Writing a book: is it worth it? | Hacker News Reader

Writing a book: is it worth it?

martin.kleppmann.com

642 pointsvivekseth287 comments

I'm an author of 8 books in Robotics. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this.

Pros 1) Great visibility in the robotics community 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income) 4) People start identifying me in conferences 5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities 6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots 7) Knowledge also doubled (I have to do a lot of homework in order to write things in the book). 8) Self-satisfaction to became an author

Cons 1) Time consuming 2) Need full-time dedication 3) Royalties are very low (only 17% of the book price) 4) Books will easily come online for free download. This will definitely demotivate us to write another book. 5) Books will outdate very easily (Technical books), so you may have to update it by writing a new edition. 6) Getting good income from books is like getting a lottery. It will only happen to a few people.

The list goes on. Just want to share my list of my books here https://robocademy.com/product-category/robotics/

How much and what ways did your motivations change from writing book 1 to say book 4? At that point, what's keeping you going the most? By the time you sit down to plan book 8, what's going through your mind especially when you factor in the cons? Thanks.

Interesting question. Here is the story.

I got an invite to write a book in 2014. Initially i thought it was very easy and can complete within 3 months. By this assumption, i agreed and start writting. When I start writting, i understood that, it is not easy at all. As a first time author, i was litterally struggling. The only factor that pushed me was, I already spent months for this, so If leave the project, I will lose that months. So I kept going.

After 1.5 years, my first book poped up and it was well recieved. Immediately after that, I got the next invitation to write second book. The thing is, the book subject was very good. So I agreed again by understanding all the cons of writting. I have spent 6 full months (full time for completing the next book. And I am keep on getting invitation and because of the experience of first book, I could easily draft the other books. It was a tough time for me too. Only less income, but only motivation was, I am doing something challenging and I am learning lot of stuff, also I am writting about the technology I like the most.

These factor pushing me for writting me again :)

Sorry for the typo and grammatical errors. :)

I can not fathom how you could write 8 books. I have written one book and got it published on Packt. It was a very tiring process.

> 5) Books will outdate very easily (Technical books)

I feel you. I wrote a blockchain programming book. It was becoming outdated soon just after the book was being released. The pace of the blockchain technology is very fast.

Yes, I think if you are writing a technical book, it'd be better to focus on a more stable technology. That or plan for a revision or two after the initial release.

And I can tell you, after I finished my book, I didn't want to think about the topic for a month or so. Can't imagine committing to a revision or two.

Doing revision of a book is OK. but the issue is, when we start writing a book, the version may be say 0.2, and when we release the book, the version may be 0.4. So the main thing is, the book got outdated in the release itself. So just think about our situation. Do we have motivation to write another book? I had this situation and I have changed the content of the book at the end of final edit. This is painful.

That's a good point. That would be deflating to have a book where the code examples wouldn't work with the latest stable release. I guess this is where a self published ebook would be a better fit (plus automation to make sure that your code samples were up to date with the latest runtime).

I guess it depends on how much the technology evolves too. I think of my own experience in writing a book on cordova. The amount of work to revise it for new editions would be, I estimate, about 50% of the effort of a new book, just because there was significant overlap between the versions.

I have started writing in 2014 and done by 8th book in 2019 I guess. It was just a roller coaster ride. I really like the technology I am working on and very interested in writing tutorials. I think that was the main overriding factor of writing books even though it's having a lot of cons. Still planning to write a book, but this time I will go with self-publishing.

Hi, can you share your process for writing?

Regarding Con 5), it's generally true with some exceptions. I wrote a Fortran book (https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortran) and expect it to stay fresh for at least several years thanks to the slow pace and the unusually high maturity of the technology. On the downside, it's a relatively narrow niche so I don't expect high total number of sales. For instance, about 800 copies have been pre-ordered in the first 2.5 years of writing. The book is done and will be out in print in November.

The issue is, if we are writting from 2020, we may publishing in 2021 or 2022. In the meantime, there may be lot changes in the technology that we are working on. So we may have to change lot of things in the book content even we finish all the chapters. This happened to me always. The version of software framework (ROS) is changing and to keep up the new version I will keep on changing all the chapters ( mainly commands and all).

All the best for your new book :)

Thank you! :) I totally get it. Same with my book: a new revision of the standard (Fortran 2018) was published half-way through the writing. However, thanks to the glacial pace of the Fortran standards development, I was able to plan for the additions to the language from the start.

I am one of the benfactors of your book. I heavily relied on it while trying to parallelize an ancient geophysical inversion code.

Didn't think i'd actually be responding to an author whose book I have spent multiple hours with.

Thanks for the great book!

Thank you for your support! I'm happy that it was helpful for you. If you have any questions or get stuck at any point feel free to email me at milancurcic@hey.com. I'll be happy to help.

I wrote a book, too (career advice for new devs). I had previously written a technical ebook (about Cordova) and wanted to write something that had a longer lifespan, but was still focused on developers. Writing a technical book was great, but, like you said, it became outdated very easily.

That said, if you want to anchor yourself as an expert in a space, I can't think of a better way to do it than to write a book. This is because it will force you to learn the topic very well (I remember spending an hour testing out something so I could write one sentence accurately) and because you can say "oh yes, I wrote a book on that" which gives you a lot of credibility.

I think it was totally worth writing the less technical book too. It makes you dig into thoughts and ideas in a much deeper way than blog posts or presentations.

It also opens up some doors in terms of presentations and speaking, if that's of interest. My book wasn't on a technical topic, but if you write one, I could definitely see that leading to some consulting.

I think the best way to write a book is to blog it first, then assemble the pieces (adding in more). This lets you do a number of things:

* you can outline the topic as a series of posts. If you can't do this, don't write a non-fiction book.

* you can see if you like the topic 5-10 posts in. If you do, then you have the bones of a book. If you don't, why would you commit to a full length book?

* you can build an audience. I didn't have a large audience, but had a list of 200ish people I could market the book to. And again, if you blog 5-10 times and no one is interested, they probably won't be interested in a book either.

* you can easily turn it into an ebook (using a tool like leanpub) if you determine you want to self publish. If you work with a traditional publisher, you can still pull and revise the blog posts.

Since the book was just released in August, I have no idea of the financial success. Like the author, I'm not looking to have this be a huge piece of my income stream. If I can earn out my advance, I'll be happy.

Here's the book URL if you want to check it out: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/the-book/

>That said, if you want to anchor yourself as an expert in a space, I can't think of a better way to do it than to write a book.

I think this depends on the field and the audience. I'm not sure about other sciences but, when I was working in Biology and Ecology, there was much higher regard placed on people who'd been published in reputable peer reviewed journals than those that published books on topics.

It usually came down to the assumption that if someone published their research in a book rather than submitting it for peer review, it meant the quality of the research wasn't up to standards and likely would have been rejected and information from scientists published only in books is looked at as questionable and not really a good source to use as a primary reference.

That being said, the general public tends to place book published scientists in almost higher regard than many working scientists and will take information published in such form as undeniable fact.

> I think this depends on the field and the audience.

Fair enough. I should have specified the "software engineering field" as the scope of my statement. I don't know enough about other fields (such as branches of science or history), and certainly writing a fiction book doesn't anchor you as an expert.

It seems like you are talking about publishing research work in book chapter rather than peer reviewed articles.

A book usually covers a selected topic in depth and in a coherent manner. This is particular useful for graduate students. Besides, some book authors also invite their friends to give comments. The impact of a book can be as rigorous and significant as journal articles.

Teaching the topic to students is the best way to learn it thoroughly because it closes the loop and you are challenged from many different angles. Something you understand weakly will be something you explain poorly, and be a big sticking point you'll need to revisit repeatedly.

The blog approach might get a similar benefit if you can get a lot of feedback and discussion for each one. But it seems like it would have a degree of self-selection of readers, where you only get the most motivated commenting on any given post.

I have to say I think you're right. I think the advantage of a blog format is that it forces you to capture your thoughts in writing. So you have to challenge yourself.

But, having taught some in-person and synchronous online classes, the different points of view from students definitely force me to understand the topic at many levels.

One issue teaching might have that blogging doesn't is that it may be hard to find your audience, if it is a niche topic. For instance, I doubt that anyone would have signed up for a Cordova automation course (the topic of my ebook). But perhaps in a world of Udacity I'm incorrect.

> 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income)

Yes, I think technical books are a great marketing asset when you're a consultant / freelancer. It gives you a ton of credibility, more so than one more project to your cv / portfolio. Plus, as a bonus, it provides a few royalties. It's a good way to stand out, too: "Do you have a business card so that I put it with all the other business cards I got today and will forget as soon as I get back home?" "No, Mr. Prospect, but let me give you that book I wrote, you'll enjoy it, and you have my contact info on the first page".

Rather than a potential source of passive income, I tend to see it as a marketing tool that has a very low to negative cost. Seen that way, most of your cons aren't that bad.

If I were a freelancer / consultant, I would definitely write books.

Is it really a full-time job? I know a few people who have written books part time, do you think that's a bad idea?

I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point.

I honestly wish I was able to channel this incredible amount of writing into blog posts or a book, but I don't know how. My blog has had one post in the last three years. Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.

It's always been this way too. For example, in high school, I spent the time on https://math.stackexchange.com/.

As someone just getting started on Rust, I’m grateful for people like you helping the newbies out with our little snippets of code. So thank you, even if we haven’t interacted yet :)

Just take your last 20 responses and turn them into a post?

I agree. Or if you want to invest a bit more effort: surely there are patterns of problems you are seeing, each of which could be a blog post.

There's a model in the way Randall Munro turned a bunch of XKCD comics into the best-selling books "What If" and "How To." It's a little more complicated than gluing together all of your posts, but with the right editor, it can all come together. https://xkcd.com/how-to/

+1 to this. This is really just a compiler/editor problem.

Compiling your answers into semantically sensible standalone posts- that's something that some specific people do very well, very easily, as easily as you respond.

Whether it is economically advantageous for you to hire someone is a different question- answer is probably not- but if you knew someone in the Rust space who was an editor rather than an author, they could, in 2-3 hours a week, scan your posts, distil the useful elements, and write something for you to approve and post. Very common workflow in the publishing space.

Ghostwriters are this at book-scale- interviewing the named author, which, like forum posts spurs answers, which get aggregated into subject areas and distilled using a common voice.

You definitely don't have to beat yourself up about it, or try to solve it with "activation energy" processes- which to be fair sometimes work. Some people are just good at some stuff and other people good at other stuff.

Cheers, good luck.

You could easily write some posts using this:

"Most common errors beginners make in Rust"

You're like the world expert on this.

"What people often get wrong about Rust"

Maybe there are common conceptual issues you spotted?

