I'm an author of 8 books in Robotics. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from this.
Pros
1) Great visibility in the robotics community
2) Started getting good consulting projects
3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income)
4) People start identifying me in conferences
5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities
6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots
7) Knowledge also doubled (I have to do a lot of homework in order to write things in the book).
8) Self-satisfaction to became an author
Cons
1) Time consuming
2) Need full-time dedication
3) Royalties are very low (only 17% of the book price)
4) Books will easily come online for free download. This will definitely demotivate us to write another book.
5) Books will outdate very easily (Technical books), so you may have to update it by writing a new edition.
6) Getting good income from books is like getting a lottery. It will only happen to a few people.
Regarding Con 5), it's generally true with some exceptions. I wrote a Fortran book (https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortran) and expect it to stay fresh for at least several years thanks to the slow pace and the unusually high maturity of the technology. On the downside, it's a relatively narrow niche so I don't expect high total number of sales. For instance, about 800 copies have been pre-ordered in the first 2.5 years of writing. The book is done and will be out in print in November.
I wrote a book, too (career advice for new devs). I had previously written a technical ebook (about Cordova) and wanted to write something that had a longer lifespan, but was still focused on developers. Writing a technical book was great, but, like you said, it became outdated very easily.
That said, if you want to anchor yourself as an expert in a space, I can't think of a better way to do it than to write a book. This is because it will force you to learn the topic very well (I remember spending an hour testing out something so I could write one sentence accurately) and because you can say "oh yes, I wrote a book on that" which gives you a lot of credibility.
I think it was totally worth writing the less technical book too. It makes you dig into thoughts and ideas in a much deeper way than blog posts or presentations.
It also opens up some doors in terms of presentations and speaking, if that's of interest. My book wasn't on a technical topic, but if you write one, I could definitely see that leading to some consulting.
I think the best way to write a book is to blog it first, then assemble the pieces (adding in more). This lets you do a number of things:
* you can outline the topic as a series of posts. If you can't do this, don't write a non-fiction book.
* you can see if you like the topic 5-10 posts in. If you do, then you have the bones of a book. If you don't, why would you commit to a full length book?
* you can build an audience. I didn't have a large audience, but had a list of 200ish people I could market the book to. And again, if you blog 5-10 times and no one is interested, they probably won't be interested in a book either.
* you can easily turn it into an ebook (using a tool like leanpub) if you determine you want to self publish. If you work with a traditional publisher, you can still pull and revise the blog posts.
Since the book was just released in August, I have no idea of the financial success. Like the author, I'm not looking to have this be a huge piece of my income stream. If I can earn out my advance, I'll be happy.
How much and what ways did your motivations change from writing book 1 to say book 4? At that point, what's keeping you going the most?
By the time you sit down to plan book 8, what's going through your mind especially when you factor in the cons?
Thanks.
I can not fathom how you could write 8 books. I have written one book and got it published on Packt. It was a very tiring process.
> 5) Books will outdate very easily (Technical books)
I feel you. I wrote a blockchain programming book. It was becoming outdated soon just after the book was being released. The pace of the blockchain technology is very fast.
> 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income)
Yes, I think technical books are a great marketing asset when you're a consultant / freelancer. It gives you a ton of credibility, more so than one more project to your cv / portfolio. Plus, as a bonus, it provides a few royalties. It's a good way to stand out, too: "Do you have a business card so that I put it with all the other business cards I got today and will forget as soon as I get back home?" "No, Mr. Prospect, but let me give you that book I wrote, you'll enjoy it, and you have my contact info on the first page".
Rather than a potential source of passive income, I tend to see it as a marketing tool that has a very low to negative cost. Seen that way, most of your cons aren't that bad.
If I were a freelancer / consultant, I would definitely write books.
I have spent probably thousands of hours writing random responses helping people on forums, just because its the thing that I do to procrastinate. For example, this year I wrote more than 4000 posts on https://users.rust-lang.org/ and 19000 messages on the help channels in a few Discord servers. I'm probably the world expert at spotting the mistake in small snippets of Rust code at this point.
I honestly wish I was able to channel this incredible amount of writing into blog posts or a book, but I don't know how. My blog has had one post in the last three years. Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.
Maybe there are common conceptual issues you spotted?
I'm not sure, but I would also imagine that you explained some things a few times in a more simple language, this could also be a great thing for a blog post. Instead of pointing them to a doc and explaining something about it, point them to your blog post then.
Grab all your posts and sort them in some kind of logical grouping and order. Decide which ones are still useful, update those that you can, and create a book out of them. Call the book something like, "1000+ answers to your most asked questions." Once you have that, publish it as an ebook. Don't give it away for free. Price it at $19.99 but have specials every so often maybe for $2.99. From that point on add it to every message that you respond to. Tada, you've become a published author with the cred of a technical book. Believe me when I tell you, you can make a career out of it. Add your contact info. so that you can get some public speaking gigs out of it. Given your past of answering questions as a hobby, you'll be able to update the book every few years. Don't look at the book as the money maker, you'll get relatively little money, but as the tool that will expand your career. At the very least, you can add it to your resume.
High priced consultants do this all the time. You should do it. You've written the material already.
I'd find a way to make it cheap for you (in time and energy) to iterate such that the one-off content that you're providing can be used as stepping stones to a paragraph, and then a chapter, and then a book.
As an example, I've written thousands (!) of customer support messages, via email, chat, or reddit, to help my PhotoStructure beta users.
I've found that the second or third time I answer a question, either I need to fix the product so the question doesn't show up again, or I transcribe my response onto a new page on photostructure.com. In my case, it's just `hugo new content/faq/post.md` and then I dump the new content into the new page.
It doesn't have to be an elaborate post. Perhaps a bit more nuance or detail than my customer support reply, but not much more than that. Sometimes it's only 1 paragraph.
I've found that these "humble starts" can then be iterated on fairly easily, as inspiration comes to you.
As an example, according to git, I've made 15 commits to <https://photostructure.com/faq/library/>. The first iteration was just a handful of sentences I wrote as a response to what I meant by "library."
Take the essence of the question asked, or the non-working sample code given, take your response on the forum post, verbatim, and post that on your blog. Your blog is a marketing vehicle, you aren't necessarily doing it to rank high in google or get lots of traffic for ads. You're doing it so you have a single source of content you can direct someone towards and also identify yourself as a source of knowledge and expertise.
