The economics of writing technical books(architectelevator.com) |
The economics of writing technical books(architectelevator.com) |
The route to riches for, say, a musician is to become famous and charge for the coliseum seats to hear him play. To become famous doesn't it make more sense to give the music away? Being famous means you get high consulting rates, get paid for personal appearances, get paid for putting your name on sneakers, etc. A famous author could get paid for writing movie scripts or snagging a professorship or teaching seminars.
If copyright law disappeared tomorrow, would the artists really be worse off?
As someone who recently (and probably unsustainably) got out of the cycle of worthless jobs and knows a handful of musicians, here's my perspective:
Indie (and indie label) musicians can actually do fairly well with recorded music. No, they won't be rich. Middle class is at most the target, usually under. Live in a third-tier city and have few expenses. You don't need to sell very much for a baseline livable state.
$10000 a month isn't an achievable target for most working artists. $800, on the other hand, is, even without touring. Sell a handful of Bandcamp copies, sell a few physical copies (cassettes are best for this in the current moment, being cheap to produce and having a fairly loyal audience), have your back catalog do well enough on streaming.
$800 is enough to live on, if you're living with roommates. In many ways, living with $800/month and no unfulfilling 40hr job is much better than living with $1800 and an unfulfilling 40hr job. Even if you don't want to live with roommates, it cuts the amount of work for an employer you have to do by a great deal. Working low-skill work is soul-crushing.
For authors, from what I understand, this baseline is even more achievable. If you have no hopes of getting rich, the current copyright system is fine.
But there are multiple other avenues for revenue. One can sell merchandise, such as the ever-popular band t-shirt. And there are still many who will want to buy an official cassette rather than just download a song. There are also paid gigs - a live performance is not replaceable with a download. One can livestream a performance, and get paid for the ad placements.
Livestreaming and live performances and merch creation are all vastly different skillsets than making music in your bedroom, and some musicians are only really good at that part.
I've seen many similar articles to this one before, but I want to complement the author by saying that this one rings the most true and is the most comprehensive of all of them.
However, I want to emphasize a paragraph from his article, that I think needs more emphasis:
> I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one. According to this blog, 96% of books (mostly fiction) sell less than 5000 copies per year. For technical books, it may be worse.
I've heard that 10k number before. I've also been told by one of my publishers that 2k copies is the break even point for them. While I've had the fortune of three out of four of my prior books selling more than 2k copies (and one selling many, many more), it seems that a significant number of traditionally published programming books do not. And I'm sure that ratio is even worse for self-published books.
In fact, I think the "Reality Check" section of the article is not harsh enough. The author cherry-picked some data on very well selling technical books, which doesn't make the point well. The reality is simple: the vast, vast majority of programming books do not sell "well" (let's consider "well" 10,000 copies) and many don't even break the 2,000 copy barrier, even from traditional publishers.
So, what are the economics of technical book writing? Not good. And it's only going to get worse as the market gets flooded with LLM-generated garbage.
So, do it because you really want to do it for another reason (career, teaching, etc.). Not to make money.
There's just no money in this. There is a small market for authors who can crank out passable technical content serially for series such as "...for Dummies": if you have ten books generating royalties in parallel, it might be worth your time. But one or two books? Absolutely not, you'll make more working a minimum-wage job.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but it's basically a hobby for folks who have something to share, and have a daytime job to pay the bills. Plus, yep, the sucky part is that books piracy is widespread, and that even people who benefit from your writing and have the means to pay are just accustomed to sharing bootleg copies for free.
That's already happening, and getting published. Recently read an awful tech book that was obviously generated by an LLM, it was so bad that I reached out to the publisher, who assured me that this was just the author's style, and that they promised no LLMs were involved. All lies, of course.
Apparently publishing awful books can somehow generate revenue.
And even without that, there are publishers like PacktPub which had a lot of poor quality hand written books. I know because I signed up for this thing where they were giving away a new book every day, and a lot of those books were just so bad. There were some gems in there too, hence why I kept looking at those free books. But I’d say 85 to 90% or more were just not worth even trying to read.