I'm not sure, but I would also imagine that you explained some things a few times in a more simple language, this could also be a great thing for a blog post. Instead of pointing them to a doc and explaining something about it, point them to your blog post then.

I liked this comment because it felt immediately constructive and a great starting point to think about if nothing else. One of probably many examples of this list-based approach (for a different technical subject) is "50 Android Hacks" by Carlos M. Sessa. Avoiding common errors makes sense but are even more valuable when the warnings are paired with idiomatic alternative patterns.

https://www.manning.com/books/50-android-hacks

It's easy to solve problems that people currently have, it's hard to visualize the problems people might have.

Just spitballing, but how about just tentatively titling a book "Common Rust Mistakes". Then take those 4000 posts (congratulations and thank you, by the way) and group/fishbone them according to elements that you feel are appropriate. I hazard to guess there's a CMS or LaTeX/DocBook package or org-mode setting that would allow posting first draft notes as blog entries. If you need a forum conversation to focus your writing, imagining a Gentle Reader may help. Many writers also bend the ears of family, friends, and editors.

There’s a decently well selling book on Python that is of the same format.

Are you on CodeMentor? Sounds like you should be!

Take the essence of the question asked, or the non-working sample code given, take your response on the forum post, verbatim, and post that on your blog. Your blog is a marketing vehicle, you aren't necessarily doing it to rank high in google or get lots of traffic for ads. You're doing it so you have a single source of content you can direct someone towards and also identify yourself as a source of knowledge and expertise.

It is precisely what I have done in the past.

I'm definitely not putting things on my blog for google rankings or ads. Those sound like they would be really boring to spend my time on, and the ads are extra pointless because the government has put a cap on my income in exchange for being paid to be a student, and I'm already at this cap with my part-time software job.

I will certainly try to see if I can repurpose some of my better responses to common questions as blog posts.

So don't do it for ads, but you should do it for ranking. You have a large body of content waiting to be exposed and once it does, if you later decide to write a book or do conferences or do training, then your blog will help you achieve that. You should be rewarded for the effort you have put into helping other people.

Focus on Answering The Damn Question. In my experience, this is enough to attract traffic in the long run.

If that works, then you can start thinking about monetization. For now, just build something good amd see how it gets picked up.

I have various blogs and outlets for putting up my writing. Only one of those has Google ads on it. It has Google ads not for the revenue (I don't think the ad revenue has even generated enough over the years to cover the hosting cost) but it is for me to understand how Google ads work on a Wordpress website. My experience of ads usually comes from "I need to integrate this SDK and provide these reporting tools so that the people who care about ad revenue can stay away from my desk" not a "I am a small-time content provider using Google ads."

At least, that's the story I tell myself to salve my ego due to not making any money from ads on my personal website :-)

As an addendum to posting your content on your own website, whenever someone reaches out to me for help, I always direct them to ask the question on the relevant forum, e.g. Unity3D or Artificial Intelligence or some such place, or post it on Stackoverflow, and then email me a link to the very public location. I have the philosophy that I will cheerfully and willingly labour over a lengthy answer and example code that will help out 10,000 people with the same problem. But I won't give the time of day to a single person.

I think you're fighting activation energy.

I'd find a way to make it cheap for you (in time and energy) to iterate such that the one-off content that you're providing can be used as stepping stones to a paragraph, and then a chapter, and then a book.

As an example, I've written thousands (!) of customer support messages, via email, chat, or reddit, to help my PhotoStructure beta users.

I've found that the second or third time I answer a question, either I need to fix the product so the question doesn't show up again, or I transcribe my response onto a new page on photostructure.com. In my case, it's just `hugo new content/faq/post.md` and then I dump the new content into the new page.

It doesn't have to be an elaborate post. Perhaps a bit more nuance or detail than my customer support reply, but not much more than that. Sometimes it's only 1 paragraph.

I've found that these "humble starts" can then be iterated on fairly easily, as inspiration comes to you.

As an example, according to git, I've made 15 commits to <https://photostructure.com/faq/library/>. The first iteration was just a handful of sentences I wrote as a response to what I meant by "library."

Yeah, it's definitely activation energy. Once I've actually started working on something, I can do anything, but damn, starting is tough.

Wow, I can relate to this so much.

What are some techniques anyone here has found to help push oneself to get started on things?

Start working on something small and easy that's related to the thing you're actually trying to accomplish, and that'll help swap the broader context into your head that you need to work on the larger problem.

Break the larger problem down into tiny little pieces that are easy to accomplish. Put them in a list. Pick off the easy items first each time you're trying to get started.

If the first step is too big or the end goal is too far, I cut the first step into smaller steps, and try to find a tempting intermediary goal.

Right now, I'm restoring an old motorcycle, and it's not going well. A bolt broke and I need to extract it from the engine I just reassembled.

My end goal now isn't to ride a shiny vintage bike, it's just to get it running. The first step isn't to extract the broken bolt, it's to open the engine again, a ten minute job.

Start small, set reasonable goals, and be careful about premature optimisation.

Start with a high level outline. Organize. See what that looks like and let me know if you have any questions.

That’s really interesting, I’m the opposite where starting on things is easy but pulling through to the end and actually making a finished product is tough. I wonder if there’s a word for that.

I coin one rule for blogging: However you do it keep it consistent. If you do monthly long reads keep doing that. If you do short posts 5 times per day keep making them 5 times per day (its better to drop to 4 and make a buffer that auto publishes than to skip days)

Forum discussions can be a mess of excess and ot information. You could easily cut and paste questions you've answered. (Sometimes modify them to fit how generic your answer is) Then copy paste your answer under it as well as useful bits from other peoples response.

Put links to topics and/or profiles with everything you "steal" to promote the forum.

Make tools to automate the process. You don't want to be muleing clip board back and forwards.

Just dump it into a post and save the draft if it isn't finished in 15 seconds.

Again: be consistent at it. If there is one post per day the visitor should be able to visit 1 time per day and find it. If it isn't there for 1-3 days - why bother?

I disagree with this advice. I write articles when there is a need for them. Sometimes they are 2 months apart, and sometimes 2 days. I can't plan the problems I'll face and solve in advance.

I also spend a lot of time updating old articles with new information, and that new information trickles in at random intervals.

Most of your readers will find you through Google, when they're trying to solve a specific problem. They won't subscribe to your content or return without a specific goal in mind, so consistency is not that important.

Could say that is still consistent. If your articles arise out of a need then that is the formula. What you could do is delay the publication if there is no urgency.

I found a really cool blog one time where the author was writing a book spread out over 4 blog posts (or so) that he kept updating. His daily new posts briefly described the updates he made. It was a cool rss subscription for me. I certainly didn't visit his book every day but his updates gave a sense of involvement and I ended up reading the "same" articles multiple times both for the content and to see the progress. Had he just updated the postings I would never have returned.

This would likely be well suited for a short book of rust anti patterns. I love resources that are learning by inversion: here is what not to do, and why.

> Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.

The key here is the interlocutor. Trying to write an interesting post for a general reader is a dauting task hence the energy. Try to materialize that reader a bit more, even if mentally. Or write in dialog form :)

It doesn't have to be interesting if it solves a problem.

I write about health insurance and visas. My guides are not page-turners, but they're a welcome introduction to really complex matters.

I don't know if this will help, but an idea. Take your posts, copy them, and paste them on your blog. Add a little bit of background to make it understandable outside of the context of a message thread.

Still feel like a ton of work?

I created my own blog as a "note to self" type work. I would write down anything I was working on so that I could reproduce it in the future. I now have hundreds of personal documents and hundreds of professional documents at work. They come in amazingly handy, to me, nearly every day.

I've now written a dozen very small books on subjects I care about. The books are just 20 pages or so and people seem to love them. An example is "Publish your eBook by Joel Dare" on Amazon. See also, Zines.

I write down solutions to problems I encountered. It's pretty useful if you encounter the same problems again. I ended up on my own website through Google a few times.

Grab all your posts and sort them in some kind of logical grouping and order. Decide which ones are still useful, update those that you can, and create a book out of them. Call the book something like, "1000+ answers to your most asked questions." Once you have that, publish it as an ebook. Don't give it away for free. Price it at $19.99 but have specials every so often maybe for $2.99. From that point on add it to every message that you respond to. Tada, you've become a published author with the cred of a technical book. Believe me when I tell you, you can make a career out of it. Add your contact info. so that you can get some public speaking gigs out of it. Given your past of answering questions as a hobby, you'll be able to update the book every few years. Don't look at the book as the money maker, you'll get relatively little money, but as the tool that will expand your career. At the very least, you can add it to your resume.

High priced consultants do this all the time. You should do it. You've written the material already.

Having had you reply to multiple questions of mine I just want to so thank you!

Mood; right now I have 6 published posts on my personal blog (hosted on github) spanning 5+ years, as well as a couple on my old company blog, but honestly there's a big hurdle to go from shitposting on the internet to publishing posts.

I do see blogposts as a stepping stone to writing books though.

Anyway I've written thousands if not tens of comments all over the internet, but I also have massive impostor syndrome so I never really look back to see if said comments were appreciated or educational.

I've also been fairly active on the Go slack channel, but very much from a beginner's mindset. 10+ years of software development and I still feel like I'm feeling my way around in the dark.

I've got tons of material to write about though, I really should set aside a couple hours to put things down. I feel like that would be a possible way forwards.

But at the same time I'm pretty terrified of being called out for being wrong; not only because it's confrontational, but because I would have to amend or retire my posts. Call me weird but it's giving me a lot of anxiety.

But, I should probably just bite the bullet and go for it, it'll be a way to improve my confidence and advance in my career, because that's been stuck for a while.

I should look into blogging platforms that are like Twitter, but for longer posts. But not full length ones. IDK

Why don't you write a book called "rust gotchas: 4000 subtle ways rust can try to f*ck up with you and how you can defeat it"?

I'm (almost) serious (if you do that, do several, specific titles: "100 lifetime gotchas", "100 traits gotchas", etc.) I've read several books that were little more than short blog posts collections, with a common theme but no real overall structure, and, mind you, some of them were pretty good despite of that, because they solved real problems I had. Some people learn better with a bottom-up approach (i.e seemingly random sequence of independent items that eventually let you grasp the big picture) than top-down (3 parts, with each part having 3 chapters, with each chapter having 5 sections, with each section having...)

Sounds like you respond more strongly to the social aspects (eg feedback mechanism) of forums.

If you can figure out how to leverage that for channeling into a book or blog posts, that'd probably work.

Maybe the technique mentioned by the OP about "releasing each chapter online as an ebook" would get you some of the way there?

