So you want to self-publish books and courses on programming
css-tricks.com
css-tricks.com
I don't mean to be rude, but the quality of some coding books is not good at all. The majority are rehashes of online documentation on what the function does with barely any examples on "real world application" and could easily be found online for free. I've seen enough chapters on how NumPy arrays work to completely disregard them. As an example, I recently picked up a book on Python for Civil Engineering because I was looking for said "real world" examples for a course I was teaching. In total, there are 6 civil engineering examples across the 160 pages and each needs ALL the basic concepts before you see them (although one is just "here's how matplotlib works").
If you choose to self-publish, please have more than the bare minimum in examples. Take a page out of Miguel Grinberg's Flask Tutorial [1] and have the entire book build up to something. If you're doing something like how to do Data Science with language X, use some larger scale datasets, walk through them, and explain what you are seeing beyond "here's the print statement's output".
Most of the videos on my YouTube channel that are about "How to use X in Y" get minimal views, because they're so simple that you only need to see it once via a video or webpage to "get it". However, some of my more popular videos are where I implement algorithms like the Luhn Check algorithm. Have that kind of material in your book.
[1] https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial...
There are essentially two kinds of tech books:
1/ Thorough, in-depth technical discussions of programming languages, software, or apps that dive deep enough to enlighten the reader on how they work under the hood
2/ Rehashes of already existing docs, the latter of which do the job more directly without forcing you to read filler text. These books are primarily written to boost the author's reputation
Obviously, you should learn to be selective and buy only the #1 type of book. It's not hard to figure out what kind of book it is from looking at the TOC and remembering the type of books you've read from the same publisher.
I wrote in detail about the process of writing, marketing, and releasing my first book here:
https://adamwathan.me/the-book-launch-that-let-me-quit-my-jo...
And was interviewed on IndieHackers to talk about the most recent one here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/098-adam-wathan-of-refa...
If the work is a good match for your skills and personality it’s a really great way to make a fantastic living.
I’m an outlier for sure but $20k is low. If you do a great job at everything that goes into running a business like this you can definitely do much better than that. Josh Comeau did an incredible job building his audience and reputation before releasing his CSS course a few months ago for example and he has done over $500k if I remember right.
Writing is half the battle—it is a significant hurdle and not everyone can write a great technical book.
But the other half (and I struggle with this mightily) is sales/marketing (and the whole 'business' side). Making it look pretty, getting people to know it exists, promoting it.
Many of the best technical writers I know are not great at the latter, and for them, self-publishing might not be the best approach.
I would prefer to read reference content from the vendors themselves and not third-parties, so I don’t understand what draws people to this sort of content I the first place.
That is, I couldn’t create any of this, because I would never buy it myself.
Your story is nonetheless very interesting.
I don’t think anyone can argue with the results, but arguing with reproducible results is a bit more difficult.
If you're not in it _just_ for the money though, go for it. It's extremely satisfying.
My most popular book is actual a book about how I self published. Publish Your Ebook by Joel Dare.
In my opinion, there is a strange marketing game around web frameworks and web frontend development especially.
Rust in Action (https://www.manning.com/books/rust-in-action) is only one data point, but USD20k sounds very low over the lifetime of the book, especially when you consider translation rights and other channels like Safari.
Not that you should necessarily care how you get remembered as you're dead anyway, but I think it's worth it to share knowledge and give to the community if you think you have a contribution worth making. I'm certainly glad other past giants wrote instructional material even if it didn't make them rich.
I doubt that I would see "Here lies Fred, he wrote the greatest book on Fortran ever written" on a tombstone.
Or "Justine, her book on JQuery changed the world" in an obituary.
For a "heritage" book the topic would need to be longer lasting.
I was forced to use specific tools/platforms to edit the content. Those tools were slow, buggy, didn't clearly show what was changed, etc. This was incredibly painful.
Obviously, one should not do it for the money. You can get quite a lot if you're lucky enough to be an outlier and write timeless content, but it's very unlikely. I personally went through the process as I was getting started with freelancing and wanted to boost my visibility. It served its purpose, but the opportunity cost was huge.
Once the book was released, my publisher didn't invest a whole lot in marketing the content. I did what I could on my end, which kept the sales going, but I felt left alone. Again, it depends on your publisher, and on their belief in your project; your mileage may vary there too...