I remain hopeful though that even in the face of LLM generated garbage, quality publishers like O’Reilly and Manning will keep the bar high for what they publish.
But there are also those who come from places where monthly wage is like $200, so they wouldn't be able to afford a $30 book even if they wanted to
You could get a book from your local library (in some places, even digitally) - the author ends up getting peanuts for it anyway.
I'm thinking of a scenario where people are paid to write the book rather than from book sales..
Pre-publication, the process consumes lots of time and energy and money while generating zero revenue, output, or other benefit. Very different from most business ventures.
Source: I have written a book, and have also started my own business and have worked for many startups. (VC-backed startups pay their employees.)
In the last 4 years I've sold 743 books which is just shy of $2000. Still I love the fact that every month I'll get a KDP payout email and it feels more gratifying than my own FAANG+ paycheck for some reason.
[0] https://github.com/jdriselvato/FFmpeg-For-Beginners-Ebook [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087GYV15Y/
This made me think that hey why not use it for all video editing needs! Although harder to use than a UI the commands will be the same in 2050 as they are now! Plus it is scriptable.
Because it was entirely^ the fruits of your own labor!
^well everything is connected, I guess you didn’t write ffmpeg nor are you responsible for the creation of video encoding or camera technology, but I’ll go back to splitting my own hairs
My personal experience: during the golden days of the technical book market, a good 15-20 years ago, writing a chapter would net you $1500 (for, like, 2-3 weeks of work, better pay than a magazine article that would take approximately the same time but pay a bit less) an entire book maybe $25K, but that would take you at least 6 months to complete.
Of course, that was just the upon-completion payment, with the promise of later royalties if the book did well, but, unless you were very lucky, that pretty much never happened.
Still, a payment of $2500-in-todays-dollars for less than a month of work isn't entirely bad, and being a published author did have its perks for getting consulting gigs.
But these days, "a magazine or book deal that pays actual money" just isn't a thing anymore, so, yeah...
It took me 2 years to write, one of which was all my spare time, so probably about 9 months to a year's full-time work.
Then I found out no-one bought it! Only pure chance led to it being promoted by someone in the industry, maybe 2 years later. I've kept it updated (started on Cubase 6, now on Cubase 13), and it sells reasonably well; maybe £400 a month in revenue, typically for me. So it's not a big earner, but it pays some of my bills, and means it's worth the 2 weeks of work (average) to update it each time Cubase releases a new version.
All of this is selling via Amazon, worldwide, print-on-demand. Previously on Lulu but they were really just sub-contracting on Amazon and while you get less money per copy on Amazon, it out-sells Lulu by 3x (and then Lulu discontinued the sizes I was using so it was a no-brainer).
I've done another book (which is less of a seller in terms of price and numbers), and quite enjoy them, but it's difficult and I think it's more a case of "if I have the time spare I can put this work in and eventually it will pay me back" - possibly over a year or two...
So it paid something, but probably not as much as a 1 year full time job would have.
Here's mine:
Good to see you here--I noticed your manuscript on GH (probably sometime last year?) during a ~vanity search because it quotes one of my blog posts. (https://hypermedia.systems/tricks-of-the-htmx-masters/#html-...)
I went to check on it and noticed that the repo I have starred is archived and that there's a new one recently put up. I don't see an explanation--can you reflect on or link to anything about the update? (Is this a content update, just ~refactoring how the book is built, etc.?)
Benefits include not needing to hit some page count (so you can be concise), and bug reports from the community.
I don't look down at people who make money from books at all. I admire all writers and editors. (Some publishers can go f themselves, though. :)
But there is another path available to many of us, one that isn't driven by money. Remember the old hacker ethic!
Meanwhile, me as a laid off gamedev counting pennies from the bits of freelance I can grab...
I guess that explains why so much gamedev literature is behind closed doors ($500 vault access for GDC. Or just oral knowledge inside industry) or non-existant. We can barely get good documentation, let alone technical literature. I'm guessing the energy expended from potentially 70+ hour crunch weeks doesn't leave much left for passion writing either.
