Programming Book Profits (2008)
johnresig.com
johnresig.com
When a customer orders a book, you make 60% of the profit, minus the cost to print the book. The cost to print the book varies. My books run 30-40k words and cost between $3-4 to print. I sell the books between $11 and $14, so I make a few bucks from each book. It isn't a lot if you consider the price of the book, but it's better than traditional publishers by a LOT, and I don't have to print any books ahead of time. My upfront costs are just getting the books written and the covers made. Then I pay for ads on Amazon as a continuing cost. And I get complete insight into how well my books are selling on a day-by-day basis.
I miss out on things a traditional publisher can do, like marketing and real in depth book design, but from what I understand they don't do much marketing unless you're someone famous anyway. I also don't get an advance.
I do keyword research before creating a book, and I've looked at technical books, and he's right, they just don't sell very well. Maybe they used to, before stack overflow, but they're just not worth the investment. If you're thinking of writing one, do it only as a resume builder, or to build a community around something you love.
I've heard the same about marketing and that was my impression when I was interacting with O'Reilly and Apress several years ago. For technical books today, they expect the author to bring the audience.
> I also don't get an advance.
Sure, but that's just a small loan. If you're in the economic bracket of a typical HN reader, you don't need this.
So what's the point to go with them? We all can save it as a pdf and upload to Gumroad,or even send it to Amazon to print. I appreciate books on JAVA or Docker don't sell in millions but I'd at least expect the publisher to try to put my book on the shelves..
Good question. :)
It depends a lot on what the author wants to get out of it and what they want to do themselves. Going with a traditional publisher gives you:
* The prestige of your book coming out of a well-known publisher. If your goal is mostly to boost your resume or public speaking fees, then having an O'Reilly animal on the cover of your book can be very valuable.
* They provide developmental editors, line editors, copy editors, illustrators, and typesetters for you. If you don't want to do that yourself or find freelancers, that saves you from the headache.
* Likewise, they deal with the administrivia and legal stuff around distribution, translations, ISBN numbers, licensing, etc. I imagine they might provide some legal cover for you if you, say, defame someone in your text or use a copyright image.
* Your editor will create a timetable and some urgency for you to get the book done. That can be really helpful for people who have trouble summoning the discipline and structure to complete a book.
All of that stuff is valuable. The question is whether it's valuable enough for them to take the lion's share of the profit that the book generates.
There are other people who focus on "low content" books like journals, log books, and children's activity books. They tend to more often do seasonal books.
I have done one "topical" book, about a new term that is trending on google over the last year, but it basically gets no sales. My mistake for not following the formula.
Martin Kleppmann, the author behind Designing Data Intensive Applications, wrote about his experience as well, and it shows an interesting contrast with Resig's experience with digital publishing. As you can see in Martin's graph, ebook sales starting Sept 2014 were a _major_ part of his royalties due to it being available as "early release", and integration with the O'Reilly platform increased his exposure, and therefore royalties.
Its hard to guage accurately, but it seems O'Reilly + ebook sales contributed to about 2/3rds of his overall royalty returns, which is a pretty darn good result!
Of course, Kleppmann and Resig are writing about very different eras in terms of publishing, but I can't help but wonder if Resig would have a different experience if he was able to publish an equally relevant work in 2015 vs 2008.
"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."
Imagine a world where the creators actually are the primary financial beneficiaries and the pipes/infrastructure (aka Publishers) are compensated appropriately for their value. Without creators, Publishers cannot exist.
The quantity of risk they take on is generally lower in non-fiction and has been going down dramatically over the past few decades. The publisher/author financial model was built for a world where:
- The publisher had to use expensive presses to print and bind hundreds of books at a time.
- The publisher had to maintain relationships with thousands of independent bookstores and ship boxes of books to them using relatively primitive logistics and shipping channels.
- Data on consumer demand and sales was hard to get and slow to update.
- Typesetting a book required expensive hardware, specialized skills, and tons of labor.
- Consumers had little information when choosing what books to buy, so a publisher's "brand" was an important and valuable signal for quality.
None of this is true any more. Authors are expected to produce near copy-ready manuscripts. Desktop publishing makes typesetting dramatically easier. Books can be printed on demand one at a time near the location where it is sold. Shipping today is highly optimized. Bookstores have consolidated into a small number of mega-chains, and most people are simply buying from Amazon today anyway. Consumers have access to reviews and lots of other data to make informed choices so couldn't care less what publisher logo is on the back of the book.
The fact that royalty rates have not changed to accommodate all of this is simply because authors are mostly unaware of this and let them get away with it.
I wrote a book[0] (published yesterday!) and, so far, sales are about 3:1 digital to print+digital. For me the biggest sales figures so far occurred when early access (MEAP) was launched.
For those of you who speak Polish (or are willing to go with Google Translate) here's the link:
https://jakoszczedzacpieniadze.pl/ile-zarobila-ksiazka-finan...
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=pl&tl=en&u=htt...
[1] https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematic...
Direct links (if your browser/workflow supports it) to the transcript of that lecture: https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematic... or (though it doesn't matter for this lecture) https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/cs1193.pdf...
Takeaways (as of 1987):
- “it takes around a thousand hours of labour to write a book […] All in all, our talented specialist or so-so generalist can expect to net maybe $8000 over his book’s lifetime of perhaps five years.”
- “you need to aim for ten thousand domestic sales; say two thousand a year for five years. That’s 5–10% of the entire market in a topic like compilers or operating systems. There’s nothing off-the-wall about this, provided you find the right niche: Let yours be the hardest book on the subject, or the easiest.”
- If you drive a hard bargain with your publisher, increase your royalties, and sales: “your efforts can net you as much as […] say $100 per hour”.
(I imagine some of these numbers will no longer be accurate as of 2021, and even the nature of the publishing industry has changed in perhaps substantial ways…)
Yet I too am guilty of finding ebooks for free, maybe I'm a hypocrite.
The problem with paying for books is its like £30+ up front before you find out if the book is any good or not. And lots of programming books are very badly written.
You might make more money by making a series of Youtube videos than writing a book?
> No one buys eBooks. You’d have to be pretty… special… in order to not be able to find a free ebook of Pro JavaScript Techniques.
Funny how things changed, today I would prefer the ebook version over physical for reading on an eink display. Actually, these days I hardly do any kind of reading on a regular light emitting display (only coding and video). It's just so much more comfortable to read e-ink despite its short comings. Does wonder with focus as well. I even started reading short form articles on my e-reader after first saving them on Pocket.
Programming Book Profits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101483 - Jan 2008 (4 comments)