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Comment by znowi | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I was all sympathetic with a poor famous author who made pathetic $12k on his bestseller until I hit the number of copies sold: 4000... Huh? Suddenly, $12k sounds like a pretty good deal.

I should note though that when I hear about authors of tech books (O'Reilly and the like), I do tend to imagine a Jaguar in their garage :) But also a lot more copies sold.

And also, 8 months delay on sales you made July last year, that's just not right. I thought if you're indie the turnaround is much faster with better pay. Apparently not.

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>I should note though that when I hear about authors of tech books (O'Reilly and the like), I do tend to imagine a Jaguar in their garage :) But also a lot more copies sold.

You'd be surprised on both counts. Actual rundowns I've read from technical authors can be even worse than the 4000/$12,000 mentioned here -- except if we talk about something like "The C programming language" or "Learning Perl".

Also: remember that 30% cut that Apple/Google etc takes of off your apps and e-books?

Well, traditional publishers take something like 90%.

Your math is a bit wonky and you are missing some aspects of the traditional publishing contract.

The traditional publishing deal involves the author getting an advance (cash up front) which they do not have to pay back unless they fail to deliver the manuscript. So the publisher takes on the risk that the book won't cover it's advance. The publisher also manages book production and distribution and publicity, to do those things the publisher keeps staff on hand in some fairly expensive office space ( publishing happens in Manhattan, or used to ). All of which add up to a pretty good deal for authors whose work is salable.

With Amazon or Apple, the author takes on the risk, and all the costs of production ( poorly edited ebook only editions aren't going to sell as well as actual books ) and all the costs of marketing and promoting their work. The only thing that's taken care of is distribution; for which they give up 30%, not the actual cost of distribution.

So the new deal is riskier and less certain ( if you pay an editor, a book designer, a publicist etc. ) you might wind up losing money.

>Your math is a bit wonky

What math? I only put some numbers forward. Didn't even do addition. What I said is that for most technical books, 4000 copies is not that far off the mark. Or $12000 dollars.

And, thanks for clarifying that, the amount includes the advance. Note also that not all publishers give an advance, not all authors get an advance, and some authors even PAY to get their books published and/or promoted.

As for the publisher doing all those wonderful things, that's more about traditional publishing (and back in the day). With technical publishing, today, you get far fewer niceties.

In theory, the advance is just an advance, and publishers could ask for the portion back that is not covered by royalties. However, they almost never do that. It's one of the few ways in which publishers actually behave decently towards authors.

Well, part of that is that authors are not as a rule gifted with assets, so it's a fruitless task to recover money from them. The other part is that it looks bad. And the third leg is that that is how commercially successful authors subsidize the unsuccessful.

So you're saying we should expect this to change very soon?

> Traditional publishers take something like 90%

The Pragmatic Programmers offer their authors 50% of the net. I was lucky enough to publish one book with them, and despite that book's anemic sales I made out pretty well. Cant recommend them enough to prospective authors.

I should note though that when I hear about authors of tech books (O'Reilly and the like), I do tend to imagine a Jaguar in their garage....

Imagine that a tech book breaks even (for the publisher) at 5000 copies sold. Further imagine that a successful book sells about 8000 copies. At a $30 cover price, the author gets $1.50 per copy sold, so 8000 copies is $12,000.

Also remember that the publisher probably gets paid 30 days after the close of the month in which a sale occurred, and the author gets paid at least a month after that--and more, if the publisher holds back royalties in case of returns. If you're fortunate, you get paid monthly. You probably get paid quarterly.

It seems to me that the money to be made on an O'Reilly book would be in speaking/consulting/job hunting as someone who "wrote the book on X".

Not much money to be made on speaking. You are lucky to get your expenses covered. But sure, better consulting/job gigs could be an outcome from writing an O'Reilly book. Of course, if you took the year or more it took you to write that book and and put that time into paid consulting I am not sure you would ever catch up. As an O'Reilly author myself if you are looking at writing a book for the money you are doing it wrong.

I have a friend who's an O'Reilly author. Granted, he's not the author of, say, the book on Bash, or Git, but it's a current book. He likes to joke around about how little money he makes on the book (now in second edition): "I make hundreds of dollars. Hundreds!"

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