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

While I love books immensely, these days I just don't buy them any more. What I do is google answers to problems, and for guidance on how to do things. There's just so much fantastic information immediately available... and there's the "constantly changing" thing that many people have mentioned. Books can't really keep up, alas.

So, I'm sorry it's not a paid position, but really, thanks so much for helping the modern programmer, particularly with rust... it's a challenging language.

You don't need to turn it into a book. You can turn it into an online resource.

I help people settle in Berlin. I got tired of repeating myself, so I put my answers on a website and linked to it. Now it's my main source of income, and a well-known resource for expats.

I don't think any topic can be monetized with such ease, but it doesn't hurt to try. Even if you completely fail, you'll still help thousands of people who are googling their problems.

ha, that's funny.

I found i have the same sort of procrastinating behavior. If I want to clean my house, just avoid some higher-priority thing.

You should harness it. Decide you will put in 4 hours a day doing exercise, and procrastinate by writing a book on the couch. :)

He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it.

I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contacted about other jobs, and even to write other books.

They all said the actual book itself made them no money beyond their initial (small-hardly five figure) advance, and in terms of dollars per hour they probably would have been better off getting a fast food job, but it opened up a lot of doors and made them at least a little bit "internet famous."

Just having a book that you've written on any topic listed somewhere on your resume is nearly always a positive. It is kind of like having a college degree in that it shows you can start something and finish it.

way more people finish college than publish a book though. It's a higher-level signal IMO, even a self-published book is a massive accomplishment that shows huge dedication.

If you do any kind of consultancy, writing and publishing a big is part or the normal careere path.

another good way to become a little bit "internet famous" is to create and maintain a useful open-source project. IMHO, this is more future proof in the technology space since you can gradually evolve a project but a book can become obsolete if it focuses on a specific technology rather than fundamentals.

Obligatory: https://mobile.twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?la...

Meh, I expected this was true. However, after 6(?) years of maintaining a moderately popular project (~10k stars), it hasn't amounted to much real external value. It has never come up in interviews, it has never led to any job offers, it's mostly just a thing I work on for free which people happen to like.

Which is too bad. I want money!

Do tell - what is the project?

It’s your job to highlight your relevant skills and experience during interviews. It’s especially important to be proactive about unusual experience that canned questions won’t hit, like an OSS project you run or a book you wrote. Remember that having something good is NEVER enough. You HAVE to tell people about it.

Case in point - you don’t even link the project in your comment! I can’t even begin to give you specific advice because I don’t know anything about your project beyond its age and basic popularity tier. Maybe it’s super relevant to me and I would benefit from bringing you in for some consulting. We’ll never know because you didn’t mention the crucial details.

Here are some generic things you can try:

- Don’t be afraid to mention your specific project in relevant settings, like this forum or an interview.

- Use examples from your project to answer questions (“Sure I know about X, I considered using that when my project needed Y, and my benchmarking eventually suggested Z was better in that instance”)

- List the OSS project on your resume like a job (“Primary Maintainer, MyLibrary, 2012-. Designed, Implemented and Maintained a library with 12,000 github stars. Reviewed and merged 300 community pull requests. Implemented CI/CD...”)

- Identify corporate users of your OSS and proactively offering consulting

- Speak at conferences/meetups focused on your programming language/ framework /industry

- Blog about the project and your experiences with it

>It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it.

And I'd add that this is the real value IMO of going with a name publisher--which is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag. Fairly or not a lot of people mentally make at least a bit of mental deduction for a book published independently.

This would be nice if it were actually true. My credentials are pretty top-notch (including writing one book, and editing another) but I still get asked to invert binary trees.

I love writing (and I’m working on another book), but other than maybe getting you in the door, you’ll still have to deal with typical tech interview nonsense.

I haven't switched companies since I've written books (and am not a developer anyway) so I can't say about technical interviews. But it's definitely helped me in other ways within my company, with partner companies, etc.

I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what value I can bring to the company -- what problems I can help them solve in the future. I'm not there to coast on my prior reputation.

Also, regarding "overcome the hurdles": those hurdles are now practically non-existent with various publishers. This results in books on the topic that should never have been published.

I could explain in more detail, but there's a lot of negative connotations with technical book authorship, which I work to overcome in such interviews and in roles. Does the author care more about working on their reputation than working for the company? Did the author only write the book to make an exaggerated name for themselves for the benefit of job interviews? (As you suggested in your opening sentence :-) I personally only write books when I'm already the expert on the topic, and it's a way to share my expertise.

Another interview I had years ago, after telling them about my first book, the interviewer said "so you know the theory, but can you put it in practice?" The assumption being "those that can do, those that can't write books." I was in a worse position for letting them know about it.

And of course, there can be positives for writing books. You are showing a willingness to share your knowledge with others. (You can do that in blog posts as well.)

Edit: added missing word "interview"

Sounds to me like a good way to weed out bad employers. If they think of a book as a negative, they probably have a few chips on their shoulders. Also, you sound overly modest to me.

Disclaimer: I haven't written a book.

> Also, you sound overly modest to me.

This was my reaction as well. Absolutely no offense to the parent comment, but this sounds like a combination of being overly modest + getting bitten by dumb behaviors by bad companies.

There's also a big difference between:

- Strut into the interview. Drop a copy of your book on the table. "I literally wrote the book - hire me"

And

- "Tell me about yourself" ... "Well, I'm bla bla bla, passionate about xyz, oh, and passionate to the point that I wrote a book about xyz if you're interested in the details"

If you're an arrogant ass, yeah, the book is a liability. But unless you really dislike the thing you wrote and want to squash it, the fact that you wrote a book at all, much less the subject, says something about you as a person. Others in this thread have talked about the positive signals this sends so I won't re-hash those here.

Right; the person saying "I literally wrote the book - hire me" is saying it matters most, and I think that approach is likely to backfire.

There are multiple problems with that attitude, including: 1) You probably aren't hired to write books, so what matters most is other things you'll be doing. 2) There are really good books and really bad books, so saying you wrote _a_ book doesn't carry the weight you may think. Was it good?

I think the problem is for most technical areas and for most technical books the writer has not literally written THE book on the subject, they have at best written A book on the subject - of people who have written the book on the subject I can think of, off the top of my head:

Donald Knuth Harold Abelson and the Sussmans

- a few others but you get the picture, most subjects do not have a definitive book.

> You probably aren't hired to write books, so what matters most is other things you'll be doing.

This is true, but some employers will allow you to write on company time. As Kleppman notes, value created by books squirts everywhere, only some of it onto the author, which can be distinct from value landing on their employers.

I've been working on Knative in Action for the last year because Pivotal (now VMware) liked the idea that it would happen under their flag.

(Your books are quite excellent, by the way.)

The main difference is the reason that a senior engineer or VP gets hired.

It is not to write code by themselves. It is to help other people do it.

For this, being a walking encyclopedia certainly helps. Of course, there's probably a correlation with being able to solve the programming puzzles in such a situation, too.

A prototypical Hacker News reply.

I don’t think you realize who the author of that reply is.

There’s nothing HN typical about him :)

I don't know either. His history shows some extensive knowledge about the types of things I'd expect readers of hacker news to know. Or course there are a lot of beginners, but the goal is to discuss things people like him are interested in. I aspire to write posts as helpful and detailed as his comment history shows.

He's got some creds: http://www.brendangregg.com/

He's a programmer with a Wikipedia page. There's like what? Maybe 60 of those?

I've long ago accepted I'd never make that list. If it ever happened I'd probably commit myself to an asylum immediately because it'd be 1000x more likely I had actually finally cracked and started hallucinating things.

Actually let's be real. Being a famous programmer is probably within my reach. I lack the discipline, focus, and dedication to spend the right amount of time on the right parts of the right projects. If this is possible for me to fundamentally address and within my capacity (still questionable) than doing things of deep impact is probably feasible. Even if it isn't, I should do it anyway.

I avoided children and marriage so I'd never have to choose safety over taking risks. So, take, more, risks. Now is the only time there ever will be.

I should print out those last 2 paragraphs and read it aloud in front of my bathroom mirror every day.

His books are excellent, especially the latest bpf one. Highly recommended.

It's not from a typical HN'er, but it's from someone who the typical HN'er hopes engages in a conversation.

Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To give a different perspective: I co-authored a technical book 19 years ago.

It is listed on my resume, but i don’t mention it at interviews because it was so long ago.

Last year at a job interview, the interviewer told me he still had my book. I got the job.

If someone has a problem they probably are seeking you out because you wrote the book, in which case you already have the job (unless HR discovers something bad) and the purpose of the interview is to convince you to take the job not the other way round! They already know you wrote the book and are hoping your pay isn't too much. This is the most valuable reason to write a book for most authors (there are other good reasons to write a book, but the rest typically don't produce $$$).

When the above doesn't apply you still need them to know you wrote the book because sometimes they will look up the book and a good book will overcome your bad interview.

The exception to the above is when you are bored of the topic and are interviewing for something completely different. In that case you hide it because they might assume you will leave for a better job in your field latter - after all you wrote the book in something else so you must be valuable.

> Also, regarding "overcome the hurdles": those hurdles are now practically non-existent with various publishers. This results in books on the topic that should never have been published.

This is a real problem. People writing some really bad quality tech books from certain publishers. I'm not going to trash the publishers because some of the authors care about writing good books (rather than being able to say they wrote something) and do it with little editorial help. They produce something which would have been better in other circumstances.

The book would open doors to GET TO the interview, probably not much past that -- exactly for the reasons you stated.

Yes, I'd think books can help open the interview door. But then it's about proving you can do the job.

I think you have some problem of low self esteem or have been brainwashed by the anti-intelectual crowd. Of course writing a book is not a magical think, but it shows that you have technical knowledge about the subject (if the book is any good). Any reasonable employer would be glad to have this kind of people. If they don't, I would suspect that it is a sweatshop.

> Another interview I had years ago, after telling them about my first book, the interviewer said "so you know the theory, but can you put it in practice?" The assumption being "those that can do, those that can't write books." I was in a worse position for letting them know about it.

I am routinely amazed at the arrogance shown by interviewers. Even people that are usual humble and great to work with get in that position of authority and judgment and suddenly act different. It's a very disappointing aspect of human nature.

>I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant.

Heh- you are quite accomplished I see from some googling. And I have to be honest, I fail to see how having an Addison Wesley book under your name in any context could be seen as a negative- the guys I was referring to were writing "Learn the MEAN stack in 21 days" type of books. But yeah I of course agree that you don't slam a copy down in the opening of the interview and try to use the fact that your name is on it as your primary selling point- its really more to get you in the door and have people reach out to you about interesting opportunities you might otherwise not have found out about.