As someone just getting started on Rust, I’m grateful for people like you helping the newbies out with our little snippets of code. So thank you, even if we haven’t interacted yet :)
Why don't you write a book called "rust gotchas: 4000 subtle ways rust can try to f*ck up with you and how you can defeat it"?
I'm (almost) serious (if you do that, do several, specific titles: "100 lifetime gotchas", "100 traits gotchas", etc.) I've read several books that were little more than short blog posts collections, with a common theme but no real overall structure, and, mind you, some of them were pretty good despite of that, because they solved real problems I had. Some people learn better with a bottom-up approach (i.e seemingly random sequence of independent items that eventually let you grasp the big picture) than top-down (3 parts, with each part having 3 chapters, with each chapter having 5 sections, with each section having...)
Mood; right now I have 6 published posts on my personal blog (hosted on github) spanning 5+ years, as well as a couple on my old company blog, but honestly there's a big hurdle to go from shitposting on the internet to publishing posts.
I do see blogposts as a stepping stone to writing books though.
Anyway I've written thousands if not tens of comments all over the internet, but I also have massive impostor syndrome so I never really look back to see if said comments were appreciated or educational.
I've also been fairly active on the Go slack channel, but very much from a beginner's mindset. 10+ years of software development and I still feel like I'm feeling my way around in the dark.
I've got tons of material to write about though, I really should set aside a couple hours to put things down. I feel like that would be a possible way forwards.
But at the same time I'm pretty terrified of being called out for being wrong; not only because it's confrontational, but because I would have to amend or retire my posts. Call me weird but it's giving me a lot of anxiety.
But, I should probably just bite the bullet and go for it, it'll be a way to improve my confidence and advance in my career, because that's been stuck for a while.
I should look into blogging platforms that are like Twitter, but for longer posts. But not full length ones. IDK
I coin one rule for blogging: However you do it keep it consistent. If you do monthly long reads keep doing that. If you do short posts 5 times per day keep making them 5 times per day (its better to drop to 4 and make a buffer that auto publishes than to skip days)
Forum discussions can be a mess of excess and ot information. You could easily cut and paste questions you've answered. (Sometimes modify them to fit how generic your answer is) Then copy paste your answer under it as well as useful bits from other peoples response.
Put links to topics and/or profiles with everything you "steal" to promote the forum.
Make tools to automate the process. You don't want to be muleing clip board back and forwards.
Just dump it into a post and save the draft if it isn't finished in 15 seconds.
Again: be consistent at it. If there is one post per day the visitor should be able to visit 1 time per day and find it. If it isn't there for 1-3 days - why bother?
Just spitballing, but how about just tentatively titling a book "Common Rust Mistakes". Then take those 4000 posts (congratulations and thank you, by the way) and group/fishbone them according to elements that you feel are appropriate. I hazard to guess there's a CMS or LaTeX/DocBook package or org-mode setting that would allow posting first draft notes as blog entries. If you need a forum conversation to focus your writing, imagining a Gentle Reader may help. Many writers also bend the ears of family, friends, and editors.
While I love books immensely, these days I just don't buy them any more. What I do is google answers to problems, and for guidance on how to do things. There's just so much fantastic information immediately available... and there's the "constantly changing" thing that many people have mentioned. Books can't really keep up, alas.
So, I'm sorry it's not a paid position, but really, thanks so much for helping the modern programmer, particularly with rust... it's a challenging language.
> Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.
The key here is the interlocutor. Trying to write an interesting post for a general reader is a dauting task hence the energy. Try to materialize that reader a bit more, even if mentally. Or write in dialog form :)
There's a model in the way Randall Munro turned a bunch of XKCD comics into the best-selling books "What If" and "How To." It's a little more complicated than gluing together all of your posts, but with the right editor, it can all come together. https://xkcd.com/how-to/
You don't need to turn it into a book. You can turn it into an online resource.
I help people settle in Berlin. I got tired of repeating myself, so I put my answers on a website and linked to it. Now it's my main source of income, and a well-known resource for expats.
I don't think any topic can be monetized with such ease, but it doesn't hurt to try. Even if you completely fail, you'll still help thousands of people who are googling their problems.
This would likely be well suited for a short book of rust anti patterns. I love resources that are learning by inversion: here is what not to do, and why.
I don't know if this will help, but an idea. Take your posts, copy them, and paste them on your blog. Add a little bit of background to make it understandable outside of the context of a message thread.
Still feel like a ton of work?
I created my own blog as a "note to self" type work. I would write down anything I was working on so that I could reproduce it in the future. I now have hundreds of personal documents and hundreds of professional documents at work. They come in amazingly handy, to me, nearly every day.
I've now written a dozen very small books on subjects I care about. The books are just 20 pages or so and people seem to love them. An example is "Publish your eBook by Joel Dare" on Amazon. See also, Zines.
He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it." It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it.
I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contacted about other jobs, and even to write other books.
They all said the actual book itself made them no money beyond their initial (small-hardly five figure) advance, and in terms of dollars per hour they probably would have been better off getting a fast food job, but it opened up a lot of doors and made them at least a little bit "internet famous."
I'm pretty sure if I showed up to a performance engineering job interview and said "I wrote the book on performance," as though that was what mattered most, I'd be shown the door. In my opinion it would be horrendously arrogant. In fact, I interviewed at Google while I was writing Systems Performance for Prentice Hall, and I never mentioned it in the interviews for that reason. In such interviews I'm focused on what value I can bring to the company -- what problems I can help them solve in the future. I'm not there to coast on my prior reputation.
Also, regarding "overcome the hurdles": those hurdles are now practically non-existent with various publishers. This results in books on the topic that should never have been published.
I could explain in more detail, but there's a lot of negative connotations with technical book authorship, which I work to overcome in such interviews and in roles. Does the author care more about working on their reputation than working for the company? Did the author only write the book to make an exaggerated name for themselves for the benefit of job interviews? (As you suggested in your opening sentence :-) I personally only write books when I'm already the expert on the topic, and it's a way to share my expertise.
Another interview I had years ago, after telling them about my first book, the interviewer said "so you know the theory, but can you put it in practice?" The assumption being "those that can do, those that can't write books." I was in a worse position for letting them know about it.
And of course, there can be positives for writing books. You are showing a willingness to share your knowledge with others. (You can do that in blog posts as well.)
