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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I've been a technical editor on a few programming titles. I don't think the average developer realizes that for the authors writing a book is a passion project.

Not only won't you get rich, you will be extremely lucky to make minimum wage. Most if not all the marketing is on your shoulders. Even though it's a hits driven business the publishers do all right though.

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Amen to this. In fact, I tell people that if they're interested in writing a book they shouldn't be asking themselves "Should I write a book?", they should be thinking: "I have 18 months of free time. What could I do with it?"

That's a lot of free time. You could:

- Learn a musical instrument pretty well. - Learn a sport and get pretty good at it. - Become a major committer on a large open source project. - Pick up a foreign language and achieve proficiency. - Make a lot of money on the side. - Go back to school and get a degree. - Concentrate on your social life. - Write a book.

If after considering these, you decide that writing a book is the best use of your time, go for it. Think of the money as a nice bonus.

What puzzles me is why most people writing book-length technical work in 2019 should use a traditional publisher at all. The premise that a publisher deserves to keep the vast majority of sales revenue because of the value they add seems like it belongs in another time. In the modern digital and online market, the idea of publisher as some sort of gatekeeper with established channels through distribution networks and into bricks and mortar bookstores is largely obsolete. And what publisher today provides a new author with enough technical editing resources or marketing power or administrative support to justify taking the rights and keeping most of the revenue?

Maybe someone has already done this, but it seems to me there's an obvious opportunity for some sort of small-scale broker service that connects authors with independent professionals who can offer the necessary skills in editing, design, illustration, ecommerce, printing and distribution if physical copies are wanted, and so on.

Because the money involved is often not much and there’s still some cred associated with traditional publishers.

Speaking as another O'Reilly author, I'd agree with this and add that for tech books the publisher is even less necessary. If you've written papers with Latex/MD/asciidoc, and drawn figures and tables, you're already doing most of what you'd do with your publisher's toolchain anyway. Hook up with Amazon's on-demand publishing service and (except for the nice cover) you've got it almost end-to-end.

[I assume you can write and organize thoughts decently well, and have some people who can proofread for you. If not, a publisher really won't help too much with that anyway.]

So what does a publisher provide? Marketing, promotion, distribution, reputation. No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will. They can arrange promotions through conferences and email distribution that you probably can't. I wouldn't underestimate this, but I also wouldn't necessarily think it's worth their 80%-90% cut either.

No matter how good of a book you write, having a name publisher like O'Reilly gives you substantial credibility that nothing else will.

Perhaps, but as they say, credibility doesn't pay the rent. What matters in commercial terms of how much money the book ends up putting in your pocket.

If a publisher is keeping 90% of the revenue, the services they offer had better generate at least an order of magnitude more sales to break even, less anything it would have cost you to obtain any other relevant services they provided directly instead. Does anyone here believe that this is in fact the case with the level of marketing that a typical tech publisher will do for a new work from a previously unknown author?

For a lot of the authors of technical books, credibility is the whole point.

The goal is not to write a book that directly makes money. The goal is to write a book that gets the author hired or promoted, or to land consulting gigs, or to get VC backing.

So, yes, credibility does pay the rent.

I have heard authors making as little as $500 and very rarely someone making more than $5000 from technical/programming books (outside of top 1% books). Given you easily put 500 hours of work in a book, the best possible outcome for vast majority of authors is literally minimum wage payment. Most authors are competent enough to make 5X more on their regular jobs so they are certainly not writing book for money.

I've made more than $5000 (each) from three books (two self-published, one '1st tier'). I don't think it's that rare, or maybe I"m lucky.

Agree on the minimum wage comment, though. I did it for career progression, personal life goals, and passive income.

For passive income? What is "passive" about writing a book? Or do you mean, passive as in "paid later"?

I wrote technical books through traditional publishers, and one reason I can tell is that they do some of the difficult parts of the process, which I consider extremely boring: proofreading, formatting, book cover, indexing. All of these are activities that can be better done by specialized people and are boring as hell. Even if you have the patience to do this part, most probably the book design will look amateurish. On the other hand, self publishing will only be financially rewarding if you are willing to do the marketing, in other words, if you want to make this a full-time gig, which is not the case for most technical writers.