You might just be running in much more intense circles than I am, but the number of people who have written a technical book is small enough that I have ran across only a handful in my career and my reaction was much more about surprise and delight than worrying about the motives behind it, but YMMV I guess.

The problem is encountering a hiring manager who treats book writing as a red flag: perhaps the candidate is more interested in self promotion and vanity projects than doing real work; perhaps they are too "academic" and don't have real experience; perhaps their book is one of these trash books that is nothing more than the open source docs (that the author didn't write) hastily thrown together; etc. That's not to say the candidate won't get the job, but that they get grilled harder in the interview to overcome these suspicions.

I only mentioned this in the first place as a counterpoint to the idea that books may have a lot of value in an interview. I think it has value in _getting_ the interview, but you might find the interview is now a little bit harder. And thinking that your book matters most may sound too arrogant.

I have recommended that people write books over the years (I'm not anti-book!): I just wouldn't list the interview as a perk. A big perk is getting to help people worldwide (my books have been translated into other languages), including those who don't have access to bay area conferences or other local experts. Another perk is assembling a technical review team of fellow experts and working on the draft with them, listing to their feedback and learning from their experiences to improve the book.

There are ways to say you wrote a book without being arrogant about it.

Brendan,

I attended a talk you gave at AWS Re:Invent 2019. You need some serious, serious help.

No company should ever be speaking to you like that. You should be showing companies the door, not the other way around.

Early on in my career I learned most tech companies are absolute garbage and are not worth working for. You're worth a lot more than they are, brother.

Thanks for attending my talk and the comment! I hope you've had a chance to run some BPF tools and get some performance wins. :)

For what it's worth, your name alone has become quite famous in the performance world, and that's due to your blog posts and books. I would be a bit shocked if an interviewer for that field didn't know you.

On the flip side, be careful when claiming skills on your resume. You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it...

> You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it...

Nothing wrong with that. I see it as a conversation starter.

I felt that way too, until the interviewee had no answers to some simple questions about the topic.

At least you caught a lie, which at least to me is a red flag that the interview is over and I know to look for excuses to downgrade the score I give to HR, thus ensuring no offer is made no matter how many people we need to hire.

We hired this guy who wrote a book on the thing the team he was hired for managed. He was a nightmare. He was just insufferable. People would ask questions and he would suggest they read his book. He would mention his book in every meeting. He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book. It was just a huge drag. He managed to also be terrible in other ways and has since been canned. I pity any future applicants that come into an interview with the managers that had to deal with that guy planning to lean on their book during the interview. There's a good 50 people in the company with a real bad taste in their mouths from him.

Okay, well I guess that’s a bad experience. I don’t think it invalidates the fact the usually book authors should be somewhat knowledgable - of course it doesn’t automatically mean that all of them is good to work with.

Yes, but... unless you are hiring an absolute EXPERT on that topic and that was the purpose of hiring the person.. I bet that could turn out very poorly.

I mean it's in general like if you hire a PhD into a role that needs to cover a lot of areas, can't be super detailed in anything, and needs to get stuff done as opposed to pure research.. that can turn out poorly.

Agreed, I just wanted to share my own experience and perspective

Similar experience here. We interviewed a guy who kept referring to his book on the subject, experience he gained during writing the book, and so on. We took the bait.

> He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book

This was the core problem: Modern technologies and frameworks move fast. His book was about the state of the art five years ago, but it was woefully out of date for what we were doing. That didn't stop him from trying to exert superiority over the more knowledgeable team members.

Some of us read his book. It wasn't even a great resource on the topic. Re-reading the Amazon reviews, I have to believe most of the positive reviews were bought or fabricated.

Since then, I'm cautious about hiring anyone who tries to portray themselves as an expert in the field. And if you're hiring an author, at least read part of their book during the interview phase.

A former co-worker of mine recounted an experience with a person hired by his previous company who had written a book on software development methodology, Scrum or something. Evidently the way the author's employment worked is the company got the reputation benefit from having a famous expert on staff. In exchange he gave talks but didn't have to do any actual work for the company, and the company didn't have to follow his methodological orthodoxies.

And that's how you end up with speakers saying ridiculous things that don't work in practice. Because they come up with some idea (or more likely, a very minor tweak to an existing idea) but because nobody has to actually do it, and all their time is spent speaking, nobody uncovers the critical flaws.

Super side note - I'm rereading Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2nd one in series) for fun right now, and this guys sounds exactly like Gilderoy Lockhart.

At my last employer there was a similar story. The candidate mentioned he had written a book on Flask. So the dev in the interview took that as an invitation to skip the warm ups and go on a deep dive into Flask internals. The author got extremely flustered and couldn’t answer.

Does the job they were interviewing for require a deep knowledge of Flask internals day-to-day?

I don't think this matters. If he strongly claims he is an expert on Flask, and I knew Flask, then I would test the depth of that knowledge. You can't validate every detail on their resume, but if you find they misled about this one fact, odds are they mislead on other facts you are not capable of validating.

I am sure this is mostly seen as a positive but this can also backfire in an interview, and later, at work (I see a sibling comment addresses this). If a person leads with saying he has written a book on a topic, and then is unable to provide adequate responses to basic questions, the panel opinion goes south very soon. I have seen this happen.

Think of it as when a candidate claims she knows a language X well, but then is unable to answer reasonable questions around X. Saying you have written a book is like this claim, except dialing up expectations to the max.

Not saying advertising a book is a bad idea, but be aware of the expectations you are setting up.

> It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it.

That would seem to depend on the publisher, and the business arrangement, as to whether it really signals anything (though I suspect that often hiring managers might not know enough to correctly interpret the signal.) Obviously, if the book is a success and widely-known for its technical merit, that's a positive signal, but that's different than just getting a book published.

Even where getting over the hurdles to get a book published signals something, there's a question of whether it signals something relevant to the job you are hiring for. The hurdles of getting a book published (where they exist at all, e.g., outside of what is essentially vanity publishing or a close approximation) aren't particularly similar hurdles to those encountered in most technical jobs even when the book is on a subject close to the job duties.

> He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it."

A lot of it depends on the publisher. If it is for example OReilly, I would be impressed. If it is Packt, I would not be impressed at all. Some publishers do a much better job of screening and providing editorial support and technical reviews so that if an author is published by them, I can have confidence that the author is a subject matter expert. Some publishers are little more than self-publishing and so I would not have confidence that the author was an expert.

Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation.

Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.

I agree - a fantastic book! I have written a longish summary/review of it, including the reasons why I liked it so much:

https://henrikwarne.com/2019/07/27/book-review-designing-dat...

Absolutely. It's the only technical book I can't stop thinking about and going back to because of how impressive and informative it is.

Agreed. I'm reading it just now and it is really high quality. Just the chapter on transactions is probably the best explanation of a single topic that I've read in any technical book. It's really good for such a complex topic—thorough while still being very readable!

I mean if you agree with the math of creating $80m in value it would be hard to argue that he doesn't deserve $500K of that.

> the best technical book I’ve ever owned.

Second-best, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book. ;)

Can someone expand on why the book is so good? I found it very unremarkable but it's recommended so much around here that I suspect that I've missed something important.

Seems many people haven't been exposed to a systematic overview of the topic otherwise, and it works great at providing that. At least that'd be my guess where your experience differs.

Just out of interest. What technical book do you find remarkable?

Unremarkable if you're in that field with experience. If you're one of the majority of developers working around the edges or new to the subject it is quite enlightening.

Can someone expand on why the book is so good?

Its a practical overview of a difficult and modern topic. That in itself would make the book good, but for me, it is that the book goes deeper into the research and algorithms than most O'Reilly books -- but it does this without becoming a Science textbook.

It is easy to tell the people working in big data that haven't read the book, just from the mistakes they make.

Did you find it unremarkable because you already know the material, or because the material isn't relevant to what you do?

Anyway, some reasons:

* Draws together a wealth of material on databases and distributed systems that wasn't explained in a systematic, accessible way anywhere else. It provides a map to someone coming to this hard-to-navigate area for the first time.

* Great balance between being conversant with the academic research (without being too abstract) and being practically applicable (without being too tied to details of particular technologies)

* Shows underlying unity and concepts of very different data technologies, e.g. why classic relational database write-ahead logs and replication are very similar to streaming platforms like Kafka

* Subjective, but it is very clear, accessible, and well-written. This is very very hard to do and quite rare in technical books.

It's my favorite technical book of the decade and my first recommendation to anyone who asks me how to really "level up" as a senior engineer.

While I agree with all your points (I also think the book is a good one), I don't agree with the "level up" part. I don't see how, after reading carefully the book, any software engineer can "level up". If you don't have practical experience implementing (or dealing with, or maintaining) some of the scenarios the book talks about, then in no way one can "level up" just by reading the book.

The book provides tons of reference. I know that while reading the book, I experimented with many of the software described in the book. The author makes a good job at comparing various techs in putting them in context. This is very hard to do by just following a web of tutorials on the web.

Ah, yes, I should have said “first _reading_ recommendation” for how to level up! (And added: primarily for web backend or data engineers.)

Yes, of course you can’t level up just by reading a book; experience is the only way. The key thing - as you know, if you like the book - is that this book provides a coherent framework for thinking about data systems that engineers can fit their particular experience into. That “weird race condition” becomes less mysterious when it’s framed in terms of concepts like write skew or phantoms; joining two streams together becomes a problem about time and ordering. And so on. In fact the reason it’s such a great book is that you can read it with not much experience or background beyond basic database knowledge, absorb a lot of the ideas, and then keep coming back to it as your experience grows and you encounter new kinds of scenarios in your day to day work.

Experience = Expectation - Perception

where:

- if Expectation > Perception then your experience is +ve (e.g. surprise);

- if Expectation < Perception then you experience is -ve (e.g. disappointment).

So the question I'd ask you is this: what were your expectations when you picked up a copy of DDIA?

On similar topic, what are some good books like DDIA?

Very much so. I wish there were more books like that. Heavy on content, light on dogma, with very well weighted opinions and suggestions. Excellent book!

My favorite line in the post, and one that inspires my own efforts lately:

> How to be a 10x engineer: help ten other engineers be twice as good. Producing high-quality educational materials enables you to be a 300x engineer.

That sentiment (though I didn't think of it in quite this fashion) is why I set up a bi-weekly project management meeting at my last office, and tried to set up something similar for technical people.

The PM meeting was not a status reporting meeting. It had no management beyond the PMs (that is, no supervisors proper). The entire purpose was to facilitate sharing information across project boundaries (technical, procedural, or even just a chance to vent). I considered it to have "paid for itself" after two PMs discovered that another PM had already solved a procedural problem (how to get something done, not a technical problem) that they'd been stumbling over for months. That was also the day the PMs stopped complaining about the (non-mandatory) meeting that I'd set up for them. Another time, a PM discovered that another project had exactly the test capabilities they needed (but because of physical separation was totally unaware of this test lab tucked into a corner). Saved a lot of time and money that day, and the project ended up ahead of schedule in that aspect (not sure if they kept that lead, I left shortly after).