For my new project (https://dev-concepts.dev), I have decided to self-publish. Here are my reasons:
- Freedom - Ownership - Financial - Responsibility
While self-publishing, I can write at my own pace, without external pressure (apart the one I put on myself). I can set my own rules, my own process, use tools of my choice, etc.
Importantly, I keep full ownership. Everything I write remains 100% mine, and I can repurpose anything I want to create new content (e.g., video courses, blog articles, etc). This is a key point for me! I also get to decide if I want to give away free copies of my book.
From a financial point of view, 100% of the benefits will be mine. This means that I can sell ~5x less copies and still make as much money. I also believe that self-published projects that have a solid copy and are marketed correctly have much a better chances to generate money.
The thing is of course that if you're alone, you're alone. Noone else is going to help, review the content, find technical reviewers, provide you a toolchain, fix typos, etc. Personally it doesn't bother me; I find that liberating and empowering!
I have also launched a free eBook generation SaaS at: https://little.webby.press it is completely client-side, there are no accounts and no tracking, just have fun building your own books.
Also, congrats on the launch of https://graphql.guide/! It is so critical to have well thought out, long-form content available in this day and age.
All in all it's been very successful for me, and I highly recommend doing so. The first time you get your printed book in your hand is a magical feeling not quickly forgotten!
[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professiona...
1. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/preppylion/the-preppy-l...
2. I'm working on being meticulous about typos but I know they will happen, plus there will likely be updates to LaTeX that will require some minor changes in the text as time goes by.
That said, probably don't worry about it. I also release additional things (like code), and it's just there for anybody that bought it. I am fine with that.
It would take you a significant effort to prevent bad actors and you would likely make it worse for the your customers in the end. It's just something to accept.
1. And please don't give me any of that Corey Doctorow–inspired stuff.² I've heard it all before. I've heard the other side too—I've seen friends' sales crater when a pirated copy of their book showed up on some site and then rebound after it was taken down.
2. As an aside, the one Doctorow book I've read was Pirate Cinema which was not good. I did read a long story of his in 21st Century Science Fiction which started out good and had an interesting premise, but ultimately failed to deliver on its promise. I've been told some of his other books are good though.
That’s probably not a big risk tbh.
What if someone provides fake information then uploads the book with your watermark?
The iPhone is still only 14 years old. Somewhere between now and universal brain-computer interfaces are many education unicorns waiting to be found.
Yeah there's a reason we still love books.
Well, Dungeons and Dragons dungeon-masters have 2 or 3 copies of important rulebooks (Core Rulebook and/or Beastiaries) because we get tired of flipping through the pages all the time.
But its not so hard to have two books (Ex: Bestiary1 + Beastiary 2 copies) and have a page on Goblins + a 2nd book with the page on Devils to run a Goblin+Devil encounter.
Is it? I wouldn't want to test that claim on any books I own or have borrowed.
Also I'm thinking about The Little Schemer format and how it includes that engagement in the dialog and the frequent small opportunities to test your thinking.
How cool would it be to subscribe to a "book" and to get the next chapter I have to type out a brief reflection of what I've read so far? It would be up to me to decide how involved to make my "reflection" but it would be really cool to have that prompt.
I suppose blogs work in a similar way for people who read them as they come out and leave comments.
Definitely a lot to think about. This is fun! :)
I'm not sure why, but turning the page and feeling a physical object seems to improve my memory. It might be wasteful, but it's often hard to beat the tactile sensation of books.
Sticking to a single, fixed size reader and avoiding changing font sizes helps solve some of that, but it's not quite the same.
Have you had any luck turning on progress bars on your reader? Hasn’t helped me yet but I know I have a very good intuition on physical books for how far through the book a concept was. I can often just move directly to the area and then scan forward / backwards.
On my Kindle or iPad I find this hard.
On the other hand I think there are potential opportunities there in more strongly visually signalling position in ways you can't with physical books (e.g. by strongly visually signposting locations in various ways), that I wish someone would experiment with.
Well printed material is much easier to read and handle than anything electronic. Eink was a step in the right direction, but there's virtually no innovation in the interfaces of ereaders. Heck - even regular PDF readers on computers/phones have a fairly poor interface.
Screens shine when it comes to dynamic content - particularly videos of phenomena (animations of functions as you change the parameter, etc). However, being able to change the form factor of paper (not all books have the same size page), as well as the ease with which one can bend pages is really helpful. Nothing electronic has yet replaced my ability to flip back and forth between two pages.