
The Economics of Writing a Technical Book - JustinGarrison
https://medium.com/p/the-economics-of-writing-a-technical-book-689d0c12fe39
======
jashmenn
We've published several books, and the author for our latest Vue book earned
$20k on the opening weekend.

The economics change completely if you self-publish or publish with a smaller
firm that has marketing abilities (and better royalty rates).

Self publishing is awesome because you keep all the money, but it takes years
to build an audience.

Honestly, writing the manuscript is the easy part. Building an audience,
marketing it, keeping the book up-to-date is just as hard as the original
manuscript. But it can really pay off.

I'm ready to share this now: our book on Angular 2 did $400k a revenue, per
year, the first two years. BUT the reason this was possible was _we had a huge
audience that trusted us_.

Email marketing is more powerful in this space than you might believe. Even
today.

If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to sign up for Ramit
Sethi's emails and watch how he markets. After that, get every book on
copywriting you can and learn how to write copy.

(Also, if you're interested in writing books with me for 50% royalties, my
email is in my profile. I want to do books on Python and Node this year.)

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

~~~
rco8786
> There aren't many topics with such a wide audience.

What now? The number of people who develop in angular actively is probably in
the low 6 figures. In the context of the world that's a very small audience.

~~~
megaman22
In the context of programming languages and tech stacks, that is an
astronomical audience though.

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

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

~~~
megaman22
Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business development. Michael Greenleaf has written a
couple books, and there are maybe a double handful of people blogging about
it.

~~~
ggg9990
What’s your plan for Skype for Business getting canned? Teams development?

~~~
megaman22
That's many years down the pike, honestly. We still see a lot of customers
using Lync 2010. People do not move fast in this segment.

------
xx_alpha_xx
Author here of a technical book published with Packt several years ago. I had
the first mover advantage as the only book of significance covering a Java
library that was (and is) very widely used.

Total page count was ~350-400. It took me approximately 600-800 hours of
research, authoring, editing, and final to complete the book. I had a full-
time job and so spent about 6-9 months of nights and weekends.

I actually haven't added up the total of royalties but it was probably
somewhere over $15-20k on sales of several thousand copies.

I wasn't in a position at the time to capitalize on the consulting / speaking
gigs that folks have mentioned, and had I thought more about it I would have
put myself in that position.

It definitely has been worth the experience as folks mentioned both in terms
of resume-building (a book is a great thing to bring to interviews) as well as
general reputation.

Also, if you are truly building a quality technical book, the level of
research and knowledge required to do a good job was (for me) at least 5x the
depth of my day-to-day work. As goes the old adage, you think you know
something well until you try to teach it -- this was definitely true of my
research efforts.

Summary - not worth it financially, but it definitely changed my career
overall for the better.

If anyone wants to know more details, please reply here or PM me and I'm happy
to answer as best I can.

~~~
fusiongyro
I had the same experience, scaled down by a factor of 10 (it was a quick start
book).

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

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

~~~
xx_alpha_xx
Yes, it was actually a lot more in depth than my day job. But I chose to write
a deep technical book rather than a shallow "cookbook".

Unfortunately most readers today are more interested in the latter than the
former.

------
BrentOzar
My experience in writing a technical book 8 years ago was the same:

[https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/01/the-economics-
of-w...](https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/01/the-economics-of-writing-a-
book/)

I made more money from Amazon affiliate fees linking to our book than I did
the actual book. Way more. If you’re out to make money short term, you’re
better off writing book reviews then books.

Having said that, the book gave me some credibility with clients for a couple
of years when I was starting a consulting practice. When clients asked, “have
you got experience with performance tuning databases?” I was able to point to
the book. Today, with self published books being so prevalent, I don’t think
having a listing in Amazon is as influential as it was.

~~~
slothario
That's the main reason I would write a book: to tell people that I wrote a
book.

You can literally say, "I wrote the book on that."

~~~
fao_
Hi, you've been shadowbanned, which is a shame because your last three or four
comments have been perfectly reasonable (I vouched for them so they'd show
up). I'd contact a moderator or something if I were you.