I wish I'd been able to get the technical meeting going, but management wasn't willing to give people the hour I asked for and "lunch & learn" only works for the motivated when you aren't getting paid and you aren't getting training credits towards some certification.

> That sentiment (though I didn't think of it in quite this fashion) is why I set up a bi-weekly project management meeting at my last office, and tried to set up something similar for technical people.

At my last office, I set up something very similar for our org with similar success. Your PM procedural problem case is a perfect example down to the complaining about having to attend a meeting they weren't required to attend.

Enter new management. After 8 weeks of ice-breaking meetings in triplicate and taking cues from all the wrong people, the first concrete thing they did that touched me was cancel that meeting. I found new employment shortly thereafter.

It's now an essential part of my repertoire. For technical people? Well that's mostly my team. We have a Trello board where anyone on team can drop RFC cards. Members of my team meet every couple weeks to review and discuss. It's visible to the whole org if anyone else is interested. (Generally, they aren't.)

I wanted the technical meeting because that was actually the weak spot for the org. Each team was isolated from each other to a greater than necessary degree. And no team was really "world class". But several had a phenomenal grasp of some aspect of development that the others lacked. I wanted to breakdown the, largely, artificial barrier between teams and better spread this knowledge and capability.

In the end, I quit before I could realize that, and what did happen (after I left) was more like you describe. Several teams basically did what you describe and set up their own internal learning and instruction approaches. But that doesn't help across the org, the bad teams are still bad. And the problem, mostly, wasn't the people but the time. They needed an opportunity to step back and think, and the firefighting they'd gotten stuck in was neverending. An hour every couple of weeks to hear and learn from others would've benefited them greatly.

Writing a book does not add value to your employer, enabling engineers in the world is one thing but it does not affect your day to day job or people arround you.

yes, why would an employer want employees who have the capability to write a book on the payroll? That's time that could be spent heads-down coding! </s>

I'm answering to the 300x engineer quote, an x engineer is in the scope of an employer.

An employer would LOVE to have a 300x engineer on board.

I mean take someone like Martin Fowler who wrote a number of highly influential book and a great website. Every time you look for him, you'll find his company or employer, ThoughtWorks. He and his work have put that company on the map as one of the top consultancy firms; he and his work educate everyone that works for that company, they follow his teachings and mindset, and become "10x" because of it.

Companies would be DESPERATE to hire him. Maybe not the kind of employers you think of, no, and maybe you wouldn't hire him for his 'output', but that's a very superficial way to look at it.

i logged in only to mention "How to be a 10x engineer: help ten other engineers be twice as good." is fantastic! That's going in one of my sigs.

I agree with the former statement but once you have reached a 300x productivity multiplier you are no longer an engineer. You're primarily a teacher who communicates via books.

I had a contract to write a book about Google Wave. I was almost finished with it when Google decided to kill the project.

I got a kill fee (which was almost nothing) and a great story to tell, but it taught me a good lesson about how to balance an advance vs going for more residuals on the backend (this is true primarily for technical books. For traditional publishing, get as big of an advance as you can get).

The secondary lesson was to not sign contracts for books about Google products (only slightly joking), or really any upcoming product or language without understanding the risk you as the author take if the project is canceled or delayed or there is some other fundamental change.

I was 25 when I got the Wave book and it was a lot of work and research for nothing, but I can look back and laugh at the experience.

I’ve turned down technical books over the last few years, just because unless you sell 100,000 copies, it can be hard to make the economics work — unless I would be willing to take it on as a side-gig. That said, if it is a hit, the speaking fees/workshops/consulting options from that book can pay dividends, as I’ve seen from many of my friends.

I wrote a book back in 2000 and it's one of those glad-I-did-it-but-never-again experiences.

I think the author nailed it with, "I strongly recommend that you estimate the value of your future royalties to be close to zero."

Do it as a way to give back / contribute to a topic you are passionate about, do it for the amazing learning experience, do it for the challenge. And then if you also make some money off it, that's just icing on the cake.

I'm not sure where I first heard this, but I feel it, even as I think about writing more: "everyone loves having written a book, not so much writing a book."

I've heard it as, "I hate writing but love having written." The source is apparently unclear:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/10/18/on-writing/

Even better, guess I need to work on my writing :)

For me, I do like writing, it's just... really really difficult. That's part of what makes it so worthwhile.

"Everyone one wants to have written, but no one wants to sit down and do the work to write." Is how I heard it.

That's how I feel about lifting heavy weights. There's certainly a general principle to be found here.

One piece of feedback I got from someone I respect very much is, "read less and write more." So far that's been limited to quality documentation and Tufte style presentations, but I can definitely see the appeal of writing a book even if I don't make a penny off it.

These days most of my writing is in the form of research blog posts for my job, which I enjoy. I used to write a lot of fiction in my teens and early 20s, but somehow lost the discipline to sit down and do so after I discovered visual art.

Even if you enjoy some of the research and interviews--and even the writing off and on--pushing an entire book out there is inevitably a grind for most people, especially if you're up against deadlines.

I've heard the same thought expressed about reading books - i.e. people want to have read classics, but they hate actually reading them - and so unread classical literature accrues on the shelves, creating an illusion that the owner is well-read.

Taleb has a response about this in Antifragile: "A friend who writes books remarked that painters like painting but authors like “having written.” I suggested he stop writing, for his sake and the sake of his readers."

The greater context of the above was dealing with procrastination: Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses.

Not having written a book I don't know what the scars are about writing one that make the process very painful,I don't know if it's the writing itself, or the editing and getting feedback that makes it painful. But maybe procrastination does play a role, especially when one reflects on how much time they've wasted.

So to stop procrastinating, change your environment or profession to one where you don't fight your natural impulses. Easier said than done in this world though.

Miracles happen and sometimes a book, like this one, takes off. For the most part, it's not worth your time and energy. I've made far more money as an author of articles and as an expert witness than I ever did from my books, even though one did with quite well and was translated into Greek and German.

I'll also add that he must have one heck of a deal with ORA to get those kind of royalties because the standard ORA contract based on his sales, would not come to anything like that much money.

The 25/10 structure has been O’Reilly’s standard split for at least a few years, no negotiation needed.

What does 25/10 mean in this context?

From the article:

"that I get 25% of publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing, 10% of revenue from print sales..."

Did the books get you the gigs as expert witness?

Your book titles?

> For the most part, it's not worth your time and energy.

I'd revise that, and say it's not worth your time and energy if the goal is to make money from it. There may be other goals (e.g. to evangelize and popularize some piece of technology, or maybe to make certain tech more accessible).

How did you get into the expert witness line of work?

I would guess it's mostly an amicable relationship with one lawyer that happens to have connections to other lawyers.

Do good once with a connected lawyer, and your name gets passed around.

I'm on my third. It's definitely worth it, but it's also, if done well, a long, hard haul.

I think it's probably good to go into the project with an idea of why you're doing this. Are you creating what's basically an extended business card? Are you trying to help a particular kind of person that you know very well? Or are you chasing the goal of matching up a slice of knowledge with an eager audience?

There are other goals. For instance, a lot of disparate experiences in your career can come together to help on a certain section you're working on. This allows you to personally gain some synthesis from your experiences you might not otherwise. You can find new depth in ancillary areas as you go through and footnote, adding more depth to the things you're talking about both for yourself and the reader.

It's good to have those goals, even if you end up delivering a different kind of book than you had planned, because as a sole author something's got to keep you motivated for years. This isn't a software project, a job, or even a romantic commitment. Whatever you write, if it's worth writing, becomes a part of you. Like one of the other commenters says, if you have people on your team with published books they're likely to be busy responding to and helping folks interested in those areas. That doesn't go away simply because you move on.

Probably the best advice I can give for new authors is that it should be a lot of work, and once you finish each phase you'll say to yourself, "Now comes the hard part". This essay writer gave 50 presentations. Wow! That number of public appearances alone is a non-trivial amount of work. Don't forget contacting bloggers, podcasts, tech publishers, and so on. No matter where you are in the process, next up is the hard part.

None of that is any reason not to do it, of course. You just should be aware that if you're going to do a good job it's a major commitment. Prepare your outlook accordingly.

I wrote two books this year, Beautiful Spark being the more popular of the two: https://leanpub.com/beautiful-spark

My book writing experience was much different:

* just took a few weeks of part time work, mainly just organizing blog posts

* Leanpub pays much higher royalties (80%)

Books are a great way to learn more about the topic and help others. It makes training and employee onboarding a lot easier. You can tell folks to read a chapter and then review.

Books aren't a great way to make money, but they're fun to write and a great way to give back to the programming community.

> mainly just organizing blog posts

Were these your own blog posts, or posts from other folks? If the former, you should include that time as time it took to write the book!

They're my blog posts and that's a good point. I can generally write a blog post in a few hours.

Martin's book is clearly a masterpiece and mine isn't. Just though I'd chime in and let folks know that writing a book doesn't have to be a 2.5 year full-time commitment.

The first book I wrote incorporated a lot of existing blog posts. There was still a lot of glue to write, holes to patch, and various updates/fixups.

Another book was from scratch and I did spend a fair number of work hours on it--with the OK of management--supplemented by some (but not outrageous) nights and weekends. It probably ended up being like a part-time job for about 6 months plus additional time spent back and forth with the editor--which wasn't actually a lot.

Just curious: what kind of software did you use to write your books?

Not the person you asked. I use pandoc to create pdf/epub from GitHub style markdown: https://learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/

>Leanpub pays much higher royalties (80%)

I don't use leanpub to create my book, but I still put it on both leanpub and gumroad. In case you aren't aware, gumroad [0] gives better returns and holds your payment for 1-2 weeks instead of 45-75 days on leanpub.

[0] https://gumroad.com/features/pricing

> The personal growth that comes from taking on such a challenge is also considerable. And there is no better way to learn something in depth than by explaining it to others.

I second. If you can't explain it, you don't understand it well enough. I'm the author of a YouTube course "Dynamic Programming for Beginners" [0]. Helping people to better understand the topic is a pure joy by itself, but it's also extremely rewardable for an author in terms personal growth. If you want to understand something, start teaching, you won't regret.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVrpF4r7WIhTT1hJqZmjP...

I’ve been writing a book on cryptography called Real-World Cryptography[1] and targeting software engineers and students who are interested in applied cryptography. The book has already sold thousands of copies before even going in print (due to a blogpost I wrote on why I’m writing a book on cryptography[2]) which has added a lot of pressure on my plate.

