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Comment by j2kun | Hacker News Reader

For the HN crowd there's probably a more realistic path toward writing as a career: self-publishing technical books.

[By one year after publishing my first book](https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programme...), I had sold 11k copies, and with self publishing you get a much bigger royalty from each copy, drastically lowering the bar for financial success. I expect my second book to do even better, because my audience has only grown since then and the book is more general purpose.

I might be an outlier in that I have already built up a large audience from blogging about math. But the benefit of self-publishing, aiming your work at folks with disposable income, and having a niche all seem to make a full-time writing job quite straightforward.

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Specifying technical books is interesting - my first book was fairly technical (though the spiritual theme which probably reduced the target market significantly) but my most successful books monetarily were far and away the erotica I wrote primarily for my own gratification. I know erotica's an active genre, but it's still a source of consternation that I get so much more reader interest for something so much easier and less meaningful.

Having written erotica on the side while working a day job where I write technical content, I truthfully find it much more difficult to write erotica. :P Props to you for doing it skillfully enough to get paid!

I wish I knew whether I was actually better at erotica than other genres or people are just more likely to pay for erotica. I suspect it's the latter...

I self-published eight (non-technical) books. They sell reasonably well, at least by Czech standards (just 10 million speakers), but the first one sold the best, around 10 thousand copies. The latest one only sold some 2500 so far.

This might be a post-Covid effect, though. During Covid, books sold well, people were probably bored. Post-Covid, with high inflation kicking in (we are around 17 per cent in Czechia), people reduced their cultural expenses first: food and energies are more important.

That said, I found the combination of being a programmer and a writer fairly efficient. Being able to write documentation in detail beforehand means that I discover a lot of subtle problems and corner cases before I actually implement something. And, as a practising writer, writing documentation feels easy to me, a natural flow.

Just a general question, how do you know the topic is even worth writing a book about? Like spending a year working on it then watch the book fail. That would really suck. I guess in general, how do you know you have something interesting and captivating to say.

Edit:for the weird auto completes

For starters, you need to define what you consider success and failure. If it's to make a ton of money, you should probably reconsider your options right there. If it's to spend a bunch of time learning and thinking about a topic that may be something else. If it's just a fun side project (just wrapping up another one of those), that's fine too.

Totally agree. If you focus on the money you'll just be frustrated. I could have made more money spending those hours driving for Lyft instead. I deliberately haven't tracked my hours so I won't be discouraged at my hourly rate. Even spending that time on leetcode could get you a better job and more income.

But, there's nothing quite as satisfying as setting out to do something really difficult and seeing it come together. And unlike most other things in your career where you're part of a team and sharing your success, a book basically rests solely on your shoulders. So it's easy to point to it and truthfully say "I did that".

Plus, it turned me into a really good writer.

I used to publish and have some anecdata you may find encouraging. In my experience, if you’re thoughtful enough to wonder if you have something interesting to say, you likely do.

Aside from that bit of data, there is one definite advantage to writing. The process of writing a book is a great way to learn more and get better at explaining what you know. This is a double edged sword because if you spend six months on a first draft, you will likely see a major difference in quality between the first section you wrote and the last.

You may make some money, but you’ll almost certainly learn something.

To some extent, this is true of many things where you do work in advance and then try to sell it. That’s just what a lot of business is. In this case I assume the author got a lot of feedback over the years in the form of ‘I’m a programmer and I liked your article and I always wanted to learn mathematics and never learned how’. And, like, that sort of thing doesn’t mean writing a book on the topic would be successful, but it does seem like a bit of a hint.

I think in general the answers might be something like ‘look for clues’ or ‘try to get feedback on whether the idea is good early’ but I also think a lot of the time it’s just people writing books they want to write or that they guess people will be interested in. But I’m definitely guessing and I don’t really know.

It's hard for me to pin it down, but after blogging for 10+ years and working on my second book now, I kind of just have a good feeling for what will work. The topic and my approach to it feels true and speaks to my experience.

There is a huge selection bias when talking about something like this.

Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential is one of my fav books but he wrote two books before Kitchen Confidential that were utter failures. I am not sure how successful some of his later works were either.

Even a masterpiece that people would love could be a total failure with bad timing and poor marketing.

Let us evaluate. You work at Google. On encryption. And have the time and energy to write books on the side and you don't consider yourself an outlier? Please...

Notice how they're always some FAANG guy in these kinds of discussions saying something like:

"so you've earned 50K for a year work on writing that book? dude that's like $x/hour, I earn a $300K wage + 1 million in stocks per year, and they have a private cook and gymnast at the FAANGplex for me and everything".

/shrug I wrote most of the book before I was a FAANG guy.

is this perhaps the same guy who says "I think you should lose the copyright for those books you wrote after 10 years, so if you don't make any money on them before that sucks to be you!"

on edit: of course not particularly relevant to most tech books but still it is sort of a bad look that nearly everybody on HN is wild about.

Is knocking down straw men a regular thing for you?

I'm sorry - you mean that you find it unlikely that people claim copyright should run out at 10 years on HN? I thought it was well-known enough that I didn't have to go through the hundreds of copyright threads to find examples.

HN, where everyone uses fallacy arguments to sound smart, prop up their delicate egos and feel like they contribute value

... without actually adding any!

okey-dokey, valued HN-member.

Sums this comment up perfectly: zero-content and basically pissing on other people.

Regular publishers have a bit different approach: they contact like 5 potential authors at the same time, ask each to write a book, pay small advance payment (~5k) then wait 1 year and pick 1 book to publish. 1 author maybe gets paid something, 4 authors just wasted 1 year of their time.

That hasn't been my experience. It's been that publishers pay less than that but do publish books that are delivered in a publishable form. But doesn't change the fact that most authors make next to nothing especially on things like technically-oriented books that have zero possibility of being best-sellers.

Which may be fine for some purposes but not if you're banking on a hit.

I've never heard of this with technical publishers. Maybe "regular" publishing is different.

Do you only sell e-books? Or you self publish physical books too?

He sells physical too, which you can see if you click through to purchase.

As someone who has written half a dozen technical books, you are an outlier. Congrats on your success!

Would love to hear more about your launch tools.

How did you self publish?

Kindle Direct Publishing. It used to be called CreateSpace (I was an intern there!) and their process is decent and the printed quality is good!

Another option is to write documentation for opensource projects. Many have some sort of funding, but not good doc.

I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from doing this. But there's some cachet to having your name on a book cover compared to being an unsung writer of docs. (Self-published vs. through a publisher is another more complicated discussion with both pros and cons on both sides.)

You are not exactly outliner as I had calculated that it would take 11k copies to make a living assuming that you are selling a weekly newsletter to the same audience.

There is also that myth-might-be-true thing of selling to developers book-wise means that you are targeting two groups those who cannot afford 2nd screens and those who can...i.e. print copy and electronic copies should be at different prices.

> those who cannot afford 2nd screens

You can pick up an extra monitor at a thrift store for around 10 bucks. My 2nd monitor came from a thrift store. I use it for displaying the manual while I'm working.

After the first year, I made my book's electronic version "pay what you want."

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