~~~
eadmund
> your last three or four comments have been perfectly reasonable

His first banned comment looks pretty reasonable too.

------
osteele
I've been pitched to write books a few times, by editors at reputable
technical publishers. (HN readers would recognize the names of the
publishers.) One of them told me up front that I would be offered an advance
of $8K, that it would take 3-6 months to write the book, and that I shouldn't
count on earning back the advance. She was clear that the benefits of
authorship were reputational.

(The price wasn't why I turned down that and the other offers. Working on a
book just isn't the thing I wake up eager to do. If I were an author I think
I'd know by now…)

~~~
commandlinefan
> the benefits of authorship were reputational

LOL. I published a book through Wiley about 8 years ago. I got an advance
which I did earn back, and I'm still earning a small bit on sales every year.
Reputational? The only time it's ever come up was when I was interviewing for
the job I have now and one of the interviewers asked, "oh, I notice you wrote
a book about SSL. Do you know stuff besides SSL though?"

~~~
outworlder
Did you continue the interview? That is a pretty big red flag for that
interviewer.

~~~
commandlinefan
Oh, actually I continued the interview, took the job, and work there now. They
just didn't (and still don't) care much about my knowledge of SSL.

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

I have also only written one book so I wasn't sure how "typical" my experience
was, but I'm really surprised to hear that your book didn't receive the same
level of support!

~~~
pc86
Would you recommend Manning to a first-time author?

~~~
egonschiele
Yes

------
yosito
Another payout of writing a technical book is that it pretty much solidifies
you as an expert in the topic and can be a springboard leading to great job
opportunities and things like paid offers to speak or teach. If I ever write a
technical book, it won't be for the immediate monetary payout, it will be to
solidify expert status in a topic.

~~~
mooreds
Be careful what you pick.

I've done a couple of projects (book, video course) because the opportunity
presented itself. Then, at the end of the projects I either was burnt out on
it, or wasn't in a career position to take on consulting around it.

So, nice resume burnisher and proof I can finish something, but not a
springboard.

~~~
pc86
I think this speaks more to differences between people than anything else. If
5-10 extra hours a week for 6-12 months burns you out on a topic, writing a
250+ page technical book is probably not a great use of your time if the
finances alone don't make it worth it.

~~~
mooreds
Ah. I wasn't burned out because of the book, but because of what I'd been
working on (I'm just not a mobile developer).

But the bigger issue is that I would write a book based on something that I
was working on, and then stop working on it (because of different work
priorities or because of changing jobs) and then not have any interest in
updating the book.

Whereas I think, for a technical book to be really worth your while, you
should really focus on an area and dive in and become an expert, and continue
to work in that area after the book comes out (consulting, etc).

------
ninjakeyboard
I authored and co-authored some books.

I wrote a book on Akka for Packt that has made maybe 5k. Packt is out of India
and they have some different standards around topics and contents, but the
experience wasn't much different from O'Reilly overall.

And there was a mini book for O'Reilly that netted a couple k, mostly because
of later sponsorship. Writing a book is a really tough experience. I found it
taxing. It's interesting going to meetups and having people come up to me and
shake my hand though saying they read my book.

I'm not super super happy with either book tbh. It's just such a crazy process
to try to get something you're 100% happy with, and once it goes into print
that's it forever more.

I would say the impact on my career has been noticeable maybe? You become an
expert on a topic by writing well on it because you're forced to fill in all
the gaps as you go, and then people give you the credit because you have a
book. It sort of happens together when writing a book - becoming an expert and
receiving the trust because you're an expert. Even if you thought you knew the
subject before, you might find you didn't as well as you do at the end of
writing on the topic.

