product, our customers and personas, and
keeps up with our roadmap and release process with on-the-ball documentation
updates and copywriting. I see tons of opportunity there internally.

------
TheOtherHobbes
I used to do some of this, and have a few books out.

It's an incredibly varied field, with a lot of different routes into it. The
main markets are:

Print magazines

Online magazines/blogs/sites

Formal corporate technical writing

Mainstream tech publishing

DIY tech publishing

They all have different requirements, schedules, and working relationships.

The first two are probably the easiest to get into. If you have no experience,
write a couple of polished sample pieces, and then start contacting editors
with ideas that match the magazine/blog. Send in the samples when they ask for
them. Mention the Python book too. If you can build a relationship and are
good, you will get regular work.

Beware - _good_ writing is harder than it looks. You have to be accurate,
concise, and entertaining as well as informative. You may also have to be
fast. Payment varies from not much at all to - exceptionally - high four
figures at the very top end for high profile journalism.

Formal tech writing is a very specific skill and it's hard to get a job in it
without some previous experience and/or a basic qualification. I've never done
it so I don't know how to get into it.

Mainstream publishing - list the publishers (there aren't many in tech), find
the commissioning editors, and email them with a couple of suggestions for
books. Mention the Python book. If you get interest you will probably get an
advance - high four to very low five figures is usual for niche tech, maybe
double that for consumer tech. Don't accept a project that offers less,
because it won't be worth the time. Formatting and editing for print can be
torturously specific, so it's not so fun from that POV.

DIY - Leanpub is a popular platform. So is Createspace. Marketing will kill
you, so you'll have to do a lot of it. Putting up a marketing site is _not
enough._ Email lists are your friend.

Generally writing doesn't pay nearly as well as coding. I did it for a while
after burning out on writing too many projects in assembler in the late 80s
and early 90s. It was great for a period, and I had a couple of years where I
could have lived off royalty payments. The market now is much broader but much
shallower - many more opportunities, but mostly they don't pay nearly as well.

Like other people, I've sometimes used mainstream pub as a way to get paid to
learn. You have to pay that back with a book, but it's not a bad deal compared
to _not_ getting paid to learn.

------
dsr_
I know several people who have full-time employment as technical writers. The
downside is that they don't get to choose what to work on.

~~~
MiddleEndian
I regularly worked with technical writers (usually one specific guy) at my
previous job. Definitely a thing.