As for your last remark, most technical publishers are already nimble operations that connect professionals and designers. It just happens that these small companies are owned by large corporations in order to benefit from the access to market channels.

So, unless you're willing to make this a full time job, I don't think it is such a great deal to self-publish your technical books.

>I wrote technical books through traditional publishers, and one reason I can tell is that they do some of the difficult parts of the process, which I consider extremely boring: proofreading, formatting, book cover, indexing.

You can hire people to do all that -- if you expect to sell your self-published book, and still make more profits than with a publisher.

you can, but then need to know how to vet them, and ideally they can work together well (professionally, on time, etc). you're taking on more risks and/or more managerial work by doing it. certainly possible, but not without cost.

>you can, but then need to know how to vet them

Or you just ask someone who know, and whose books you like, which ones they use...

I could hire someone if I was expecting to make a living from that, which I didn't. Unless, as I said, if I decided to do a lot of marketing for these books.

All of these tasks can be done for pennies by offshoring it to places like India. In fact most publishers have staff for proofreading, indexing, cover design etc entirely in India. My estimate is that you can recover the cost even if you sell as little as 100 copies.

All of these are activities that can be better done by specialized people and are boring as hell.

Sure, but you could hire independent specialists with exactly the skills you need rather than relying on your publisher's choices, and still retain overall control of your work and the process of distributing it yourself.

If a publisher provides some degree of overall project management as well then evidently there is also a space for professionals to offer that service independently to those authors who don't wish to get involved in such matters themselves.

Even if you have the patience to do this part, most probably the book design will look amateurish.

Perhaps, but the bookshelf next to me clearly demonstrates that big name publishers are capable of producing poorly designed, crudely illustrated, naively typeset, negligibly edited rubbish too.

You're still not understanding the economics of the issue: the publishers are paying me do the writing. If I do what you suggest, I will have to pay for this upfront and make the project an investment, which will only pay off if I'm also willing to do the marketing myself. In other words, unless you're willing to do significantly more work, self publishing is a money (and time) losing proposition, even compared to standard publishing.

There are good reasons to go with a name publisher or to self-publish but the upfront money (one way or the other) is probably not one of them. For most people, the time invested in writing a book far outweighs a small four-figure advance on the one hand or some out-of-pocket expenses for copy-editing and design on the other.

And you're going to be doing most of the marketing yourself in any case.

For most people, writing a book is an investment whether you go through a publisher or not. Unless it's just a passion project, you're presumably doing it for your career/brand/etc., not to make a meaningful amount of money. If you are evaluating how to go about a book project based on pure financial ROI, the short answer is you should probably do something else.

Correct, but that is exactly how the people talking about the self-publishing route are thinking: in terms of return on investment. The ROI in a standard publisher is small, and that is how it is supposed to be for something that is just a side project where you don't want to spend additional time. I am not saying that self-publishing doesn't have use cases: if you want to publish a book for which it is difficult to find a publisher, or if you're considering to do this as a full time job or a big part of your business, then self-publishing might be the right thing to do.

I'm sure it's how some people are thinking but there are other reasons you might want to self publish even if you take money 100% out of the equation.

- As someone else noted, you can put free eBooks online. If you're writing a book for visibility, being able to distribute free copies (or customized versions of free copies) might be a benefit.

- You don't need to conform to publishing industry length standards. If 75 pages cover the topic, you get most of the benefit of publishing "a regular book" for a lot less effort.

- You're on no one's deadline but your own. This has pros and cons but does let you better work a book around life, work, and other projects.

- The style, format, etc. is all up to you. Again, pros and cons.

I have made (a bit) more money with publishers than self-publishing. I'm also not sure if I'd go with a publisher again barring a strong reason to do so.

You are right and that's the way industry is moving slowly. Currently publishers provide the following:

- Toolkits and tutorials for inexperienced writers. If you never written a book, you probably don't know first thing you should write is outline. You probably also don't have good templates with typography and layouts that gets instantly recognized as good modern book.

- Taskmaster that keeps nudging you: This is super important role. Book writing is tremendously taxing job for most people and its very easy to get in writer's block, put off things and distracted.