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

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

~~~
pc86
This is a shame, I hadn't looked too deeply into the content but everything
looks high quality.

------
chubot
Really useful, thank you! I had saved this post of John Resig's from 10 years
ago (!), which also gives some numbers:

[https://johnresig.com/blog/programming-book-
profits/](https://johnresig.com/blog/programming-book-profits/)

(I'm not sure if my expectation is reasonable, but I would have thought that a
book the most popular JS framework author would have sold more / made more in
profit.)

I know you said you weren't planning to write another book, but I wonder if in
retrospect you would have self-published? I feel like the publisher provides a
few things:

1) Editing

2) Marketing

3) Writing tools, typesetting, etc.

It seems like you had to take control of #1 yourself to some extent. As for
#2, you got unexpected "sponsorships" income, which is very interesting, but
it seems like you also had to take control of it yourself.

I was surprised that between the 2 of you, you would only make about $2 per
physical book and $1 per e-book for a $40 book. If you end up having to do
work in areas #1 and #2, why have the publisher at all? I would have expected
them to give you more of a sales bump.

Here are some other posts I saved:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13876514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13876514)
_How I Made $70k Self-Publishing a Book about Ruby on Rails_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14334845)
_Why We Are Self-Publishing the Aviary Cookbook_

Anyway, thanks for sharing! I am just trying to think of what the publisher
adds. The main thing I think would be marketing / sales / distribution. It's
better to make a smaller amount on a larger number of copies than a large
amount on a small number of copies. But it doesn't feel like it adds up in
general, and in this particular case?

EDIT: also
[http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2007/10/081247.html](http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2007/10/081247.html)
_Hard Work, No Pay: What 's the Point?_

(Not trying to be negative, just sharing sources I found. I have read at least
one book by Petzold.)

~~~
JustinGarrison
_author here_ From what I hear from other O'Reilly authors my experience was
more negative than most. We got very little support from our editors because
of various situations (job change, maternity leave, etc.)

If I tried to self-publish my first book it would have never happened. I feel
like there's too much to figure out I'd spend a year yak shaving and never
produce a book. O'Reilly helped me focus on writing and making the content
good and they took care of the rest. Coordination with editors, reviewers, and
actual printing I'm sure would have taken me months to figure out and with
O'Reilly it was just weeks.

Marketing had some push just because it was an O'Reilly book. Podcasts picked
it up and that is where the sponsors started to get interested. If it were a
self-published book I doubt it would have carried the same authority and not
had as much interest. WRT sponsors, I did no work to bring in the sponsors or
organize contracts. I only had to review the foreword and then was sent an
"congratulations" email from O'Reilly that the book was sponsored. I did a
webinar for one of the sponsors for free but haven't done any other work. We
also were lucky enough to have CNCF marketing sponsorship who sponsored some
of the book signings at events.

I still think O'Reilly added a lot to the process. Most of the extra work I
did (website, affiliate programs, ad campaigns etc.) were minor work and
didn't drive any meaningful sales.

Let me know if you have other questions.

~~~
chubot
Thanks, I do see that there's value in having a "turn-key" proven process like
O'Reilly's. Yak-shaving might be the stage I'm in now :)

Did you have any technical diagrams in the book? If I were to write a book, I
would want some, but I'm not sure if I should invest the time to make them
myself. I imagine that most publishers can help with that.

~~~
JustinGarrison
Yes, there were a few diagrams. We gave rough sketches and descriptions of
what we wanted an they had someone create the diagrams for us.

------
jseliger
It's a bit dated, but Philip Greenspun's "The Book Behind the Book" is also
good on this topic: [http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-
trees/story](http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story)

I myself have thought about it when I think about writing a grant writing
book: [http://seliger.com/2011/03/06/why-youre-unlikely-to-see-
seli...](http://seliger.com/2011/03/06/why-youre-unlikely-to-see-seliger-and-
associates-presents-grant-writing-confidential-the-book-and-musical-anytime-
soon)

------
xrd
I wrote a book for O'Reilly:
[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920043027.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920043027.do)

This post is so accurate. I have nothing but good things to say about the
O'Reilly staff. It didn't make a dent in my finances but was a good experience
to understand the challenges in writing something like that.