We hired this guy who wrote a book on the thing the team he was hired for managed. He was a nightmare. He was just insufferable. People would ask questions and he would suggest they read his book. He would mention his book in every meeting. He would tell people they couldn't do things they'd already done and then back-peddle that it wasn't possible when he'd written his book. It was just a huge drag. He managed to also be terrible in other ways and has since been canned. I pity any future applicants that come into an interview with the managers that had to deal with that guy planning to lean on their book during the interview. There's a good 50 people in the company with a real bad taste in their mouths from him.
Just having a book that you've written on any topic listed somewhere on your resume is nearly always a positive. It is kind of like having a college degree in that it shows you can start something and finish it.
>It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it.
And I'd add that this is the real value IMO of going with a name publisher--which is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag. Fairly or not a lot of people mentally make at least a bit of mental deduction for a book published independently.
> It's a tremendous signal to have overcome the hurdles of getting a publisher to accept you and print your book with your name on it.
That would seem to depend on the publisher, and the business arrangement, as to whether it really signals anything (though I suspect that often hiring managers might not know enough to correctly interpret the signal.) Obviously, if the book is a success and widely-known for its technical merit, that's a positive signal, but that's different than just getting a book published.
Even where getting over the hurdles to get a book published signals something, there's a question of whether it signals something relevant to the job you are hiring for. The hurdles of getting a book published (where they exist at all, e.g., outside of what is essentially vanity publishing or a close approximation) aren't particularly similar hurdles to those encountered in most technical jobs even when the book is on a subject close to the job duties.
another good way to become a little bit "internet famous" is to create and maintain a useful open-source project.
IMHO, this is more future proof in the technology space since you can gradually evolve a project but a book can become obsolete if it focuses on a specific technology rather than fundamentals.
> He kind of touches upon it, but there is a lot of value in being able to go into an interview and literally being able to say about a topic "I wrote the book on it."
A lot of it depends on the publisher. If it is for example OReilly, I would be impressed. If it is Packt, I would not be impressed at all. Some publishers do a much better job of screening and providing editorial support and technical reviews so that if an author is published by them, I can have confidence that the author is a subject matter expert. Some publishers are little more than self-publishing and so I would not have confidence that the author was an expert.
I am sure this is mostly seen as a positive but this can also backfire in an interview, and later, at work (I see a sibling comment addresses this). If a person leads with saying he has written a book on a topic, and then is unable to provide adequate responses to basic questions, the panel opinion goes south very soon. I have seen this happen.
Think of it as when a candidate claims she knows a language X well, but then is unable to answer reasonable questions around X. Saying you have written a book is like this claim, except dialing up expectations to the max.
Not saying advertising a book is a bad idea, but be aware of the expectations you are setting up.
On the flip side, be careful when claiming skills on your resume. You may just encounter an interviewer who wrote the book on that topic who decides to ask you a few questions about it...
Martin deserves every penny of his hard-work on Designing Data Intensive Applications. Experienced engineers can easily use the book as a reference and you can give the book to smart junior engineers to give them a great foundation.
Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.
Can someone expand on why the book is so good? I found it very unremarkable but it's recommended so much around here that I suspect that I've missed something important.
Agreed. I'm reading it just now and it is really high quality. Just the chapter on transactions is probably the best explanation of a single topic that I've read in any technical book. It's really good for such a complex topic—thorough while still being very readable!
Very much so. I wish there were more books like that. Heavy on content, light on dogma, with very well weighted opinions and suggestions. Excellent book!
That sentiment (though I didn't think of it in quite this fashion) is why I set up a bi-weekly project management meeting at my last office, and tried to set up something similar for technical people.
The PM meeting was not a status reporting meeting. It had no management beyond the PMs (that is, no supervisors proper). The entire purpose was to facilitate sharing information across project boundaries (technical, procedural, or even just a chance to vent). I considered it to have "paid for itself" after two PMs discovered that another PM had already solved a procedural problem (how to get something done, not a technical problem) that they'd been stumbling over for months. That was also the day the PMs stopped complaining about the (non-mandatory) meeting that I'd set up for them. Another time, a PM discovered that another project had exactly the test capabilities they needed (but because of physical separation was totally unaware of this test lab tucked into a corner). Saved a lot of time and money that day, and the project ended up ahead of schedule in that aspect (not sure if they kept that lead, I left shortly after).
I wish I'd been able to get the technical meeting going, but management wasn't willing to give people the hour I asked for and "lunch & learn" only works for the motivated when you aren't getting paid and you aren't getting training credits towards some certification.
I agree with the former statement but once you have reached a 300x productivity multiplier you are no longer an engineer. You're primarily a teacher who communicates via books.
Writing a book does not add value to your employer, enabling engineers in the world is one thing but it does not affect your day to day job or people arround you.
I had a contract to write a book about Google Wave. I was almost finished with it when Google decided to kill the project.
I got a kill fee (which was almost nothing) and a great story to tell, but it taught me a good lesson about how to balance an advance vs going for more residuals on the backend (this is true primarily for technical books. For traditional publishing, get as big of an advance as you can get).
The secondary lesson was to not sign contracts for books about Google products (only slightly joking), or really any upcoming product or language without understanding the risk you as the author take if the project is canceled or delayed or there is some other fundamental change.
I was 25 when I got the Wave book and it was a lot of work and research for nothing, but I can look back and laugh at the experience.
I’ve turned down technical books over the last few years, just because unless you sell 100,000 copies, it can be hard to make the economics work — unless I would be willing to take it on as a side-gig. That said, if it is a hit, the speaking fees/workshops/consulting options from that book can pay dividends, as I’ve seen from many of my friends.
I wrote a book back in 2000 and it's one of those glad-I-did-it-but-never-again experiences.
I think the author nailed it with, "I strongly recommend that you estimate the value of your future royalties to be close to zero."
Do it as a way to give back / contribute to a topic you are passionate about, do it for the amazing learning experience, do it for the challenge. And then if you also make some money off it, that's just icing on the cake.
I'm not sure where I first heard this, but I feel it, even as I think about writing more: "everyone loves having written a book, not so much writing a book."
Miracles happen and sometimes a book, like this one, takes off. For the most part, it's not worth your time and energy. I've made far more money as an author of articles and as an expert witness than I ever did from my books, even though one did with quite well and was translated into Greek and German.
I'll also add that he must have one heck of a deal with ORA to get those kind of royalties because the standard ORA contract based on his sales, would not come to anything like that much money.
> For the most part, it's not worth your time and energy.
