Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

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/

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

Deadlines are also both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, they’re not very flexible if you get busy or there are reasons to slip a bit to sync up with external events. Or just to take a bit more time.

On the other hand, deadlines impose a certain discipline and also force you to wrap things up by a certain date and not draw things out.

Since you appear to be into publishing stories, here's mine from back in the day: http://peterc.org/beginningruby/#post-21

I made about $19K on about 9000 sales of the first edition of my book published with Apress at the point I wrote that (many years ago). Since then, I've written 2nd and 3rd editions with diminishing returns each time, but even now over 10 years later it's perhaps $1000 a year in residuals.

Publishers should provide editing, marketing, and typesetting.

Generally, typesetting is a given. Outline design and line (grammar) editing is usually a given, but may vary in quality and depth. Customer marketing is often non-existent.

Publishers don't think of book buyers as customers. They think of book stores and book chains as customers. With a few exceptions, that's where marketing spend is usually directed.

Access to book chain buyers is how publishers justify their existence.

Kindle was a revolution because it gave authors direct access to a huge potential audience. Kindle can be great for fiction, but it's pretty much useless for professional technical non-fic unless an author has a significant social following.

If you want to publish a book you can do it on Leanpub, or you can try to sell PDFs from your own site. Leanpub is probably a better bet, but nothing will help you more than that solid social following.

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