The most meaningful experience for me was when someone reading the early
access version found me on the internet and sent excited questions to me out
of the blue: [https://medium.com/@xrd/sending-two-signed-copies-of-my-
book...](https://medium.com/@xrd/sending-two-signed-copies-of-my-book-to-a-
guy-i-ve-never-met-in-michigan-8832cb405dcf)

~~~
pc86
How would you recommend someone with a limited audience go about becoming an
O'Reilly author?

~~~
xrd
In my case, I stumbled into it. I went to Google I/O and talked to someone who
already had written several books for O'Reilly. He proposed the book to them
long before I got involved. Honestly, the hacker in me thinks that finding a
list of people who have already written for O'Reilly and then seeing if you
can help them complete a book in progress might be a good way to get into the
oreilly ecosystem.

I proposed a book 16 years ago to O'Reilly and the rejected the idea. So maybe
just show up multiple times and you'll get lucky? I think I did.

But once I got "lucky" then I did have three years of hard work for very
little money. Be prepared for that!

~~~
pc86
> _I did have three years of hard work for very little money. Be prepared for
> that!_

Oh my wife and I own a gym so I am very familiar with working a lot and
getting little to no money in return haha

------
zrail
I've self-published two books and my economics have been completely different.
Since first publishing Mastering Modern Payments in 2013 I've grossed almost
$75k directly from product sales. Of that, I've paid about 3% to Stripe and
PayPal for credit card processing, a few thousand for server hosting, and
another few thousand for design and editing work over the years.

------
bpesquet
The same kind of report, written a few days after releasing a self-published
open source book: [https://medium.freecodecamp.org/taking-off-the-successful-
la...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/taking-off-the-successful-launch-of-an-
open-source-book-7553a2262898)

Nine months later, the book earned a little more than $3,000 in Leanpub
royalties. Like other said, marketing is definitely the hardest part,
especially if (like me) you had no initial audience. Since the book is free to
read on GitHub, I hoped word-of-mouth would be enough to make it widely known
and popular. Boy was I wrong.

The experience was worth it for a number of reasons, honing one's skills being
the number one. That said, would-be authors without an existing follower base
should prepare themselves for a multi-year commitment in order to reap any
significant rewards.

------
mharrison
This sponsoring is cool. I wonder if they would work with self-published
books.

Writing a book is a huge effort (I'm the author of a couple Python books, one
of which is on the current Python Humble Bundle). From speaking with (many)
other Python authors, most would do better financially self-publishing. There
are few titles that sell very well from publishers (they do 2nd, and 3rd
versions), but these would probably do even better if they were self-
published.

Of course, there are other reasons for publishing. (People really want their
name on an animal book). One of those reasons is that a book is a really good
business card. This is especially useful for consultants or when looking for a
job. "Why yes, I do know about ...., in fact, I wrote a book on it".

I could blame quite a bit of my business (I do consulting and corporate
training) on writing books.

~~~
ghaff
Re: sponsoring and self-publishing.

Probably not. The marketing programs people who are mostly the ones paying for
these things are mostly looking for predictable content from the publishers
who do this sort of thing regularly.

------
mgkimsal
> From December through March the book has sold 1337 copies.

That's a pretty 'leet number :)

------
mrbill
I've never written an ENTIRE technical book, but I've written a number of
chapters for multi-author titles (namely, Solaris certification study books).

I don't remember making more than $500 from any single chapter I wrote - but
even that sure came in handy at the time. It was usually done as work-for-hire
plus I got a couple copies of each finished book.

Ended up being worth more as lines on my resume than anything else.

~~~
JustinGarrison
Did you change jobs? Were you able to negotiate a higher salary because of the
book? Seeing as this book was just published in November I'm curious to learn
how to leverage it into a more long term success.

~~~
mrbill
I've been a career sysadmin, so having chapters authored in a couple of
Solaris certification study books certainly looked good on my resume and was
relevant to my experience; nobody ever told me if that helped cinch the deal
when moving onward and upward, though.