I'd revise that, and say it's not worth your time and energy if the goal is to make money from it. There may be other goals (e.g. to evangelize and popularize some piece of technology, or maybe to make certain tech more accessible).
I'm on my third. It's definitely worth it, but it's also, if done well, a long, hard haul.
I think it's probably good to go into the project with an idea of why you're doing this. Are you creating what's basically an extended business card? Are you trying to help a particular kind of person that you know very well? Or are you chasing the goal of matching up a slice of knowledge with an eager audience?
There are other goals. For instance, a lot of disparate experiences in your career can come together to help on a certain section you're working on. This allows you to personally gain some synthesis from your experiences you might not otherwise. You can find new depth in ancillary areas as you go through and footnote, adding more depth to the things you're talking about both for yourself and the reader.
It's good to have those goals, even if you end up delivering a different kind of book than you had planned, because as a sole author something's got to keep you motivated for years. This isn't a software project, a job, or even a romantic commitment. Whatever you write, if it's worth writing, becomes a part of you. Like one of the other commenters says, if you have people on your team with published books they're likely to be busy responding to and helping folks interested in those areas. That doesn't go away simply because you move on.
Probably the best advice I can give for new authors is that it should be a lot of work, and once you finish each phase you'll say to yourself, "Now comes the hard part". This essay writer gave 50 presentations. Wow! That number of public appearances alone is a non-trivial amount of work. Don't forget contacting bloggers, podcasts, tech publishers, and so on. No matter where you are in the process, next up is the hard part.
None of that is any reason not to do it, of course. You just should be aware that if you're going to do a good job it's a major commitment. Prepare your outlook accordingly.
* just took a few weeks of part time work, mainly just organizing blog posts
* Leanpub pays much higher royalties (80%)
Books are a great way to learn more about the topic and help others. It makes training and employee onboarding a lot easier. You can tell folks to read a chapter and then review.
Books aren't a great way to make money, but they're fun to write and a great way to give back to the programming community.
I don't use leanpub to create my book, but I still put it on both leanpub and gumroad. In case you aren't aware, gumroad [0] gives better returns and holds your payment for 1-2 weeks instead of 45-75 days on leanpub.
> The personal growth that comes from taking on such a challenge is also considerable. And there is no better way to learn something in depth than by explaining it to others.
I second. If you can't explain it, you don't understand it well enough. I'm the author of a YouTube course "Dynamic Programming for Beginners" [0]. Helping people to better understand the topic is a pure joy by itself, but it's also extremely rewardable for an author in terms personal growth. If you want to understand something, start teaching, you won't regret.
I’ve been writing a book on cryptography called Real-World Cryptography[1] and targeting software engineers and students who are interested in applied cryptography. The book has already sold thousands of copies before even going in print (due to a blogpost I wrote on why I’m writing a book on cryptography[2]) which has added a lot of pressure on my plate.
The book is almost done at this point, but revising and polishing it will take a lot of time. I really wish I could take some time off for that like the author of the post did.
I can say that it has been a long journey, but I have learned so much along the way.
It's really stunning to see the percentage take from writing a book vs. putting something on the app store. People complain about Google and Apple taking 30%, but for these books, they're taking 75% for electronic books and 90% for print! 30% doesn't sound so bad to me compared to that. (I realize for print their costs are higher, but still - 90%?)
My wife is a published author (and ghost writer) and my sister-in-law is a VP and acquisitions editor for a small publishing house.
The different between 30% and 75% is mostly historical, and the app market vs. the publishing world run on different models: There is not really an equivalent of advances or physical publishing in the app world. Royalties and app revenue splits are are roughly equivalent, though.
As an author, your leverage on advances and royalties is your personal brand equity. "Becoming" by Michelle Obama is almost an automatic winner due to her brand. If you're not well known, your publishing deal is abysmally standard.
It costs some money to print and distribute a physical book vs. a digital book. This is slowly changing as digital distribution flexes up. But print is still the preferred model for people. [1]
And there are additional layers of writing a book in the traditional model: acquisitions, developmental and copy editing being some of the big ones. And you'd be shocked how many non-fiction books have a ghost writer.
Finally, there's the reality that the publisher is taking a risk: their high percentages are covering all the books they took a loss on.
(In theory) publishers are doing more for you than Apple is. At a minimum they're providing some level of editing services and (maybe) validation of a quality floor. They also have distribution deals that you mostly can't get on your own.
Remember too that publishers aren't seeing a big chunk of the list price which is going to discounts and middlemen of various sorts.
That said, publishers in general don't do as much as they used to and independent publishing will be the right answer for many people--understanding they'll probably have some money out of pocket to make up for the services publishers provide.
Typically your royalty is calculated against the final sale price of the book -- after publisher and retailer have taken their cut. Usually the retailer takes the biggest cut.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications might be the best (non-niche) CS book of the decade, and he definitely did create far more value than he captured. So I'm glad Mr Kleppmann at least kind of "broke even" compared to the alternative of working for a FAANG (his salary assumptions seem however rather low). I guess the main take away for mere mortals who consider writing a book and making money with it (as opposed to boosting their profile) is to under no circumstances publish with OReilly. Getting <10% vs 80%+ of revenue is just about viable for the 0.01%.
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the same purse—honora y provecho no caben en un saco.
For professionals in technical fields where skills-assessment itself is expensive and uncertain, a book serves at a minimum as a signifier of one's own skill and ability. In exceptional circumstances, a book can lead to the author becoming part of both the skill-generating and certifying mechanism. Writing "the book" on a topic, and the teaching, lecturing, training, or technical leadership roles availed ... may ... prove worthwhile. Others then display their copies or familiarity of the book as evidence of their own ability. (Knuth, Gang of Four, Kernighan & Ritchie, etc.)
It's critical to realise that this signalling capability, as with attention, is a fundamentally rivalrous and finite space (perhaps not fully zero-sum), such that there can only be one truly leading authority or reference at a time. Though if like Martin Kleppmann you hit that spot, it can prove rewarding.
Specialties are fractal. It’s much easier to be the expert on something that 1,000 people do than something 1,000,000 people do. However, by making expert knowledge accessible it’s likely that far more people discover they really should be doing whatever it is you’re an expert at.
>The combination of talks and the book have allowed me to establish a significant public presence and reputation in this field. I now get far more invitations to speak at conferences than I can realistically accept. Conference talks don’t generate income per se (good industry conferences generally pay for speakers’ travel and accommodation, but they rarely pay speaking fees), but this kind of reputation is helpful for getting consulting gigs.
