A year of Geek Atlas sales (some facts about book royalties) | Hacker News Reader

A year of Geek Atlas sales (some facts about book royalties)

blog.jgc.org

46 pointsjgrahamc25 comments

I guess I understand that, while providing a good insight into royalties in general, the article left out something more directly interesting:

Was it worth, monetary, to write the Geek Atlas? It wasn't written for the money, I read that. And I understand that the royalties are smallish, compared to the prices payed by the customers. But I do wonder if a book like that (targeted at a "minority", more a "novelty" thing from what I can tell) sells good enough to keep a single guy alive.

So - in the light of the recent talks about salaries around the world in general and in NYC/the bay area specifically: John - would mind sharing a very rough estimate of sales for this book?

(I guess the answer is "It's too personal", because otherwise it could've been part of the blog entry itself to further strengthen the "Not for the money" part, but hey - I guess it's always okay to ask politely)

I have made about 1/12 of my annual salary from the book. This is great, but I consider the fringe benefits of having the book much more important.

Thanks a lot for responding. This again is interesting in the light of the salary discussion from yesterday. Thinking out loud here I assume that JGC isn't living on anything near a minimum wage. 1/12 of that could certainly be 1/6 to 1/4 of a yearly salary elsewhere, again refering to the gap in salaries for basically doing a similar job. Which changes a lot about the ROI here, for me.

Not that I want to undermine the effort you had to put into that project. I seriously cannot imagine or understand the work put into that book by you. And I certainly don't plan to write a book now...

What really is interesting about this number game is mostly that I come from the opposite direction of guy that wrote the comment ("Living of your book royalties") that lead to your blog entry in the first place: I assumed creating a book would suck in terms of money in general (except for the obvious exceptional cases like Rowling) and for a minority target group specifically.

Now, on the other hand, I can better understand why and how one could live off writing most of the time (obviously with numbers like yours you wouldn't be able to sustain a life in NYC, but again - the differences in cost of living and salaries showed that it should be possible elsewhere).

Thanks a lot for sharing this.

I seriously cannot imagine or understand the work put into that book by you

It was a pleasure to spend the time on the book and if I had the means I would write another book. But I also need to make a living. If I get the time I'd like to do "The Apollo 11 Guidance Computer: Annotated Program Listing" :-)

I think most of us would love to see your take on that. However, in case anyone's interested, a book like that does already exist:

http://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture-...

I haven't bought it yet but it's in my wishlist pending an Xmas purchase ;-)

I suggest doing a "Kindle Edition Deluxe Pack" that comes with a physical snap-on cover to turn that thingy into a 2 column "DSKY" approximation with battery powered lights.. :)

(No, I didn't remember the visuals of that component and was inspired by the Wikipedia entry..)

And I'm guessing that the total effort was greater than 1 months work?

Out of interest as an hourly rate did it come in above minimum wage?

I spent six months in front of my computer writing the book and doing research, on top of time taken to visit the places (which is the result of a lifetime of traveling).

I worked pretty much an 8 hour day. I was working in France at home so I would get up in the morning and start work on the book. I had always left myself something easy to work on the night before (such as a section of the book that I knew I could write) so that I was never blocked. I would take a long lunch with a glass of wine with my SO and then return to work on the book.

I had a very detailed schedule of work and I put off bits of the book that were easy for me until the end so that I was forced to work on the hard bits first. I had a spreadsheet that would track my progress and predict my end date based on writing rate. This was very motivational and made sure that I hit my deadline with O'Reilly.

Once the book was delivered there were 8 months between me handing in the manuscript and publication. This was longer than usual for O'Reilly because of the large number of illustrations in the book and the complexity of the book layout.

It already went round the HN mill last year but just in case anyone finds it interesting now, I wrote something similar (but about 50x longer, for various reasons) about my book, Beginning Ruby: http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/

Intriguingly, it seems from this post that Apress offers better terms than O'Reilly..

