Ask HN: What does success for a technical book look like? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does success for a technical book look like?

28 pointsCoreSet9 comments

In September I released a small book about programming and security. Like most technical authors, I did it for the experience and professional credential more than the money.

Now I've sold around 300 copies in the first few months, nearly paying off my $2K advance.

I'd like to write more - a lot more - so I'm trying to judge how successful the book is in terms of securing myself more writing opportunities. I've been offered the chance to pitch / write more by the publisher, and the publisher overall seems really happy with my output, but it would be an enormous help to understand what people in the industry / acquisitions editors / etc, use as their criteria for success in technical publishing.

View on HN

Serial self-publisher [0] here and loving it :-)

From a number's perspective, I think you can look at anything between $0 - $3000 a month for a popular technical book on Amazon. Maybe there are some even up at $3000 - $5000. That doesn't include what you get from publishing it through other channels as well.

That's only on point of viewing it though. I like more to see success from the recommendation/readers ratio perspective: How many of the people that have read your book would recommend it to someone else. That's where word of mouth comes into play that I find so much more worth than any money. It guarantees your book's success over the long term, not only for the launch. As every startup launch: it's a marathon and not a sprint! So make sure you deliver high quality or iterate towards high quality.

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/the-road-to-learn-react/

Thanks for the comment Robin! Your blog is an interesting case study - clean, good content, different monetization strategies (from what I can tell you have at least your infoproducts + consulting + affiliate + advertising). I'll have to study it more. I also use Hugo for static site gen!

I never thought of publishing on amazon, interesting.

Which tool do you use for editing your ebooks?

So far I have self published my ebooks with the leanpub markdown editor.

However it leaves a mention of leanpub inside the book.

Pretty sure it wouldn’t be ok to have this for amazon.

have a look at pandoc [1], you can convert text files in markdown to ebooks

[1] https://pandoc.org/

I'd published a couple books years ago and the publisher's benchmark was 2000-4000 copies (depending on variables within their business) over any period of time was a commercial success. If you've done 300 in the first few months it seems fairly likely you'll get there. That said, the biggest bar to securing more writing opportunities for technical books is more about proving you can write consistently, so as a second time author you'll already be well ahead of the game. Technical publishers know the business and where there's enough interest and little enough competition to make money, so let them guide you on interesting areas to publish in and you can focus on great writing.

Thank you - even seeing that number is really helpful.

Did the topics of your books diverge significantly? One thing I'm balancing is moving out of security and into other areas.

My real, secret, ultimate goal would be to break into general interest nonfiction, which is of course completely different, but I'm content for now just moving on to other technical topics.

I don't think you should be afraid of linking to your book.

For anyone interested, it's "Bug Hunting for Penetration Testers" [0], and seems pretty good.

Also: Packt Publishing has a 5$/5€ sale right now.

[0]: https://handsonbughunting.com/

Thanks for posting! Didn't want to come off as a shill.

Can you share the book? At least in the profile? I’d be interest to take a peek.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com