The book is almost done at this point, but revising and polishing it will take a lot of time. I really wish I could take some time off for that like the author of the post did.

I can say that it has been a long journey, but I have learned so much along the way.

[1]: https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=...

[2]: https://cryptologie.net/article/504/why-im-writing-a-book-on...

It's really stunning to see the percentage take from writing a book vs. putting something on the app store. People complain about Google and Apple taking 30%, but for these books, they're taking 75% for electronic books and 90% for print! 30% doesn't sound so bad to me compared to that. (I realize for print their costs are higher, but still - 90%?)

(In theory) publishers are doing more for you than Apple is. At a minimum they're providing some level of editing services and (maybe) validation of a quality floor. They also have distribution deals that you mostly can't get on your own.

Remember too that publishers aren't seeing a big chunk of the list price which is going to discounts and middlemen of various sorts.

That said, publishers in general don't do as much as they used to and independent publishing will be the right answer for many people--understanding they'll probably have some money out of pocket to make up for the services publishers provide.

Typically your royalty is calculated against the final sale price of the book -- after publisher and retailer have taken their cut. Usually the retailer takes the biggest cut.

> Usually the retailer takes the biggest cut.

Retail markup is usually 35% to 55%, but what a lot of people don't realize is that retailers usually have a method of returning their unsold stock, which the publisher is on the hook to liquidate somehow.

My wife is a published author (and ghost writer) and my sister-in-law is a VP and acquisitions editor for a small publishing house.

The different between 30% and 75% is mostly historical, and the app market vs. the publishing world run on different models: There is not really an equivalent of advances or physical publishing in the app world. Royalties and app revenue splits are are roughly equivalent, though.

As an author, your leverage on advances and royalties is your personal brand equity. "Becoming" by Michelle Obama is almost an automatic winner due to her brand. If you're not well known, your publishing deal is abysmally standard.

It costs some money to print and distribute a physical book vs. a digital book. This is slowly changing as digital distribution flexes up. But print is still the preferred model for people. [1]

And there are additional layers of writing a book in the traditional model: acquisitions, developmental and copy editing being some of the big ones. And you'd be shocked how many non-fiction books have a ghost writer.

Finally, there's the reality that the publisher is taking a risk: their high percentages are covering all the books they took a loss on.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/physical-books-still-outsell...

>And you'd be shocked how many non-fiction books have a ghost writer

Not really. Whether it's writing ability or simply time a lot of successful people aren't really equipped to write a book from scratch. I assume a pretty common model is to conduct a long set of interviews, make some background and other material available, and the ghost writer creates a draft. Even if the subject wants a lot of direct involvement, starting out with a lot of content is a lot easier than a blank page.

Plus the publisher sells the books to the bookstore at 1/2 the price on the cover.

The point made here is important, publishers lose money on most releases but make a lot of money on the successes much like venture capitalists. The downside of each book is protected/limited but the upside is unlimited. So one book that sells 100.000 copies makeup for a lot of books that sell a few thousands.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications might be the best (non-niche) CS book of the decade, and he definitely did create far more value than he captured. So I'm glad Mr Kleppmann at least kind of "broke even" compared to the alternative of working for a FAANG (his salary assumptions seem however rather low). I guess the main take away for mere mortals who consider writing a book and making money with it (as opposed to boosting their profile) is to under no circumstances publish with OReilly. Getting <10% vs 80%+ of revenue is just about viable for the 0.01%.

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship

For professionals in technical fields where skills-assessment itself is expensive and uncertain, a book serves at a minimum as a signifier of one's own skill and ability. In exceptional circumstances, a book can lead to the author becoming part of both the skill-generating and certifying mechanism. Writing "the book" on a topic, and the teaching, lecturing, training, or technical leadership roles availed ... may ... prove worthwhile. Others then display their copies or familiarity of the book as evidence of their own ability. (Knuth, Gang of Four, Kernighan & Ritchie, etc.)

It's critical to realise that this signalling capability, as with attention, is a fundamentally rivalrous and finite space (perhaps not fully zero-sum), such that there can only be one truly leading authority or reference at a time. Though if like Martin Kleppmann you hit that spot, it can prove rewarding.

Specialties are fractal. It’s much easier to be the expert on something that 1,000 people do than something 1,000,000 people do. However, by making expert knowledge accessible it’s likely that far more people discover they really should be doing whatever it is you’re an expert at.

Sure.

But the skill remains in competition with all other skills --- some specialisation or specialisations must shrink for another to grow.

With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though most fall at 98% or higher by UNESCO rankings.[2] And even basic literacy expresses a minimal language and cognitive capability.

Skill itself is finite. Over half the population, and over 2/3 in most surveyed industrialised countries, have poor, "below poor", or no computer skills at all, by an OECD survey.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

The population with the demonstrated capacity to aquire any advanced computer skills seems to be about 5--10%, and this competes with all other high-skill, technical, or professional occupations. Increasingly it's a prerequisite for them, possibly shrinking that pool.

Again, the larger point is that attention, a key component of skills acquisition, is rivalrous, in both individuals and populations

________________________________

Notes:

1. NCES reports 4% "could not participate", 4.1% "below level 1', and 12.9% "level 1", or 21% "low English literacy" ages 16--65, in 2012 and 2014, a level insufficient "to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences".

https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp

2. Rankings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_...

The shift in skills tends to be advantageous to the new experts not the old ones. The great books on using slide rules have already been written, but their unlikely to find a new following.

Java applet‘s and a host of other tech is simply not coming back. Which is why experts often become advocates, they want their skills to remain relevant.

If one presumes a culture with an increasing overall complexity level, then the circumstance is not one of simply obsoleting technologies and skillsets being replaced, but of competition among multiple essential skillsets.

Complexity expands to meet all constraint boundaries.

Society is still largely bound by the human intellect. So, I don’t think overall complexity is actually increasing significantly. It’s more a question of how obvious the complexity is.

How would you measure or disprove your hypothesis?

Compared to what or when?

20, 50, and 100 years too seem like a reasonable point of comparison.

One simple approach is hand people old objective tests for subjects like math under the original rules. If people where simply becoming more competent in all areas then average scores should be higher today, but that’s not what happens.

Measuring complexity more specifically is probably easiest done by using equivalent jobs and compare how long each take to achieve competence. McDonald’s cooks take less time to train now vs the 1970’s, but I am not sure how that compares across industries.

Maths is, like literacy, a fundamental skill, not a specialty.

Math is pardon the pun, fractal in nature. Geometry skills may be reasonably common, but topology and group theory for example are rarely taught in high school or their not even part of most collages general education requirements.

Go back 50 years and people may have been studying geometry but they covered significantly different areas.

How much has that fractal expanded?

Is it more or less complex than 20, 50, and 100 years ago?

How many subspecialisations have groups 9f 50, or 10, or5, or 1, who actually understand them?

At what scale of living practice does knowledge fail to be cultural and become merely transient, lodged for a few years in a few minds, perhaps mouldering for a few decades in a fiche copy of a once-read dissertation?

And, a few moments after writing the above I see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24631728

> How much has that fractal expanded?

In terms of actually useful mathematics, not much. But, that’s missing the point. 100 years ago people studied chess as hard as they could, without machine assistance they didn’t become as skilled but that doesn’t mean chess somehow became more or less complex. Lawyers are dealing with roughly equivalent legal systems, and so it goes.

Mathematicians may have discovered say more digits of pi through useful tools, but at the core mathematicians are about as intelligent and still working just as hard. We have more mathematicians today in large part because global population has increased 4x in the last hundred years. However, go back 100 years and most people didn’t understand what hyper specialized work was being done.

Society involves more than one human. Larger populations can handle more complexity.

> With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though most fall at 98% or higher by UNESCO rankings.[2]

I drilled into the literacy reports cited by [1], eventually landing at [3]. From those results, the US is not especially anomalous compared to other countries, although breaking down by nativity does suggest that the US has an anomalously large gap between native-born adults and immigrant adults.

The UNESCO rankings and the PIAAC rankings give substantially different results by observing scores. There's a few countries in both: Chile, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Turkey. Most of those countries are given >99% literacy rates by UNESCO, but have a few percent classified as "Below Level 1" by PIAAC, indicating that UNESCO has a much looser definition than PIAAC.

I can't tell you which ranking is better correlated to what a naïve observer would think of as "literate," but the two rankings are definitely measuring different things.

[3] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/ideuspiaac/report.aspx?p=3...

Just to note, I realised much of this when composing and citing my reply above. US NCES and UNESCO literacy metrics and criteria do seem to differ pretty materially.

There are other evidences of persistent barriers to skills and rationality attainment though, with fairly strong evidence.

US high school graduation rates reached a pretty firm plateau in about 1950, having risen from six percent in 1900. Much of the ballyhoo over secondary education (test scores vs. graduation rates) has involved trading one against the other, though improvements in fundamental living standards for the poorest (well mother/baby care, nutrition, housing, environmental contaminants most especially heavy metals, reduced general precarity) have also contributed greatly, as has equality of access. All of these being before pedagogical factors are considered --- raiseing the floor is the most cost-effective way of raising numerous population averages.

Hiher-education attainment similarly shows some resistance to expansion, as well as questions regarding comparability over time. Bachellors, Masters, and PhD inflation seem likely. There are also cases where standards seem to have tightened somewhat: there was a biography of a 19th century American who was admitted to the bar in a Southern state on the basis of a brief interview, but who declined the practived on account of the obviously lax standards evidenced. (Ran across recently via Wikipedia, though the details escape me.)

Back to literacy, the US seems to struggle to achieve ~95% at a minimum, the number I'd initially written above, though by its own measure (assuming all those unable to participate in the assessment are illiterate) as low as 91%.

The UNESCO values strike me as somewhat suspiciously high. I'm not sure that's warranted suspicion, but it suggests investigating methods more deeply.

>The combination of talks and the book have allowed me to establish a significant public presence and reputation in this field. I now get far more invitations to speak at conferences than I can realistically accept. Conference talks don’t generate income per se (good industry conferences generally pay for speakers’ travel and accommodation, but they rarely pay speaking fees), but this kind of reputation is helpful for getting consulting gigs.

This has been the real value of writing books--especially through a known publisher--for me. (I'm updating one at the moment.) Even if you're not a consultant, publishing a book on some topic still can give you cachet--and, in fact, because of the research you did, you probably are pretty expert on the topic even if you weren't before.

I agree that the expected future value of royalties isn't much--but there are other ways to earn money related to a book.

"economically viable (it is possible to generate a reasonable level of income from it)."