This has been the real value of writing books--especially through a known publisher--for me. (I'm updating one at the moment.) Even if you're not a consultant, publishing a book on some topic still can give you cachet--and, in fact, because of the research you did, you probably are pretty expert on the topic even if you weren't before.
I agree that the expected future value of royalties isn't much--but there are other ways to earn money related to a book.
"economically viable (it is possible to generate a reasonable level of income from it)."
The second part of that sentence, is not really the same as the first. By his own admission, his book is a real outlier on the high side (second highest in his peer group of O'Reilly books), and it only basically compensated for lost income. This strongly suggests that the median case, is you lose money.
Now, there are lots of other great reasons to write a book. The satisfaction of helping others, the space to focus and expand your thinking on a topic, the increase to your reputation, etc. But, "economically viable" doesn't really equate to "at least one or two people didn't lost money doing it".
It's very difficult for accomplished person in the tech field to find an activity that pays better than just getting a job at a top tier company. People who choose to do something else must have other reasons.
Another way to look at it is the answer to "Ask HN: I'm looking for a side project or job to make me extra money" is almost certainly not "Write a book!"
(With the most obvious exception being if you're a public figure of some sort.)
Just finished my first novel (in French); will be sending it to publishers next week. If they reject it IDK what I'll do (dump it or auto-publish).
But, I'm super happy to have done it. I wrote poems and novellas when I was younger. A complete novel is something else entirely. Even if it doesn't go anywhere, the feeling of having done it is really great.
Please consider self-publishing or putting it on your own blog. Share it on your social media, here on HN, reddit (there are specific subreddits for self-pub, free books, kindle unlimited, etc) and so on. You never know, even a single heartfelt review will be worth the effort. As a reader, I try to help out lesser known authors, here's an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/izhhoa/hardest_of_...
"Writing a book is an activity that creates more value than it captures. What I mean with this is that the benefits that readers get from it are greater than the price they paid for the book. To back this up, let’s try roughly estimating the value created by my book."
This is the key - you need to create more value for your customer than you are asking them to pay you. If you do that, you will never be want for income because people actually value having you around. Otherwise, you are just a rent extractor.
Do you think the lifespan of the topic or the delivery platform impacted your returns? I don't buy a lot of books anymore but used to drop 40-50 bucks on an O'Reilly book that would be used for years. My LP purchases probably top out under $10 and are for more immediate, short-lived topics (which seems to be what the platform targets with it's digital & updated content focus)
Even if you earned $0 from your book, I'd say being able to tell people you wrote a book at interviews and on your resume, and even at parties, would make it worth it.
And you'd be able to call yourself an author, how cool is that?
I also wrote a book with O'Reilly and have collaborated on several more with other publishers and indies. I have to say working with the folks at O'Reilly was my best publishing experience by far. Even if I didn't get an animal cover. Not that I'm complaining... but you know, maybe a bat or a weasel or something would have been nice, just sayin'.
Self publishing (which I did) means you don't nearly need as much sales to make writing a book financially viable. If you self-publish through Amazon you get 40%+ royalties, and selling 10k books would net six figures. With a publisher (as Keppmann writes), you really need 5-10x as many sales for it to be a success.
> A lot of money, but I also put a lot of time into it! I estimate that I spent about 2.5 years of full-time equivalent work researching and writing the book, spread out over the course of 4 years. Of that time, I spent one year (2014–15) working full-time on the book without income, while the rest of the time I worked on the book part-time alongside part-time employment.
Is it too creepy to wonder how the author sustain himself during the "full-time without income" part ? (Did he start saving earlier on to get a big safety cushion, did he get an advance, etc ?)
I think if you're a senior software engineer at LinkedIn in silicon valley for a couple of years and then don't have enough to sustain yourself without additional income for a year after that then your lifestyle must be quite extravagant.
An advance probably isn't going to be much more than beer money. It's not unreasonable to imagine though that a West Coast developer could have some savings.
That said, given his comments about finances (which are spot-on), it does seem like sort of a leap to take 1+ year off. Nothing wrong with taking some extended time off, but most wouldn't use it to write a book full-time. Of course, going in he may have had unreasonable expectations which were indeed met.
You don't write a book to make money from the book. You write a book to make money from the aftermath.
My best friend has written a couple of NYT best sellers and a number of others that weren't best sellers. Even after his first best seller, his next advance was only around $100K. For about 6 months work (over a 1 year time period), that's not a great wage for many of the engineers here. But, he makes over $1 million/year on the aftermath (mostly speaking).
For the last two years, I was able to make ends meet writing books, even though the Czech market is rather small (10 million speakers).
The key was having my own e-shop and a set of readers who come to read the blog. Once people buy directly from you, the whole balance shifts. Normally, distributors and bookshops take a large cut before sharing a slice of profit with you. Avoid them and the whole thing turns profitable.
>The feeling of knowing that you have helped a lot of people is gratifying. The personal growth that comes from taking on such a challenge is also considerable. And there is no better way to learn something in depth than by explaining it to others.
An apt conclusion that resonates well with me.
>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.
Self-publishing is relatively new compared to the history of traditional publishing. If someone wishes to write a book and hasn't been able to land a deal with a publishing company, I'd definitely suggest self-publishing. Returns are much higher and you retain the rights to do interactive course, translations, video course, etc. The downside is that you have to do marketing, get reviewed, etc all by yourself. One of the main reasons self-publishing is attractive to me is that I can easily update for newer versions and I can give them away for free whenever I want.
> because the income that this work has generated is in the same ballpark as the Silicon Valley software engineering salary (including stock and benefits) I could have received in the same time if I hadn’t quit LinkedIn in 2014 to work on the book
I think he’s underestimating his salary and stock value.
Most Silicon Valley engineers at his level would make more than $200,000 a year with stock and salary.
Like everything, the answer is "it depends." I wrote a book a decade or more ago on an F/OSS project I was involved with. The advance worked out to about $2/hour, and I've never sold sufficient copies to go beyond that. That being said, it was always intended more as a labor of love and a way of promoting the project than it was a way to make money.
Sadly, there was a political battle within the project's core team, and the fundamental API of the project changed around in a non-backwards-compatible way. That rendered my book semi-obsolete within months of publishing. I left the project shortly thereafter. While those externalities don't bear directly on the book-writing experience, they may be things to keep in mind: stability of the subject you're writing about, general versus specific applicability, and the health of the community you're writing for.