I know that for one position (where I spent 12 years and lived in two
different cities) part of why I got the job was that an interviewer said "He's
one of the guys that maintains the Sun-Managers mailing list!" (they still had
a large number of Sun boxes at the time).

I will say it was weird writing about the VI editor but then having to submit
to the publisher in Word/DOC format. Of course I used free/OSS tools to
convert to DOC before submission.

------
wink
I once did a technical review for one of those small O'Reilly books (the
German ones went for 10-15 EUR) - it was a lot of fun. I was paid in store
credit, not cash, but it was a good deal because I did it mostly for the
experience and then enjoyed some reading material. Sadly I've no clue how much
the author made and if it was worth it financially.

That said, just the thought of having to write a book makes me want to run
away screaming. Producing my diploma thesis was the least enjoyable part of
all the years of school and university. I'm absolutely ok with writing
technical documentation for my dayjob, but this rigid form with a threshold of
pages to reach... bah

~~~
pc86
How did you get on board as a technical reviewer? That seems really
interesting.

~~~
wink
One of the folks at the publisher was looking via Twitter. As I tried to
convey, it was a small reference book - not the new "bible of <x>".

After the fact I learned that a former co-worker (sitting next to me) had been
the technical reviewer for the first edition, that gave me a good chuckle as
well.

------
scottinseattle
OK. Doesn't anyone else who read this now think, "Well gee why would I ever
write a book then?" You could easily make $23 an hour as an entry-level server
in a diner if you include tips.

~~~
actuallyalys
_You could easily make $23 an hour as an entry-level server in a diner if you
include tips._

I don't think this is true—the median pay for servers is $10 an hour in the
U.S. [0] Even servers in areas with unusually high pay barely reach $23 an
hour. [1]

With a median personal income in the United States of $31,000 [2], most people
make significantly less than $23 an hour.

[0]: [https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-
serving/waiters...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/food-preparation-and-
serving/waiters-and-waitresses.htm)

[1]:
[https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes353031.htm](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes353031.htm)
Scroll down to "Top paying metropolitan areas for this occupation"

[2]:
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N)

~~~
pc86
Keep in mind this is going to be reported income only. When I was waiting
tables nobody declared more than half their tips if they declared any at all.
In fact a lot of folks just declared whatever amount they need to go to $10 an
hour.

------
DanielBMarkham
It was very interesting comparing and contrasting this author's experience
with my own. I just finished a technical book about managing all of the
information in the project aside from the code -- and doing it using DevOps
principles. There's a free compiler, there's video, yadda yadda.
[https://leanpub.com/info-ops/](https://leanpub.com/info-ops/)

My experience in writing a book was that it was a long, hard slog, followed by
a brief moment of self-congratulations before the "real" work begins. That
might sound negative, but overall it's been a very happy and enjoyable
experience. It's just the "writing the book" part of writing the book is just
a small piece of it.

I did not find a publisher, although I think I could have. Instead, I used
LeanPub and dove right into the nuts and bolts of creating content and finding
an audience instead of filling out forms and making marketing pitches. There's
nothing wrong with that. It probably makes for a more profitable book. But I
wanted a book that I could wallow in. A book that would be me. I own and am
responsible for every little period, piece of art, sentence fragment, and
graphic in there. I wouldn't want it any other way.

Once I got rocking, I set up a beta list. Sent out links to a shared Dropbox
folder and watched as the comments came in. (Meanwhile I was continuing to
write.) I found reader feedback to be eye-opening. Because I was getting it as
I went along, I was able to adapt and change to meet the audience where they
were, instead of where I wanted them to be. This feedback process made me
realize that I had to narrow the scope. So I did. No editors to get approval
from. (And I love editors. They are the key to any good work. But as
publisher, I get to choose strategy. LeanPub changes the dynamics.)

A few weeks back I had gotten to the end, edited and reworked each chapter a
couple or three times, gotten feedback on most of it. Time to publish. Note
that a bunch of stuff was crappy as hell: layout sucked, some of the footnotes
needed changing, and so on. But this CI/CD applied to books. It was good
enough for now, passed the smoke tests. Away it went.