The second part of that sentence, is not really the same as the first. By his own admission, his book is a real outlier on the high side (second highest in his peer group of O'Reilly books), and it only basically compensated for lost income. This strongly suggests that the median case, is you lose money.

Now, there are lots of other great reasons to write a book. The satisfaction of helping others, the space to focus and expand your thinking on a topic, the increase to your reputation, etc. But, "economically viable" doesn't really equate to "at least one or two people didn't lost money doing it".

It's very difficult for accomplished person in the tech field to find an activity that pays better than just getting a job at a top tier company. People who choose to do something else must have other reasons.

Another way to look at it is the answer to "Ask HN: I'm looking for a side project or job to make me extra money" is almost certainly not "Write a book!"

(With the most obvious exception being if you're a public figure of some sort.)

Just finished my first novel (in French); will be sending it to publishers next week. If they reject it IDK what I'll do (dump it or auto-publish).

But, I'm super happy to have done it. I wrote poems and novellas when I was younger. A complete novel is something else entirely. Even if it doesn't go anywhere, the feeling of having done it is really great.

Congratulations. But don’t dump it! It costs nothing to distribute electronic versions from your own website.

Please consider self-publishing or putting it on your own blog. Share it on your social media, here on HN, reddit (there are specific subreddits for self-pub, free books, kindle unlimited, etc) and so on. You never know, even a single heartfelt review will be worth the effort. As a reader, I try to help out lesser known authors, here's an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/izhhoa/hardest_of_...

"Writing a book is an activity that creates more value than it captures. What I mean with this is that the benefits that readers get from it are greater than the price they paid for the book. To back this up, let’s try roughly estimating the value created by my book."

This is the key - you need to create more value for your customer than you are asking them to pay you. If you do that, you will never be want for income because people actually value having you around. Otherwise, you are just a rent extractor.

Very different experience for me.

Wrote a book about Redux (https://leanpub.com/redux-book) brought about $15K for 4 months of work. (Granted, did no marketing at all)

It always feels strange to say "I wrote a book" and it never seemed to really impress tech people or cause an inflow of consulting work.

But it is very fun and you get to really get into the tech (other projects, sources, blogs, testing ideas).

Prob would do again one day

Do you think the lifespan of the topic or the delivery platform impacted your returns? I don't buy a lot of books anymore but used to drop 40-50 bucks on an O'Reilly book that would be used for years. My LP purchases probably top out under $10 and are for more immediate, short-lived topics (which seems to be what the platform targets with it's digital & updated content focus)

It's easy to use LP but getting into O'Reilly is not that simple.

If we could, we would of published with them instead

15k is pretty good for no marketing!

i feel that self published book authors should all have a "marketing partner" since they all seem so shy about marketing

>should all have a "marketing partner"

The problem is that it's relatively easy to hire a marketing partner (does PR, etc.). But it will probably cost quite a bit more than your book advance. And most publishers these days aren't setting up book signings, sending out review copies, etc.

When I get pings to see if I want to review a book it's usually from a PR agency.

as a developer-who-can-market i often wonder if itd be worth my time taking a 50% cut to be a marketing partner heheh. not sure i can do it repeatedly for people i dont already know.

If we knew any good partner, would happily split revenue for their work.

Not sure what is the best place to find such companies/individuals

you'd basically be hiring a "cofounder" with equity - i assume its similar but with lower stakes. good practice tbh

Even if you earned $0 from your book, I'd say being able to tell people you wrote a book at interviews and on your resume, and even at parties, would make it worth it.

And you'd be able to call yourself an author, how cool is that?

This.

I wrote a book about React and after that didn't get asked stupid interview questions anymore.

Surely that doesn't work if it's 'just' some self-published book the interviewers haven't heard of?

I don't mean any disrespect to yours at all (since I've never read any book on React, so I can say with certainty not your (unshared name) book on React) but anyone can write a bad book and start selling (or rather, 'offering for sale') PDFs/ePubs on their website (I've thought about doing it!) that shouldn't make them an automatic authority on the titular topic though.

Check GP's profile. The info you're asking about is there.

I'm not really asking for any info, I'm assuming that if that's really worked as described for k___, then their book is well known or regarded in React circles, and that's why.

I don't think that's a good reason to do it, because well-regarded authors didn't become so by writing any old book - they either already were, or they wrote a bloody good one.

I don't disagree in that a publisher provides some quality floor and they presumably wouldn't have taken your book on if they already have a superior library on the same topic.

That said, put a self-published book on your site and someone can tell pretty quickly from a few minutes with the PDF if it's obviously bad. (Honestly, if I'm doing a book primarily for reputational purposes and I self-publish, I will (and have) just given it away for free.

I'm not sure about this. I have read (not finished) many "bad" books about software engineering. Not all books are equal, and so not all authors.

> Hi, I wrote a book about X.

> Hi, I wrote a good book about X.

A the difference is abysmal.

If you have earned $0 from a commercial book (as opposed to a free one) then that would be a negative signal. "Your book is rubbish".

I also wrote a book with O'Reilly and have collaborated on several more with other publishers and indies. I have to say working with the folks at O'Reilly was my best publishing experience by far. Even if I didn't get an animal cover. Not that I'm complaining... but you know, maybe a bat or a weasel or something would have been nice, just sayin'.

So that now has me curious on the politics of O'reilly, and who gets an animal cover. Would you be willing to share the experience?

Self publishing (which I did) means you don't nearly need as much sales to make writing a book financially viable. If you self-publish through Amazon you get 40%+ royalties, and selling 10k books would net six figures. With a publisher (as Keppmann writes), you really need 5-10x as many sales for it to be a success.

> A lot of money, but I also put a lot of time into it! I estimate that I spent about 2.5 years of full-time equivalent work researching and writing the book, spread out over the course of 4 years. Of that time, I spent one year (2014–15) working full-time on the book without income, while the rest of the time I worked on the book part-time alongside part-time employment.

Is it too creepy to wonder how the author sustain himself during the "full-time without income" part ? (Did he start saving earlier on to get a big safety cushion, did he get an advance, etc ?)

I think if you're a senior software engineer at LinkedIn in silicon valley for a couple of years and then don't have enough to sustain yourself without additional income for a year after that then your lifestyle must be quite extravagant.

Sure ! To clarify, that's also my assumption, but I was wondering if he specifically decided to save money to prepare for the "writing" period ; or he if "accidentally" ended up with enough money to spare a year of full-time employment.

In any case, good for him, of course, no jalousy implied !

(Also, as for the "your lifetime must be quite extravagant"... Again, "fair enough", but apparently the whole "FIRE"[1] movement might beg to differ ;) )

[1]: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

An advance probably isn't going to be much more than beer money. It's not unreasonable to imagine though that a West Coast developer could have some savings.

That said, given his comments about finances (which are spot-on), it does seem like sort of a leap to take 1+ year off. Nothing wrong with taking some extended time off, but most wouldn't use it to write a book full-time. Of course, going in he may have had unreasonable expectations which were indeed met.

You don't write a book to make money from the book. You write a book to make money from the aftermath.

My best friend has written a couple of NYT best sellers and a number of others that weren't best sellers. Even after his first best seller, his next advance was only around $100K. For about 6 months work (over a 1 year time period), that's not a great wage for many of the engineers here. But, he makes over $1 million/year on the aftermath (mostly speaking).

“A Career in Professional Basketball: is it worth it?” by Lebron James.

For the last two years, I was able to make ends meet writing books, even though the Czech market is rather small (10 million speakers).

The key was having my own e-shop and a set of readers who come to read the blog. Once people buy directly from you, the whole balance shifts. Normally, distributors and bookshops take a large cut before sharing a slice of profit with you. Avoid them and the whole thing turns profitable.

>The feeling of knowing that you have helped a lot of people is gratifying. The personal growth that comes from taking on such a challenge is also considerable. And there is no better way to learn something in depth than by explaining it to others.

An apt conclusion that resonates well with me.

>My contract with the publisher specifies that I get 25% of publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing, 10% of revenue from print sales, and 5% of revenue from translations.

Self-publishing is relatively new compared to the history of traditional publishing. If someone wishes to write a book and hasn't been able to land a deal with a publishing company, I'd definitely suggest self-publishing. Returns are much higher and you retain the rights to do interactive course, translations, video course, etc. The downside is that you have to do marketing, get reviewed, etc all by yourself. One of the main reasons self-publishing is attractive to me is that I can easily update for newer versions and I can give them away for free whenever I want.

> because the income that this work has generated is in the same ballpark as the Silicon Valley software engineering salary (including stock and benefits) I could have received in the same time if I hadn’t quit LinkedIn in 2014 to work on the book

I think he’s underestimating his salary and stock value.

Most Silicon Valley engineers at his level would make more than $200,000 a year with stock and salary.

I think so, too. But on the flip side he wrote probably one of the best CS book of the previous decade. :)

Like everything, the answer is "it depends." I wrote a book a decade or more ago on an F/OSS project I was involved with. The advance worked out to about $2/hour, and I've never sold sufficient copies to go beyond that. That being said, it was always intended more as a labor of love and a way of promoting the project than it was a way to make money. Sadly, there was a political battle within the project's core team, and the fundamental API of the project changed around in a non-backwards-compatible way. That rendered my book semi-obsolete within months of publishing. I left the project shortly thereafter. While those externalities don't bear directly on the book-writing experience, they may be things to keep in mind: stability of the subject you're writing about, general versus specific applicability, and the health of the community you're writing for.

I'm a software engineer and the author of four books, but none are about software. (Three are pop-sci and one is pop-stats.)

First book (2013) did extremely well and continues to sell well. Lots of good press, translated into multiple languages, excerpts in a national magazine, promotion on a network TV show. Second book (2014) tanked hard. Third book (2019) looked like it would suffer the same fate as the second, but sales have been slowly inching up. Fourth book (2020) has seen abysmal sales, likely because of the pandemic, but it's a direct sequel to the first book and there are opportunities for cross-promotion, so I'm hoping sales eventually pick up.

I've been fortunate that throughout the course of writing these books, I've had a full-time job that pays the bills, so any advances or royalties have been gravy.

But if I could give advice to those who are interested in writing a book, it would be this:

* Unless this is purely a vanity project, do not go in the red. I would not have written my books if I hadn't gotten book deals. I wouldn't have put myself in the red by hiring an editor, a proofreader, an illustrator, a designer, a publicist, etc., which is what you likely will have to do to produce a quality book when self-publishing. A "you have to spend money to earn money" mindset is not the best mindset to have in a category where relatively few books succeed.