I'm a software engineer and the author of four books, but none are about software. (Three are pop-sci and one is pop-stats.)
First book (2013) did extremely well and continues to sell well. Lots of good press, translated into multiple languages, excerpts in a national magazine, promotion on a network TV show. Second book (2014) tanked hard. Third book (2019) looked like it would suffer the same fate as the second, but sales have been slowly inching up. Fourth book (2020) has seen abysmal sales, likely because of the pandemic, but it's a direct sequel to the first book and there are opportunities for cross-promotion, so I'm hoping sales eventually pick up.
I've been fortunate that throughout the course of writing these books, I've had a full-time job that pays the bills, so any advances or royalties have been gravy.
But if I could give advice to those who are interested in writing a book, it would be this:
* Unless this is purely a vanity project, do not go in the red. I would not have written my books if I hadn't gotten book deals. I wouldn't have put myself in the red by hiring an editor, a proofreader, an illustrator, a designer, a publicist, etc., which is what you likely will have to do to produce a quality book when self-publishing. A "you have to spend money to earn money" mindset is not the best mindset to have in a category where relatively few books succeed.
* Publishers these days aren't looking for good writers or great writers. They're looking for marketable books in established categories written by half-decent writers with solid platforms. There are certainly exceptions to that, but you can't hurt your chances by strengthening your platform or doing your own market research before even approaching an agent. (By platform I mean a built-in audience -- people to whom you can market the book. For better or worse, this means having lots of newsletter subscribers, YouTube subscribers, a big social media presence, blog readers, etc.)
* If you are an introvert, you will likely find being an author uncomfortable. You might have no problem with the often solitary task of writing the book. But the hardest part (and potentially the most time-consuming part) of being an author is not the writing itself but the marketing and promotion that comes afterward. Don't expect to be able to lean on your publisher for this. After a brief promotional blitz around pub day, you're likely on your own.
* There is a quote attributed to a number of famous writers: "I hate writing, but I love having written." I can all but assure you that if you're working on a book of any decent length or depth, you will reach an "I hate this" moment. But once the book is published, for the rest of your life you get to say that you're an author. It's a pretty cool feeling.
I wrote a book once. I could do it again, but I haven't found a reason. It's a hell of a lot of work.
I think one thing that helps, is to have a "timeless topic." People still read Knuth's stuff, and Steve McConnell's Rapid Development is just as valid today, as it was, 25 years ago.
It's been noted before that these highly specific niche titles can do very well.
You need a topic where the people who work in it are well paid, even by SV standards, and you can save them a lot of time and effort by condensing the state of the art into actionable information and examples.
So this is not "writing a book" - this is writing a book for a niche market that will pay well for non-obvious high-value technical content.
Something like "Xcode for Beginners" will not be nearly as successful - especially not now that app dev is so established.
Even though Xcode has a lot of quirks, the features and the build process aren't too much of a mystery and most people in the industry will be able to work out the essentials for themselves.
Recently I've been playing with the idea of writing a sci-fi book.
...and that's mostly it. I don't know what could be the next step, except actually writing the thing.
Are there websites/communities? I don't follow nor know of any relevant ones myself.
Start with short stories? Or something longer?
Self-publish whatever I write? Or start spamming "real publishers"?
When I was younger I read a monthly science fiction magazine in the library. That magazine had all kinds of short stories ranging from hardcore space sci-fi to some kind of horror fantasy things. Some stories were so interesting that it was a bit frustrating for the story to stop after only a few pages.
- Writer's Digest publishes large yearly lists of places to submit books and short stories.
- The Writing Excuses podcast covers all steps of the writing process, from research and planning to publishing with an agent or going the self-publishing route. The speakers cover a wide range of strategies on each topic.
- writing.stackexchange.com is a relatively useful resource on a range of writing and publishing topics
Worth is an interesting thing. I wrote and published a very niche book that was, for all intents, a mind dump of my experiences doing a particular volunteer, non-tech job over a three year time span (now eight). The value to me was the cleansing nature of putting it all down on paper.
I knew I was never going to get rich from it, but felt the many hours I spent doing this job would be wasted if I did not make an effort to pass along to others what had been learned. That it sells 200 copies every year still amazes me.
I have a total cheat for book writing: find a project where you can contribute a single chapter. It's an order of magnitude less work then writing a full book, and you get to add "author of a book on X" to your resume.
It's pretty much the other end of the scale in terms of overall benefit from what Martin is describing here, but it's worth remembering that it could be a much less stressful and time consuming opportunity.
Except that would be untrue. You would not be an “author of a book”, but an author of a chapter. Which is still a nice thing for the résumé. But if you overstate anything and are found out, that will be fatal poison, and a stain that could follow you forever.
As a young author, I'm always thinking about the process of writing a book. At some point, someone needs to write this book, a long book with lots of little details. I'm thinking: I don't want to write it, but it'll be so much better than doing nothing and leaving it. I can either start it and finish it on a different day, or just put it down for a long time and try to get some ideas out of it.
all books are having pdf/epub/etc format these days, means you can get most if not all of them online for free quickly which is discouraging, plus things move fast these days and book might be out of date soon, and it's easier to self-publish, I think the golden time of legacy book writing is probably gone.
What about some different models? While the internet/google presents everything, a well organized and to-the-point book still saves time and time is everything.
1. have your own website, and write online book only, ask people to pay for read?(free samples at the frontpage).
2. whoever paid can get automatic reminders on new releases, book updates
3. create a small forum on that site for questions and erratas.
4. give a link for whoever read your book somehow without pay, tell them if the book helped them to profit somehow, please press the donate button to show a little appreciation.
As there is no other costs involved(other than hosting fee), your book can be cheaper, to the point people might want to pay even though they can get a free version somewhere.
I wonder how the economics have changed between when this book was written (2014) and today?
For reference, there are twice as many books published last year than in 2014. It's cumulative of course, you're competing for limited readers against every book written every year since the dawn of time (unless you're writing on a brand new subject).
I was second author of a book on computational aesthetics and first author of a book on drawing. As the only native English speaker, I did all of the final re-write of both. For me also it was a turbo-boost to my ability to write. I thought I could write before I started those books. I was wrong. For this alone it was worth it.
> It would be interesting to compare it to working on open source software, another activity that can have significant positive impact but is difficult to get paid for. I don’t have a strong opinion on this at the moment.