I also tried various promotions. Facebook, as far as I can tell, is a complete
scam. (But I don't know much.) When I target an XP programmer that knows Scrum
and get likes from people in nursing homes who haven't posted in a year?
That's not only fraud, that's somebody either blanket covering the entire FB
audience with bots or having a direct feed to ads as they're purchased. I
promoted a post with a link to the book. After 1500 people liked it, nobody
looked at the book. Nobody commented. You can't have 1500 people look at
something enough to like it without having any other interaction with it. That
just defies reason.

Finally I settled on funny pictures on Twitter. I've collected funny pictures
for years. It was a chance to make my own memes about the book. They seem to
work okay. Nothing great, but it's a more honest experience than I got over on
that other site.

The best part, aside from making something to help people, is that _I
completely own it_. Sure, it might not be great now, but I can republish. In
fact, I _should_ republish. The book was as worse as it was ever going to be
on the day I hit the publish button. From here on out it only gets better.

I know that there's a ton of the business part that I missed and am ignorant
about. But you know what? I always screwed these things up by getting wrapped
up in stuff like that. I'd spend a week rewriting one chapter and choosing a
font. The LeanPub paradigm let me change and focus instead on getting the
thing out the door while moving to align with the readers. The rest of that
can be added on later.

Would I do it again? Sure! I've had a blast. But it was -- and remains -- a
slog. This is no get-rich-quick adventure. It might be nothing more than a
fancy business card. But I said and explained things nobody else was saying
and explaining. It had to be done so I did it. The rest of it is just icing on
the cake.

tl;dr The old economics models are going away. Instead we're seeing startup
ideas applied to book publishing. That's good -- but it puts a lot more
responsibility on the author.

------
braythwayt
My experience is that the self-publishing business is a _business_ that
generates money from publishing and marketing books. If you decide to self-
publish and self-market, all you are doing is skipping the publishing step of
recruiting an author, and substituting the step of writing one or more books
yourself.

The key insight here is that it is a business, and the actual writing of the
book is incidental to the success of the business. I repeat, incidental. The
main drivers of the publishing business is marketing to acquire more
customers, and finding ways to build additional revenue streams to generate
value from each customer.

If you don't care to know what LTVs and conversion rates are, you will not be
happy running a publishing business regardless of who wrote the book(s) you
are publishing.

The other road forward is to have a publishing hobby. Some hobbies make token
amounts of money. I know two brothers who buy collectible corvettes, fix them
up, drive them for exactly one Summer, and then sell them.

The money they make seems like a nice side-business, until you listen to them
tote up the hours and expenses and tax implications. They would make way more
money selling almost anything else part-time. And that is my personal
experience with my own writing hobby.

The money sounds nice until you actually look at it as a business, and then
you start asking why I am on Hacker News writing this comment when I should be
curating my email list. The "problem," of course, is that writing is my hobby,
not curating email lists.

So I believe you need to decide whether you have a business or a hobby. If
it's a business, then you have to put 80% of your work into the activities
that produce 80% of the revenue. And that is _not_ writing, in my experience
or observation.

Whereas with a hobby, you put 80% of your work into the activities that
produce 80% of the happy juice in your brain. If writing does that for you,
you can write and make a little something on the side that will pay for some
discretionary lifestyle purchases. In my own case, that's things like a
1950s-era Rietveld Crate Chair.

Blatant Endorsement:

FYI, I publish with LeanPub [http://leanpub.com](http://leanpub.com), because
it generates the maximum revenue for the small scale of my writing hobby, and
its "lean" approach helps me maximize my contact with my readers as part of
the writing process. Since writing is my hobby, that's a win for me.