I was technical editor of the (dreadful) Practical OCaml, for which I made £650 (about £450 after tax) for months of work:

http://blog.merjis.com/2006/11/08/practical-ocaml/

Boy, I'm glad The Geek Atlas didn't get reviews like that! The worst anyone has said is "An interesting idea, but the author's choices seem overly idiosyncratic to me."

Ah, that reminds me of something. I was browsing the reviews for your book a few weeks ago having seen the book linked on your site and noticed the "worst" review you got (still 3 stars, though!) was written by a "P. Cooper." Paranoid as I am, I feel the need to note that this is/was not me :-)

You are paranoid. Also, if you had written the P. Cooper review I hardly would have held it against you. I thought his/her opinion was perfectly sensible.

I know. :-) I'm on "be nice and clear the air" alert as yesterday I got a bizarre e-mail from a HN user over a 2 line comment. Most of it can't even be reproduced here but the most pleasant bit was the ending: "Have a horrible day, and if you see your parents tell them that they did a sXXt job, and raised a sXXt human being."

You can't keep everyone happy, it seems, but it's worth a try!

Basically they ignored all my input. I came to the conclusion that Apress don't give a --- about the quality of their books. Or perhaps I should be more circumspect and say that they leave those decisions entirely up the authors and just publish it as-is.

BTW Geek Atlas was great. I bought it for my dad, but my mum ended up reading it the most.

When considering publishing a book, one must consider how widely applicable the subject matter is and how widely the publisher can actually disseminate your work. I just published my fourth book, seventh if you count works that I have written for hire. I do not expect it to do as well as my previous works because the publisher is smaller and the domain of application is much more restricted. The publisher of my first few books is a subsidiary of HarperCollins and runs bookstores itself, so its channels are much more pervasive. This is shown in the royalty statements.

Self-publishing naturally boosts the ROI on small runs, but it is not without its drawbacks. Whenever I have thought of a book that I might self-publish, I question whether it is worth writing. The major publishers know their customer better than I could realistically hope to ever know. If they would not take it on, one must wonder about the market for it. I do not say this to mean one should not self-publish, but self-publishing is usually reserved for pet projects that one has developed as a hobby and want to share. If one is looking for a high ROI on the effort it takes to write a book, the larger publishers are the way to go.

Also, the longevity of one's work is directly related to how evergreen the content is. If one writes something sexy or novel, I suspect one would be lucky to get a year or two of decent sales out of it. I write as evergreen as I can. so to this day, I am still receiving cheques from a book that I published 4-5 years ago that are close to the same level as what I received originally. It remains in the top 3% on Amazon.com. This is highly unusual, but it can be done. You will seldom get rich off a single title, but you can develop several streams of passive income if you write well and can engage readers. My 2¢, fwiw.

A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be harder to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies. Massive advantage if your subject matter is skewed towards the web anyway.

> A compelling reason to self publish, if possible. Sure it's going to be harder to gain traction but you only need to sell a tenth the copies. Massive advantage if your subject matter is skewed towards the web anyway.

It's not all it's cracked up to be. I just wrote another comment on this.

You can get 15% from a major publishing house for a semi-mainstream project, and you're looking at 60% from Amazon. The problem is, you're going to have to pay your own copyeditor, cover design, formatting, presentation, etc with Amazon. Realistically, you're looking at $1500 to $3000 to self-publish a quality piece of self-published work, and that's with a lot of hours of grunt work on your own, and then your work hasn't been shaped by an editor that knows what the market wants.

Nonfiction really just doesn't sell very well, so there's a realistic chance you won't recoup your expenses for self publishing. Of course, you could skip having your book copyedited professionally, but then your quality is going to be a lot worse. No matter how good of a writer you are, you get too close to your own work and really should have a professional go over it. When you publish with a mainstream house, that's part of what they do. When you self-publish, you're own your own and out of pocket for that.

If you have an opportunity to get paid speaking events or being recognized as an expert would increase your pay, you actually probably stand to make more mainstream publishing. Also, it's still probably better for getting your message out to many people.