Does anyone have views from having tried to do both - book and open source project?
Questions for the authors in this thread: If I'm thinking about writing a book, what stepping stones would you recommend? I'm thinking things like should I write a series of blog posts, do tech talks, etc.
What resources were most valuable for you in writing your book?
It depends on your goals for your book; are you trying to make money, to be known in the domain, etc... ?
For me, I was working on a wine-related software project but I had all of these notes that I had accumulated over the years and I felt like they needed to be better organized.
My original plan was to write a series of blog posts, but I ended up self-publishing the book on Amazon (under the title Essential French Wine) and it's had a modest success (but quite unexpected since I didn't put any effort into marketing it).
So if you are just trying to write a book just go and do that, don't waste time on other things...
On the other hand if you are trying to know good strategies for book marketing or to get published, I don't think writing should be your primary concern but rather getting yourself known (building an audience) and that depends very much on where your audience hangs out.
I wrote the book at a time when I wanted a change in my career. I had been doing Network administration and tech support and simple repair work, but I wanted to switch into software development.
The book got me interviews. And my life was very different after that.
I wrote a fiction book when I was a teenager. It didn't make me rich, but it forced me to be more social, like at various writers venues or at my own book signing.
Fiction books are not worth it. Technical books are if you write it like a cookbook and list things they need to have in order to do the things you write about doing.
1) You can write it slow in your free time. No hurry.
2) You learn a lot and organize your thoughts in your head.
3) You can start selling before the book finished. It will allow you to test your audience and keep motivated.
4) When it's finished it's mostly passive income (though it's a good idea to also build a website and publish some blog posts regularly)
Technical books in print are generally better formatted than their e-book cousins (O'Reilly's digital library, Kindle) unless they're PDFs. This has a major impact on readability if there are significant amounts of diagrams or code samples or tables in the text.
I much prefer physical books to e-books, especially for technical ones. I learn much better from a physical copy - flipping back and forth, checking where the current section fits into the bigger structure etc I find to be easier. I also like to underline and write notes in the margins - again, I prefer this in a physical book.
I've found few issues on which people are as diametrically opposed as the ebook/physical book debate.
I did a reading group at work a couple of years ago (for Designing Data Intensive Applications as it turns out!), and half the group looked at me like I had 3 heads when I offered to buy them hard copies and the other half was insulted if I didn't offer them hard copies
lentinjoseph|5 years ago
Pros 1) Great visibility in the robotics community 2) Started getting good consulting projects 3) Started getting Royalties(Passive income) 4) People start identifying me in conferences 5) Got the invitation to do research in good universities 6) Got good patience which is very useful while working with the robots 7) Knowledge also doubled (I have to do a lot of homework in order to write things in the book). 8) Self-satisfaction to became an author
Cons 1) Time consuming 2) Need full-time dedication 3) Royalties are very low (only 17% of the book price) 4) Books will easily come online for free download. This will definitely demotivate us to write another book. 5) Books will outdate very easily (Technical books), so you may have to update it by writing a new edition. 6) Getting good income from books is like getting a lottery. It will only happen to a few people.
The list goes on. Just want to share my list of my books here https://robocademy.com/product-category/robotics/
milancurcic|5 years ago
mooreds|5 years ago
That said, if you want to anchor yourself as an expert in a space, I can't think of a better way to do it than to write a book. This is because it will force you to learn the topic very well (I remember spending an hour testing out something so I could write one sentence accurately) and because you can say "oh yes, I wrote a book on that" which gives you a lot of credibility.
I think it was totally worth writing the less technical book too. It makes you dig into thoughts and ideas in a much deeper way than blog posts or presentations.
It also opens up some doors in terms of presentations and speaking, if that's of interest. My book wasn't on a technical topic, but if you write one, I could definitely see that leading to some consulting.
I think the best way to write a book is to blog it first, then assemble the pieces (adding in more). This lets you do a number of things:
* you can outline the topic as a series of posts. If you can't do this, don't write a non-fiction book.
* you can see if you like the topic 5-10 posts in. If you do, then you have the bones of a book. If you don't, why would you commit to a full length book?
* you can build an audience. I didn't have a large audience, but had a list of 200ish people I could market the book to. And again, if you blog 5-10 times and no one is interested, they probably won't be interested in a book either.
* you can easily turn it into an ebook (using a tool like leanpub) if you determine you want to self publish. If you work with a traditional publisher, you can still pull and revise the blog posts.
Since the book was just released in August, I have no idea of the financial success. Like the author, I'm not looking to have this be a huge piece of my income stream. If I can earn out my advance, I'll be happy.
Here's the book URL if you want to check it out: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/the-book/
ArcMex|5 years ago
langitbiru|5 years ago
> 5) Books will outdate very easily (Technical books)
I feel you. I wrote a blockchain programming book. It was becoming outdated soon just after the book was being released. The pace of the blockchain technology is very fast.
sacado2|5 years ago
Yes, I think technical books are a great marketing asset when you're a consultant / freelancer. It gives you a ton of credibility, more so than one more project to your cv / portfolio. Plus, as a bonus, it provides a few royalties. It's a good way to stand out, too: "Do you have a business card so that I put it with all the other business cards I got today and will forget as soon as I get back home?" "No, Mr. Prospect, but let me give you that book I wrote, you'll enjoy it, and you have my contact info on the first page".
Rather than a potential source of passive income, I tend to see it as a marketing tool that has a very low to negative cost. Seen that way, most of your cons aren't that bad.
If I were a freelancer / consultant, I would definitely write books.
HeavyStorm|5 years ago
aliceryhl|5 years ago
I honestly wish I was able to channel this incredible amount of writing into blog posts or a book, but I don't know how. My blog has had one post in the last three years. Writing a blog post just takes energy in a way that writing on forums simply does not.
It's always been this way too. For example, in high school, I spent the time on https://math.stackexchange.com/.
TN1ck|5 years ago
"Most common errors beginners make in Rust"
You're like the world expert on this.
"What people often get wrong about Rust"
Maybe there are common conceptual issues you spotted?
I'm not sure, but I would also imagine that you explained some things a few times in a more simple language, this could also be a great thing for a blog post. Instead of pointing them to a doc and explaining something about it, point them to your blog post then.
WheelsAtLarge|5 years ago
High priced consultants do this all the time. You should do it. You've written the material already.
mceachen|5 years ago
I'd find a way to make it cheap for you (in time and energy) to iterate such that the one-off content that you're providing can be used as stepping stones to a paragraph, and then a chapter, and then a book.