They also help people with a writing business in some amazing ways, like their
tools for creating courses, which helps generate more revenue from existing
content, and the ways they help you build a mailing list so you can develop
other revenue streams from your existing readers. If you want to build a
business, they help you build your business.

~~~
themodelplumber
It could also be that you write off the cost of the book-writing as an expense
in an experience-establishment communications effort. Like building up your
professional resume. In effect you are giving time and maybe a little money to
be able to say "I'm an author who has published N books on this subject."
That's part of the equation, if not the whole equation, for many people.

~~~
braythwayt
Quite a few people make this argument, thank you for mentioning it.

My feeling is that this is a holdover from a time when there was a substantial
barrier-to-entry for authorship. Back when publishers were the gatekeepers,
anybody could write a book, but relatively few were published.

People could vanity-press anything, but nobody would hear about them, because
just as publishing was concentrated, so was marketing.

\---

But today, anybody can publish a book, and likewise anybody can market a book,
super-cheaply. "I wrote X" is worth geometrically less today than it was a
decade ago.

If you write a book for other reasons, by all means bask in the reputation.
But I find it extremely unlikely that if you are doing it strictly for
economic reasons, that writing a book and then marketing it is going to be
superior to the many other ways you might have of building your professional
resume.

Maybe you should answer a lot of questions on Stack Overflow. Or--like me--
become a blowhard on Hacker News.

~~~
themodelplumber
I don't think it's really as easy as you say. At the same time, it wasn't
really hard to self-publish in the 20th century either; even self-marketing
could be a matter of buying mailing lists and paying for help with bulk
mailing. I had friends who did it and sold their books in local bookstores
too.

Putting a book together, as compared to many things, takes a lot of time and
energy and definitely sends social signals. Just last night a friend dropped
"he just published a new book" in conversation where Stack Overflow creds
would have sounded like a joke. SO just isn't known the way book publishing
is. Since the comment was an effective social cue to the audience, she freaked
out and asked a bunch of questions. It still works just fine.

~~~
braythwayt
What you describe sounds more like "proof of work" than "proof of competence."
The bottom line of your story seems to be that anybody who publishes a book
must have worked hard to write it. And we are to assme their expertise
because... They wouldnkt have bothered unless they had something worthhwile to
say?

That may appeal to some, but given the number of books written that are
absolute dreck, the argument carries no more weight with the discerning
audience than saying that you put in the work to get a CS degree, so you must
be smart.

Now, if you write a book and get nice reviews, thatks a different signal. But
absent that... I doubt it's more than an invitation to a conversation.

I wouldn't want to belong to any club whose sole requirement was that I had
written and self-published a technical book.

------
pc86
> _The contract stipulated that Kris and I own the copyright for the content,
> but O 'Reilly has exclusive rights to use the content any way they see fit
> throughout the world now and in the future for the duration of the
> copyright._

I'm a little confused by this. Can Justin and Kris use the content they own?
Or does O'Reilly's exclusive use rights supersede their ownership?

~~~
gmiller123456
"Exclusive" pretty much means exclusive. E.g. the publisher would not want to
spend a lot of time and money into promoting a book, only to have the author
have the same book available on his/her own website at a lower price with 100%
of the profits.

A real world example of this is the US Chess Federation's rule book. The 5th
edition was published in the early 90's, and a book was pretty much the only
thing that made sense. After the web came about, a lot of people asked why the
rules weren't available on-line, and the board members pointed to the
agreement with the publisher that they had exclusive rights to publish the
material. Of course with the latest edition of the book, they're still not
publishing them on-line, so maybe there's more to the story.

------
datalog19908
> This breaks down to we each get $.99 for a physical book and $.46 for an
> ebook.

Isn't this just a huge rip off of the authors. They'll probably make way more
money if they did a humble bundle or just ask readers to pirate the book and
send them a $5 in bitcoin or something.

~~~
pc86
Keep in mind this is for first-time, untested authors. The publishers are
spending what, $10k or more on publishing and order fulfillment? Payroll or
contract rates for graphic design, editing, reviewing, etc?

Yes the ebook split seems much lower than expected, but the book is also
cheaper.

