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Comment by xchaotic | Hacker News Reader

I consider this a success story similar to an NBA star making it. So if 100k is very successful in terms of computer book revenues, then I’d say money should not be the main motivation to do it, as there’s better, more reliable ways to earn money in the software industry - working for any SP500 company will easily get you the same amount of money in less than a year, more or less guaranteed. I know it’s not either or situation, just that it proves that money should not be main motivator for writing a book.

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working for any SP500 company will easily get you the same amount of money in less than a year

Horses for courses, as we say in the UK, but working for an SP500 company means a boss, reporting, office politics, and spending most of the day doing things that other people want you to to do. If you're independently minded and want to break out of that world, stories like the OP's are nice to see.

> If you're independently minded and want to break out of that world, stories like the OP's are nice to see.

I was approached by recruiters asking me if I wanted to work for Google in Zurich. I had to decline them.

I'm happier being a solo-entrepreneur. The best part is that I get to learn a lot of stuff about running a business, which was impossible when I was a employee.

>money should not be main motivator for writing a book.

I know my case is an extreme corner case, but I did finally try my hand at writing a book to make money. Long story short, I left my job, was living on my savings, tried a few things, etc. The only active earning came via 1/2 workshops I conducted at my college. I started maintaing materials for those workshops and expanded it on my own interest and tried to get donations. But no one did (GitHub didn't have sponsors at that time).

Finally, as a sort of last ditch effort before being forced to start working a job again, I tried my hand at converting my materials into a book. I had been working to convert "Think Python" to "Think Ruby", so that gave a bit of experience and confidence as well. Second book gave an initial sale of $250+ (enough to pay two months of my expenses), so I've continued with it.

With the pandemic, my workshops have dried up. Fortunately, I have 6 books now and looks like I'll comfortably cover my expenses this year. My monthly salary from 6 years back when I left the job would've covered my current yearly expenses, but I'm unlikely to go back to working like that again.

Do you mind me asking how ~$250 is enough to cover your expenses for 2 months? That amount is so low for anyone in the US that the anecdote reads more as proof that it’s not worth it to write a book for the income. :-)

I'm from India and currently live in outskirts of a city. I'm living in a rented place, otherwise my expenses (currently about $150 per month) would be even lesser. I also employ a maid for cleaning/washing purposes. $150 translates to more than Rs.10000 and that puts me above the average income in my country.

Writing a highly niche book like this, probably compensates you more in the "exposure" side of things (i realize that word has negative connotations now, but it is a real thing).

I have to imagine consulting gigs would go up. And as the "guy who wrote the book on it" you can probably charge significantly more.

LOL, good lord, no. I published a book about SSL around 10 years ago or so (one of only, I believe, five or six such books). I found myself unexpectedly back on the job market around 2017 and I applied for job listings specifically related to SSL. Never heard back from a single one of them. The only time the book came up was when I interviewed for the (completely non-SSL, non-security-focused) job I have now when one of the interviewers said, "You published a book about SSL? But you can do other stuff, right?"

> working for any SP500 company will easily get you the same amount of money in less than a year

If you live in the US. Which I'm (maybe wrongly) going to assume the author doesn't. 100k dollars is a life changing amount of money in a lot of countries.

> Which I'm (maybe wrongly) going to assume the author doesn't.

I'm not living in the US. I live in Romania. In Europe, salaries are not as high as the ones in California. But then, even in the US, the Silicon Valley salaries are much higher than in other states.

The great thing about selling products is that there is no upper boundary to how much money you can make. So, over time, you can end up making 250k $ from a single book.

The advantage of passive income is that you can use your time to create new products, which, in turn, can generate more income. It's not easy, but it's not impossible either.

Oh man, I completely agree with you. People here or on reddit who are constantly talking about US salaries and cost of life forget that there's other parts of the world where people are programmers.

I live in Poland and a one-off 100k USD as a side income in a year would absolutely change my life. I am _not_ exaggerating.