This whole idea of greed is good and the profit motive being the prime mover is a very recent and arguably detrimental mindset for the long term development of civilization.
Here’s my recap of making almost $400k over a few years of working on books-and-such as a sidebiz alongside a full-time job. Not all of it was from books directly, a lot was from opportunities that the books unlocked. And that’s not even counting how the books enabled me to sponsor my own visa/greencard to come into USA and unlock oodles of opportunities.
The main insight I’ve learned is that the book is a product. Write your thing for someone to benefit from. What [useful thing] will they be able to do after reading your book that they weren’t able to before? How does it help them get more of what they want faster?
https://swizec.com/blog/5-years-of-books-and-courses-or-how-...
Sharing this to encourage, not to brag. We need more insightful and useful books out there.
If you’re gonna do this, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of Write Useful Books first. Wish it existed when I started. http://writeusefulbooks.com/
My pet peeve is indie dev influencers who tweet “anyone can do it” while ignoring their own built up momentum. I don’t know enough about you to ascertain either way.
I've been writing books for over 10 years (have published over a dozen). If you keep at it, there is good money to be made. Because you learn how to market and treat it like a business.
I now make more from my books than I make when I was in industry. But it took a long time. And a lot of work.
My advice is this: if you want to write a book, then write it. But if you do have this sick, twisted desire to spend countless hours writing and editing your work, telling yourself you are an idiot, not good enough, and a horrible writer, then at least do so with the thinking people are going to read it and as a result you will make money. Set yourself up for the possibility of success. How can you do this?
* Package the book in different ways (print, print + videos, print + videos + consultation). This has been extraordinarily successful for me personally.
* Use the amazing Leanpub.com to do the book production (turn your Markdown into PDF, epub, etc). Not an affiliate or whatever, just mentioning it because you will save untold hours of pain.
* If you want to work with a publisher (and in 2024 I don't suggest you do), then choose very, very wisely. There are two who I would even consider working with today, and even in those cases I would absolutely not cede the usual rights.
Hope this helps, Jason
[1] As of this fifth edition my name is no longer on the book due to a disagreement with the publisher.
Jeff Geerling gave his devops books away (free) on multiple occasions. I chose to pay for them as he kept working on and improving them well after release.
If more writers took this approach, the quality would increase.
oh man, I'm sure you can't share, but now I really want to know.
https://www.amazon.com/Write-Useful-Books-recommendable-nonf...
It isn't about technical books exactly but it does speak mostly on how to write recommendable non-fiction, some of which can obviously be technical. It's got a lot of practical advice for the actual "doing" of the book, and has inspired me to at least start dipping my toes in.
Now I do tiktoks on current topics of interest mixed with my project management content. That will probably turn into a series of YouTube long form video lessons.
Personally, I think my first book, 10 years ago, was my best book but it sold much worse than my later books because the topic was too niche.
Also, there are many, many more programmers now than there were before. Maybe they don't read books as much as their predecessors did, but to say Stack Overflow and open source platforms killed technical book publishing is highly inaccurate. I honestly think you're projecting a "you" situation to talk about the whole market. Please don't take that as an attack, but just as an additional perspective.
If you look at Google's documentation of Android now, you don't need to supplement it.
This resonates with me. I've written and published a few books, and the one I'm most proud of has sold the last.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1484232275/ has a 5.0 star rating on Amazon (at 20 ratings), and I've gotten lots of positive feedback about it via email, chat and in person. The topic is just so niche that virtually nobody cares :-)
My book, Effective Haskell (https://pragprog.com/titles/rshaskell/effective-haskell/), is a pretty well reviewed book on a fairly niche technology. It's been in print for about a year, and was in beta for around 6 months before that. I'd estimate I spent around 4,500 hours over 5 years writing my book and the royalties so far mean that the value of that time was around $5/hour pre-tax. That hourly rate will go up slowly over time until the book stops selling, but it's pretty hard to argue that it's objectively worth it just for the royalties.