You can probably maximize short term cash by self publishing if you don't worry as much about production quality, if you alreay have a huge fanbase (like Seth Godin for instance, smart of him to jump into alternate models), and especially if you can speculatively burn $5000 to $10000 to hire professionals and spend some money promoting and you could handle taking a loss or breaking even if it doesn't pan out. If you're already fairly established and successful, self publishing is very viable. If you're not, there's a lot of advantages to being signed to a major house.

I just did a lot of looking into this. First, yes, you nailed it - if you publish with a publisher, you do it because they're going to help you with distribution, presentation, and get you wider reach and impact. It's good for art and exposure, but not as good for getting cash, especially if you already know how to promote or have a significant fanbase.

With that said, a couple of things for anyone thinking of getting into this.

1. You really want your royalties to be based on "suggested retail list price" if possible. That means you get the same amount no matter what price people sell it at. Here's a link that explains more:

http://www.ivanhoffman.com/royalties.html

> The significant question to ask is: "Upon what figure is the percentage royalty rate to be calculated?" In other words, by what number do we multiply the royalty rate? Examples range from "net monies received by Publisher," "gross cash receipts," "the suggested retail list price," "wholesale price," and perhaps other variations on that theme.

You're on net, which kind of sucks, because the publishing house and your incentives don't always line up. Generally speaking, publishers want to maximize their profit across the catalog, and might be happy to "price your work to move" - I won't get into complicated maths about demand elasticity, but publishers sometimes prefer to sell lots of books at lower prices, even if an individual author would make more at higher prices. If you're on suggested retail price royalties, this is a non-issue and your incentives don't really clash at all. In fact, then it's a big win for you if the mark the book down to sell more copies, which they still likely will as it's the current model of the publishing industry.

2. I looked into self-publishing, and you can pick up a 60% royalty rate from Amazon Createspace, but your production quality is going to suck, you're going to need to eat a lot of upfront fees, thus you're taking on a lot of risk, and you're going to have make your own connections with distributors and bookstores and things like that (and you'll be approaching them from a position of lower credibility - they're still quite wary of self-published books).

I was going to self publish, but then realizing what Amazon wanted it's kind of ugly. They want an exactly formatted pdf of what your book would look like, and then the production quality is very so-so. And IMO, Amazon Createspace is the best self publishing route because of its tight integration with Amazon. If you go with a different self publishing company, you're looking at even more hassle trying to make distribution work correctly.

Geek Atlas looks good - congrats on that. I'll pick up a copy next time I'm settled down and not on the road. Congrats on that, it's a cool project and piece of art that I respect, notwithstanding our internet scuffling.

I was going to self publish, but then realizing what Amazon wanted it's kind of ugly.

It's not strictly necessary to have your book available in Amazon or at other bookstores (or even in print form at all) to make a successful "book." HN's own Amy Hoy (ahoyhere) has made more from http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/ - a $39 e-book - than I have from selling > 10,000 copies of a print book published with Apress.

What are the numbers, roughly?

Over $45,000 now, ftr.

Don't be so quick to discard CreateSpace.

I recently published my first book through them [1], and imho, it looks good. I formatted the book itself in LaTeX and had a graphic designer do the cover, which cost me a couple hundred bucks. It doesn't look exactly like a typical textbook, but that's much more because of some first-time mistakes of mine than anything about the production process.

Also, not sure what "a lot of upfront fees" are in this case. I paid for my cover, but that's not required. They offer a plan for $39 (iirc) that gives you a better royalty deal. But that's it.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1453772316/8631&pf_rd_i...

There is the new Barnes & Noble PubIt platform just detailed [1] for digital self-publishing. Royalties are 65% for the $2.99-$9.99 range and 40% for $10.00 <= prices <= $2.98. Supposedly with "no additional charges, regardless of file size" and "no hidden terms or fees".

[1]: http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/04/barnes-and-noble-opens-pu...

"That, by the way, is roughly how Amazon.com sells you books for so little"

What? You mean Amazon makes some sort of "margin" off the sales they make? How does that system work? I thought they'd make money selling google ads. I thought they pay the cover price and then get a little from the shipping

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