US dollar is a prefix currency sign. All your dollar sums should look like $<sum> (Euro is also prefix, BTW). Compare [1] and [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_leu#List_of_current_b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_one-hundred-doll...

Sorry for nitpicking, it really bothers me when such small and easily correctable error continues.

> I’d say money should not be the main motivation to do it

It depends on how you approach this investment. For me, a book is like any other product I make. It takes a certain amount of resources to produce and launch it, and it should generate at least as much revenue as I would have made if I had chosen to do consulting instead.

However, selling products can scale better than consulting. So, over time, you could end up making more money from a certain product (e.g., book, video course) than if you were employed or doing consulting.

I’ll go a step further. I agree going through all of the trouble writing and promoting a book for only a $100K seems like a lot of work. Especially when you consider the risk adjusted return.

Anyone that smart could make more than that - guaranteed just by consulting.

I’m most familiar with the Apple related ecosystem, but there you see people with a following making a money via optional subscriptions (Accidental Tech Podcast,Upgrade), subscription only podcasts (Dithering by John Gruber and Ben Thompson), or daily newsletters (Ben Thompson).

If he is not doing just for the money, then go for it. Another example is John Siracusa of ATP. He wrote large reviews of each version of OS X for the first 10 years that literally took months, did much more than his contract required and admitted that if he actually accounted for every hour he worked on it, it paid much less than minimum wage.

One more mention is Horace Deidu. He got his start as an analyst, started podcasting and now hosts paid workshops and conferences.

The book made more than 100k as it's still selling pretty well. In fact, the sales have increased over time, even if the book is now 5 years old.

I keep on updating it and will release a second edition soon.

The marketing effort is not just for the book. It also helps me sell:

- video courses

- on-site training

- online training and workshops

- find consulting opportunities

- subscription licenses for a software product I created, Hypersistence Optimizer, https://vladmihalcea.com/hypersistence-optimizer/

That makes sense. From what I’ve seen, most authors don’t write books just to make money from the books themselves but as the center of the “flywheel”.

I manged to get some training engagements because someone in the company read the book and liked it.

So, it can surely help you sell other services. However, this Twitter thread aimed to point out that a book can also make good money, not just be an exposure mechanism.

> Anyone that smart could make more than that - guaranteed just by consulting.

I'd have absolutely no idea where to even start consulting, or whether I'd have any aptitude for it. I'd be very surprised if anyone anywhere wanted to pay me $100k for consulting!

But I could probably write a book.

People have strengths in different areas.

Yes you could write a book, but no one would buy it or even hear about it unless you put in the work that he did to make a name for himself.

By the time you established yourself as an expert in the field like he did, consulting opportunities would open themselves up.

I just have a very small network compared to him, haven’t tried to market myself and just through word of mouth, I’ve had a couple of people asking me about consulting for their startups that could have easily netted $30K - $40K at $125-$150/hour.

I have a strict policy about not doing side gigs so I turned them down. But now, I probably would have had to turn them down regardless because of a conflict of interest since I do consulting as part of $day_job.

> Yes you could write a book, but no one would buy it or even hear about it

Lol thanks for the attack on my writing skill and ability to promote myself!

Being an expert in a field and being able to write a book doesn't mean you're any good at consulting. That's my point. It's a different skill.

That’s not what I said at all. I in fact said just the opposite. The process he took to promote himself so his book would sell is the same process it would take to promote himself as a consultant.

Also, consulting really involves only a few things:

- marketing yourself

- being able to listen to people and figure out their needs

- being a good communicator and being able to explain concepts well.

- being technical sound enough to solve the problem.

- being disciplined enough to be a consistent worker.

Most of which overlaps with being a successful technical author.

It all tends to be interconnected. A number of people ask me for advice based in part on the last book I wrote. I'm happy to give them a free hour phone call as it's sort of good ambassadorship associated with my day job. I could do a side consulting business in the space but don't really have an interest so I give them the name of one or two people I know who do have consulting businesses if they want to dig deeper.

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