If you have a proven track record of writing books people want to pay $60+ for
I'm sure you can negotiate better deals as time goes on, including advances.

------
antirez
TLDR: Unless you are dying to have the O'Reilly animal in your book cover, go
self-publishing or alike, and earn some real money. The OP doing earning-per-
hour math on the task of writing a book is very very odd. You write a book
investing what you learned in a life or in many years at least, the amount of
time to write it is not a meaningful metric.

~~~
chubot
Hm I think you might be misunderstanding what kind of book we're talking
about.

I think it's helpful to divide computer books into 2 categories: those with a
short shelf-life and those with a long shelf-life.

Most (all?) O'Reilly books are in the former category. They probably sell 90%
of their volume in the first couple years (at least one comment in this thread
said something like that).

How many copies a year do you think jQuery books are selling right now?
Especially if they haven't been updated since 2009? Are publishers even asking
for updates for those books?

jQuery was extraordinarily popular and a real innovation -- probably more
popular in relative terms than Angular is now.

So time spent writing it probably matters. It probably makes sense to get the
book out when the technology is on its upswing, which may only be a window of
a few years. Especially with frameworks, less so for languages like Python or
C.

I think this is fundamental to the subject of programming. On the other hand,
computer science is knowledge that lasts longer. I think it's justified to
spend more time on a computer science book, but perhaps not a programming
book. Of course many books are a mix of both.

I have several old programming books, like "Programming Pearls", "The Awk
Programming Language", Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. Although I have to say that
I have no problem finding those books used, so I don't need to buy new copies.

------
millerm
Wow, I must say that was one of the most informative articles I have ever read
about the topic. I've known a few technical book authors but none have given
such an awesome breakdown of the process.

Thank you!

~~~
JustinGarrison
I'm glad you liked it. I wanted to write down all the information I wish I had
a year ago before I started writing the book.

------
cryptos
Does O'Reilly still use DocBook? Is this the choice of the author?

~~~
justherefortart
What's DosBook?

~~~
tedyoung
Typo: should be DocBook. O'Reilly (used to?) use DocBook and now seems to
prefer AsciiDoc (Atlas). Some info about it (and other useful style info for
writing ebooks) is here: [http://oreillymedia.github.io/production-
resources/styleguid...](http://oreillymedia.github.io/production-
resources/styleguide/)

~~~
synack
The open source AsciiDoc Python tools support translating it into fairly
reasonable DocBook XML. I assume that's what O'Reilly's doing behind the
scenes with Atlas.

------
le3dh4x0r
It's some awesome, that a lot of people here wrote a book. I would like to
write one too, but I think, that I don't have enough experience, or it will
suck.

~~~
munificent
Start writing a blog, now. That will:

1\. Give you practice finishing smaller written works before you work your way
up to a much larger book project.

2\. Let you practice all of the various skills in writing.

3\. Improve your writing/marketing based on the feedback you get from people.
Publishing on the web is a fantastic feedback loop for learning what resonates
with people and what doesn't.

4\. Build an audience for your writing. Set up an email list and put a link to
it on your blog.

The way you get experience writing is the way you get experience in any other
artistic pursuit: practice and feedback.

------
sytelus
TLDR; the books on specific tech is lighly sold, gets out of date fast and
publishers are ripping off authors by throwing them 10% revenue share.

 _Because we co-authored the book we each got 5% of revenue for physical books
and 12.5% for ebooks and digital access (10% and 25% for individual authors)._

 _So far I have received $539 over 5 months._

 _On average, the book has sold 222 copies per month which is greatly skewed
by the first month which had 930 sales. The last month (March) had 34 physical
book sales. I suspect that number will go down even more over the next few
months._

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

~~~
sytelus
Typically I expect 70:30 split between creators and distributors for the
information products. Information product typically have negligible
manufacturing cost and most of the price is paid by the customer is purely the
information value. Less than half of other way around is ripping off creators
in my view.

------
shaklee3
Great read. Interesting to see how many total copies were sold for a book in
this genre.