My motivation for writing the book was never the money, and I've generally treated the royalties as a nice bonus. I started writing because I cared a lot about the technology, and I wanted to share it with other people. Writing the book was my way of contributing something to a community that I'd benefited from a lot in my career.
In addition to the satisfaction, there have been other benefits I've seen to writing a book. It's opened up opportunities for other side income. I've had paid speaking opportunities, and I've been invited as a guest lecturer at a couple of universities and been offered to chance to design and teach a course at a well ranked local university. If I wanted to actively pursue consulting as a side gig I think the reputational gain would help me there as well.
Writing a book has also helped me in my career. In a direct way, I think the benefit to my reputation helped me get interviews. The communication and technical writing skills I gained writing a book have also helped me as I've moved into a leadership role. It's impossible to know precisely how much writing a book contributed or to put a clear monetary value on that, but I do think it's contributed.
The other side of this is that, a year after finishing writing on my book I'm still recovering a bit from the burnout of working so intensely on a side project for so long. I still have some follow-up work (extended solutions to all exercises, errata, fixing up and publishing some cut chapters as free content) that I intend to take on and it's been really hard to find the energy to do it. I'd like to write a second book one day, but I'd still advise people to be mindful of the amount of work it takes and to avoid writing one unless they are absolutely certain that it's something they want to do.
https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematic...
Things haven't changed much. The absolute numbers are similar and discounting for inflation, worse.
1. You write the book as part of your job during the workday. 2. Your company buys the published book to distribute at events and conferences for free. 3. The book seems successful and you get paid. 4. The book gives you credibility in industry events and may even help you get a special visa if you need one.
Full disclosure: I have never written a technical book, but you should if you work in Developer Relations.
Off these, I’ve made $65,000USD. That’s over 13 years. None of these books have sold anywhere near as close to the Unicorn Project! (Which imo is fanfic for the tech-inclined)
The money is nice, but hearing from people who’ve read the books (especially those who ask questions!) is the best part.
Huh, maybe it is the friends we make along the way after all.
What I mean by “good”, is the design & layout of the technical documentation is easy to consume and visually appealing.
(I’m revamping my customer facing tech reference docs and wanting have a visually appealing doc but not so much visually appeal it becomes distracting)
https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Flatten.html
Just look at the amount of examples and details for this function. It is like that for every function.
https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d
The paid option includes an export to PDF which is okay for a quick print or free PDF to put on a tablet, but would need a lot of work to make a book.
I did it mainly because I was starting up as a consultant and trainer, and having your name and picture on a book was a huge plus. A second benefit was that you learn a lot when writing a book; not just about the dark corners of the topic, but also about long form writing and how to express yourself.
But publishers, though... I'll just say that if I was going to do another book I'd try self-publishing, make more from my labour, and save myself a lot of hassle.
Lots of YouTube channels are really just a platform to advertise their product.
Publishing anything these days is a long tail game. Outliers make $.
If you want to make money from a book, you need to promote it, self published or not.
As someone who is interested in the topic of regexes and parsing, Perl in the subject made me... uninterested. I know this is a sample of size 1, but maybe splitting the principles / theory from the language would make sense?
Kudos for spending so many years on this, that's very inspiring.
Which speaks to the lack of need for books in certain elements of the Android market, but not to technical publishing more generally.
Generally curious about new authoring/markup tools and systems, so I'll keep an eye out for the post.
(The quoted blog post is part of an effort to explain some work I've been doing to single-source documentation and output multiple formats while taking advantage of the idioms/affordances of each format. I spent quite a bit of time reviewing and trying markup systems before deciding what I wanted didn't quite exist. Typst wasn't released when I did all of that; I'm aware of it but I haven't read enough to pull it out of my blind spot.)
What was the experience like? What features is it missing?
Being a paid employee of a start-up is different. That would be similar to receiving an advance from a publisher to write a book.
Not all investments are created equal. the bigger Startups convince rich people to give them millions to work on their idea. Publishers completely invert this; you show them a product and you get a piece of the pie in exchange for them distributing. One's a much safer bet even if everything falls apart. And in the corner, entertainment is pretty much the biggest gamble. Always was, probably always will be.