- Regular advances: Almost all publishers would deposit money in your bank account at specific intervals during book writing. This keeps you obligated, at least morally, to keep going.

- Book reviews, editing: Various services like cover design, proof reading, recruiting technical reviewers etc.

- Marketing: Almost all publishers would buy sponsored spots on Amazon as well as Google. Some top-tier publishers would have journalists do book reviews, podcasters invite you for interviews. Some very top-tier publishers would have you do book tours at their expense. However, 90% of the authors will end up doing virtually all promotions themselves.

- Brand recognition: Publishing from very top-tier organizations like MIT Press has huge brand recognition due to their stringent selection process.

I think the future of writing is not even book-size publishing but probably series of posts published as chapters online.

There were a few publishing startups that only published electronically and let the author keep 60% of the title's price. I can't find them anymore so perhaps the experiment failed.

Up to 85% of the title's price. Meet Bubblin @ https://bubblin.io

Discl.: founder here.

Interesting idea. FYI, the layout of your home page breaks if your browser default font size isn't 16px, leaving most of the important text unreadable.

Can you send a screenshot what you see/inspected to my mail?

marvin@bubblin.io

Edit: I understand the issue now. Thanks!

Sorry, I'm commenting pseudonymously, so not really. But if you just change your browser default font size to say 20px you can't miss it.

At Leanpub, authors keep 80% of the title's price. We've paid over $7.5M in royalties to authors, and we're alive and well :)

Write in Markdown, click a button, get a book (PDF, EPUB, MOBI). Click a different button and your book is for sale with an attractive landing page, etc. You can even create a MOOC with one click, again based on Markdown...

(disclosure: cofounder)

Do you also provide services for proof-reading, cover design, marketing (or connect people with these expertise online)? It would be great to have community of people offering services to book writers for money or royalty.

I'm using leanpub [1] and gumroad [2] and very happy with both (get to keep 80% or more) - there are small differences between them, and I feel putting your book on both these sites will cover most of the needs for the user

[1] https://leanpub.com/

[2] https://gumroad.com/

A big problem is that even 100% cut doesn't amount to much if you are writing technical/programming related books. So this should probably not be the biggest decision factor. The advantage of not going with publisher, however, are MANY:

- You can open source the book. This can help you gain much more audience and career recognition.

- You are not bound by having to fit in to publisher's specific series, its style of writing

- You can chose your own title. Most publishers in technical books arena will force you to have title that is consistent with their series.

- You do things in your own time without pressure, may be even open sourcing book from day 1

- You are not bound by page limit. Most publishers would force you to have 250-400 pages, no matter what. My personal philosophy is that the most useful books are the shortest and personally I would prefer to write books that are as little as just 50 pages.

One of the better ones in that space is https://www.softcover.io/

The build pipeline looks like:

  .md --> .tex  -->  .pdf/.html/.epub/.mobi/.html

or you can start directly from the .tex

  .tex  -->  .pdf/.html/.epub/.mobi/.html

If you're looking to write a book that has a lot of latex math equations in it, this is the "book builder" you need. The tech is open source, see https://github.com/softcover/softcover and https://github.com/softcover/polytexnic

By the time you've paid these professionals the typical book is making a loss. A publisher profits from the hits. This is much more of a gamble for a lone author.

This is a reasonable argument, but an unfortunate corollary is that the author of a really successful book is losing out because they're subsidising all the commercial failures that the publisher took a punt on. The bookie always wins, but no-one else is guaranteed to.

In my experience (author of "technical" book about digital strategy), you need publishers for two things: 1) there's still some kudos in having something commissioned, edited and published by a known entity and 2) the imposition of a hard deadline.

If you can cope on your own without either of these, sure, self publish.

It is a hard slog, and as others say here, it's unlikely to earn you a reasonable wage - but it's hugely satisfying to see it through knowing how much discipline it takes.

Every time I start to think about writing a technical book, this is what stops me. The sheer amount of time you'd need to spend writing it is staggering.

On the flip side, once you've published the book being a noted author may present you with certain kinds of opportunities that may not have been available before. That perhaps is more valuable than the revenue generated from the book.

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