* Publishers these days aren't looking for good writers or great writers. They're looking for marketable books in established categories written by half-decent writers with solid platforms. There are certainly exceptions to that, but you can't hurt your chances by strengthening your platform or doing your own market research before even approaching an agent. (By platform I mean a built-in audience -- people to whom you can market the book. For better or worse, this means having lots of newsletter subscribers, YouTube subscribers, a big social media presence, blog readers, etc.)

* If you are an introvert, you will likely find being an author uncomfortable. You might have no problem with the often solitary task of writing the book. But the hardest part (and potentially the most time-consuming part) of being an author is not the writing itself but the marketing and promotion that comes afterward. Don't expect to be able to lean on your publisher for this. After a brief promotional blitz around pub day, you're likely on your own.

* There is a quote attributed to a number of famous writers: "I hate writing, but I love having written." I can all but assure you that if you're working on a book of any decent length or depth, you will reach an "I hate this" moment. But once the book is published, for the rest of your life you get to say that you're an author. It's a pretty cool feeling.

> solid platforms

Can you expand on that?

Very interesting comment, thank you!

Not the OP but they want authors with big social followings or email lists etc, because the main risk of a book is will it sell - and if you already have a big audience to market to, that risk goes down a lot.

When publishers consider book proposals, they're always thinking about how easy and how expensive it will be to market the book to people.

Paid advertising is effective, but extremely expensive.

Getting press coverage is great, and less expensive than advertising, but you've got to pay a publicist who knows what they're doing, and even then, there are no guarantees.

But if an author has a strong platform, such as an email newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers, or a popular website or YouTube channel with tons of views, then it's an incredibly effective and inexpensive way to market the book. The author has already established an audience who has shown interest in their previous content, so chances are good that they will show interest in the book as well.

I wrote a book once. I could do it again, but I haven't found a reason. It's a hell of a lot of work.

I think one thing that helps, is to have a "timeless topic." People still read Knuth's stuff, and Steve McConnell's Rapid Development is just as valid today, as it was, 25 years ago.

Funny coincidence... I just ordered a copy of this book yesterday after reading https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-are-the-future/. I might not be the only one.

It's been noted before that these highly specific niche titles can do very well.

You need a topic where the people who work in it are well paid, even by SV standards, and you can save them a lot of time and effort by condensing the state of the art into actionable information and examples.

So this is not "writing a book" - this is writing a book for a niche market that will pay well for non-obvious high-value technical content.

Something like "Xcode for Beginners" will not be nearly as successful - especially not now that app dev is so established.

Even though Xcode has a lot of quirks, the features and the build process aren't too much of a mystery and most people in the industry will be able to work out the essentials for themselves.

Recently I've been playing with the idea of writing a sci-fi book.

...and that's mostly it. I don't know what could be the next step, except actually writing the thing.

Are there websites/communities? I don't follow nor know of any relevant ones myself.

Start with short stories? Or something longer?

Self-publish whatever I write? Or start spamming "real publishers"?

When I was younger I read a monthly science fiction magazine in the library. That magazine had all kinds of short stories ranging from hardcore space sci-fi to some kind of horror fantasy things. Some stories were so interesting that it was a bit frustrating for the story to stop after only a few pages.

Good places to start for writing fiction:

- Writer's Digest publishes large yearly lists of places to submit books and short stories.

- The Writing Excuses podcast covers all steps of the writing process, from research and planning to publishing with an agent or going the self-publishing route. The speakers cover a wide range of strategies on each topic.

- writing.stackexchange.com is a relatively useful resource on a range of writing and publishing topics

Thank you!

Martin Kleppmann is a great speaker, if you have a chance watch any of his talks on youtube.

The book itself is also great, it gives an amazing lay of the land when it comes to databases / database methodologies and algorithms.

Worth is an interesting thing. I wrote and published a very niche book that was, for all intents, a mind dump of my experiences doing a particular volunteer, non-tech job over a three year time span (now eight). The value to me was the cleansing nature of putting it all down on paper.

I knew I was never going to get rich from it, but felt the many hours I spent doing this job would be wasted if I did not make an effort to pass along to others what had been learned. That it sells 200 copies every year still amazes me.

Shamelessly plagiarizing from the Is Y Combinator worth it? comments.

Gist: Writing a book is worth it.

But, it depends more on you than on the book.

Isn't that true for pretty much everything in life?

Yes. That doesn't change the truth of it.

I have a total cheat for book writing: find a project where you can contribute a single chapter. It's an order of magnitude less work then writing a full book, and you get to add "author of a book on X" to your resume.

It's pretty much the other end of the scale in terms of overall benefit from what Martin is describing here, but it's worth remembering that it could be a much less stressful and time consuming opportunity.

Except that would be untrue. You would not be an “author of a book”, but an author of a chapter. Which is still a nice thing for the résumé. But if you overstate anything and are found out, that will be fatal poison, and a stain that could follow you forever.

Sure, you don't mislead people like that. "An author of X" is the language I use.

Oh, OK. Sorry if I misinterpreted. (Usually on CV publication lists people have a section for books and a separate one for book chapters.)

As a young author, I'm always thinking about the process of writing a book. At some point, someone needs to write this book, a long book with lots of little details. I'm thinking: I don't want to write it, but it'll be so much better than doing nothing and leaving it. I can either start it and finish it on a different day, or just put it down for a long time and try to get some ideas out of it.

all books are having pdf/epub/etc format these days, means you can get most if not all of them online for free quickly which is discouraging, plus things move fast these days and book might be out of date soon, and it's easier to self-publish, I think the golden time of legacy book writing is probably gone.

What about some different models? While the internet/google presents everything, a well organized and to-the-point book still saves time and time is everything.

1. have your own website, and write online book only, ask people to pay for read?(free samples at the frontpage). 2. whoever paid can get automatic reminders on new releases, book updates 3. create a small forum on that site for questions and erratas. 4. give a link for whoever read your book somehow without pay, tell them if the book helped them to profit somehow, please press the donate button to show a little appreciation.

As there is no other costs involved(other than hosting fee), your book can be cheaper, to the point people might want to pay even though they can get a free version somewhere.

I wonder how the economics have changed between when this book was written (2014) and today?

For reference, there are twice as many books published last year than in 2014. It's cumulative of course, you're competing for limited readers against every book written every year since the dawn of time (unless you're writing on a brand new subject).

If you weren't going to do it anyway, no.

I was second author of a book on computational aesthetics and first author of a book on drawing. As the only native English speaker, I did all of the final re-write of both. For me also it was a turbo-boost to my ability to write. I thought I could write before I started those books. I was wrong. For this alone it was worth it.

> It would be interesting to compare it to working on open source software, another activity that can have significant positive impact but is difficult to get paid for. I don’t have a strong opinion on this at the moment.

Does anyone have views from having tried to do both - book and open source project?

Questions for the authors in this thread: If I'm thinking about writing a book, what stepping stones would you recommend? I'm thinking things like should I write a series of blog posts, do tech talks, etc.

What resources were most valuable for you in writing your book?

It depends on your goals for your book; are you trying to make money, to be known in the domain, etc... ?

For me, I was working on a wine-related software project but I had all of these notes that I had accumulated over the years and I felt like they needed to be better organized. My original plan was to write a series of blog posts, but I ended up self-publishing the book on Amazon (under the title Essential French Wine) and it's had a modest success (but quite unexpected since I didn't put any effort into marketing it).

So if you are just trying to write a book just go and do that, don't waste time on other things...

On the other hand if you are trying to know good strategies for book marketing or to get published, I don't think writing should be your primary concern but rather getting yourself known (building an audience) and that depends very much on where your audience hangs out.

Regretfully, I can only say that what seems to have worked for me was dumb luck. Difficult advice to reproduce.

I made about $0.03 per hour from my book.

BUT

I wrote the book at a time when I wanted a change in my career. I had been doing Network administration and tech support and simple repair work, but I wanted to switch into software development.

The book got me interviews. And my life was very different after that.

No. Its not. Do anything with photos and color and try to do anything outside of platforms and its worse.

Platforms can help with distribution and mitigate inventory storage but your yield gets so small

I wrote a fiction book when I was a teenager. It didn't make me rich, but it forced me to be more social, like at various writers venues or at my own book signing.

Fiction books are not worth it. Technical books are if you write it like a cookbook and list things they need to have in order to do the things you write about doing.

Are there any writers of technical books here that write in their second language? Do you translate it to english or just write it in english?

As a personal goal: yes, very rewarding. The signing night is also very pleasant. You get to meet a lot of people.

As a money maker: no. Not even close.

I wrote two useless books no one should read. I love them with all my heart and they make me feel great about myself. Case closed.

I saw a related Stackexchange post the other day: https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/52772/everyone-h...

Tl;dr:

Q: Should I write something if I kinda want to?

A: Write it. Even if it's just for you.

A tech manual, he means?

I'm selling a book via Gumroad (https://www.vimfromscratch.com/book). Not much, around 30 books per month in good months.

Here's why I think it worths it:

1) You can write it slow in your free time. No hurry. 2) You learn a lot and organize your thoughts in your head. 3) You can start selling before the book finished. It will allow you to test your audience and keep motivated. 4) When it's finished it's mostly passive income (though it's a good idea to also build a website and publish some blog posts regularly)

Writing a book isn’t worth it... who wants to put in that much effort.... to write down your thoughts...

As far as I can tell, writing and publishing a dead-tree book is the best/only way to get on NPR.

As far as I'm concerned, that's the only purpose dead-tree books serve anymore.

Technical books in print are generally better formatted than their e-book cousins (O'Reilly's digital library, Kindle) unless they're PDFs. This has a major impact on readability if there are significant amounts of diagrams or code samples or tables in the text.

I've also found some physical books nicer for reference then their digital versions.

I sometimes think 'I really prefer physical books, if only they had Ctrl-F' - but actually, in reality, it's often so much easier to leaf through and find something (from rough memory of where it was, skimming, jumping around, ..) than it is to search digitally (get the search term right, see results with little context, find it's impossible to search for part of an equation or the text in a diagram, or oh damn it was rendered as an image).

When something isn't just flowing text, it can be a real crap shoot in ebook form. And, even if the formatting is fine, I often find technical or other reference books (e.g. cookbooks) generally work better in physical form.

I much prefer physical books to e-books, especially for technical ones. I learn much better from a physical copy - flipping back and forth, checking where the current section fits into the bigger structure etc I find to be easier. I also like to underline and write notes in the margins - again, I prefer this in a physical book.

I've found few issues on which people are as diametrically opposed as the ebook/physical book debate.

I did a reading group at work a couple of years ago (for Designing Data Intensive Applications as it turns out!), and half the group looked at me like I had 3 heads when I offered to buy them hard copies and the other half was insulted if I didn't offer them hard copies

Trees are a renewable resource.

For sure, but my shelf space isn't.

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