The Economics of Writing a Technical Book

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.)

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.

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/01/the-economics-of-w...

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.

(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…)

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!

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.

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 How I Made $70k Self-Publishing a Book about Ruby on Rails

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 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.)

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...

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...

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.

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.

That's a pretty 'leet number :)

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.

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

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.

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, 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.

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?

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.

Thank you!

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.