As an example, I've written thousands (!) of customer support messages, via email, chat, or reddit, to help my PhotoStructure beta users.
I've found that the second or third time I answer a question, either I need to fix the product so the question doesn't show up again, or I transcribe my response onto a new page on photostructure.com. In my case, it's just `hugo new content/faq/post.md` and then I dump the new content into the new page.
It doesn't have to be an elaborate post. Perhaps a bit more nuance or detail than my customer support reply, but not much more than that. Sometimes it's only 1 paragraph.
I've found that these "humble starts" can then be iterated on fairly easily, as inspiration comes to you.
As an example, according to git, I've made 15 commits to <https://photostructure.com/faq/library/>. The first iteration was just a handful of sentences I wrote as a response to what I meant by "library."
justinlloyd|5 years ago
It is precisely what I have done in the past.
selestify|5 years ago
sacado2|5 years ago
I'm (almost) serious (if you do that, do several, specific titles: "100 lifetime gotchas", "100 traits gotchas", etc.) I've read several books that were little more than short blog posts collections, with a common theme but no real overall structure, and, mind you, some of them were pretty good despite of that, because they solved real problems I had. Some people learn better with a bottom-up approach (i.e seemingly random sequence of independent items that eventually let you grasp the big picture) than top-down (3 parts, with each part having 3 chapters, with each chapter having 5 sections, with each section having...)
Cthulhu_|5 years ago
I do see blogposts as a stepping stone to writing books though.
Anyway I've written thousands if not tens of comments all over the internet, but I also have massive impostor syndrome so I never really look back to see if said comments were appreciated or educational.
I've also been fairly active on the Go slack channel, but very much from a beginner's mindset. 10+ years of software development and I still feel like I'm feeling my way around in the dark.
I've got tons of material to write about though, I really should set aside a couple hours to put things down. I feel like that would be a possible way forwards.
But at the same time I'm pretty terrified of being called out for being wrong; not only because it's confrontational, but because I would have to amend or retire my posts. Call me weird but it's giving me a lot of anxiety.
But, I should probably just bite the bullet and go for it, it'll be a way to improve my confidence and advance in my career, because that's been stuck for a while.
I should look into blogging platforms that are like Twitter, but for longer posts. But not full length ones. IDK
6510|5 years ago
Forum discussions can be a mess of excess and ot information. You could easily cut and paste questions you've answered. (Sometimes modify them to fit how generic your answer is) Then copy paste your answer under it as well as useful bits from other peoples response.
Put links to topics and/or profiles with everything you "steal" to promote the forum.
Make tools to automate the process. You don't want to be muleing clip board back and forwards.
Just dump it into a post and save the draft if it isn't finished in 15 seconds.
Again: be consistent at it. If there is one post per day the visitor should be able to visit 1 time per day and find it. If it isn't there for 1-3 days - why bother?
twirlip|5 years ago
chris_st|5 years ago
While I love books immensely, these days I just don't buy them any more. What I do is google answers to problems, and for guidance on how to do things. There's just so much fantastic information immediately available... and there's the "constantly changing" thing that many people have mentioned. Books can't really keep up, alas.
So, I'm sorry it's not a paid position, but really, thanks so much for helping the modern programmer, particularly with rust... it's a challenging language.
matdehaast|5 years ago
sasaf5|5 years ago
The key here is the interlocutor. Trying to write an interesting post for a general reader is a dauting task hence the energy. Try to materialize that reader a bit more, even if mentally. Or write in dialog form :)
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
GCA10|5 years ago
nicbou|5 years ago
I help people settle in Berlin. I got tired of repeating myself, so I put my answers on a website and linked to it. Now it's my main source of income, and a well-known resource for expats.
I don't think any topic can be monetized with such ease, but it doesn't hurt to try. Even if you completely fail, you'll still help thousands of people who are googling their problems.
mritchie712|5 years ago
elamje|5 years ago
seanalltogether|5 years ago
justinclift|5 years ago
If you can figure out how to leverage that for channeling into a book or blog posts, that'd probably work.
Maybe the technique mentioned by the OP about "releasing each chapter online as an ebook" would get you some of the way there?
m463|5 years ago
I found i have the same sort of procrastinating behavior. If I want to clean my house, just avoid some higher-priority thing.
You should harness it. Decide you will put in 4 hours a day doing exercise, and procrastinate by writing a book on the couch. :)
codazoda|5 years ago
Still feel like a ton of work?
I created my own blog as a "note to self" type work. I would write down anything I was working on so that I could reproduce it in the future. I now have hundreds of personal documents and hundreds of professional documents at work. They come in amazingly handy, to me, nearly every day.
I've now written a dozen very small books on subjects I care about. The books are just 20 pages or so and people seem to love them. An example is "Publish your eBook by Joel Dare" on Amazon. See also, Zines.
jonathanzufi|5 years ago
kevstev|5 years ago
I used to have several guys on my team that had published books- and they were great, and were constantly getting contacted about other jobs, and even to write other books.
They all said the actual book itself made them no money beyond their initial (small-hardly five figure) advance, and in terms of dollars per hour they probably would have been better off getting a fast food job, but it opened up a lot of doors and made them at least a little bit "internet famous."
brendangregg|5 years ago
Also, regarding "overcome the hurdles": those hurdles are now practically non-existent with various publishers. This results in books on the topic that should never have been published.
I could explain in more detail, but there's a lot of negative connotations with technical book authorship, which I work to overcome in such interviews and in roles. Does the author care more about working on their reputation than working for the company? Did the author only write the book to make an exaggerated name for themselves for the benefit of job interviews? (As you suggested in your opening sentence :-) I personally only write books when I'm already the expert on the topic, and it's a way to share my expertise.
Another interview I had years ago, after telling them about my first book, the interviewer said "so you know the theory, but can you put it in practice?" The assumption being "those that can do, those that can't write books." I was in a worse position for letting them know about it.
And of course, there can be positives for writing books. You are showing a willingness to share your knowledge with others. (You can do that in blog posts as well.)
Edit: added missing word "interview"
libraryatnight|5 years ago
markshead|5 years ago
ghaff|5 years ago
And I'd add that this is the real value IMO of going with a name publisher--which is otherwise a bit of a mixed bag. Fairly or not a lot of people mentally make at least a bit of mental deduction for a book published independently.
franze|5 years ago
dragonwriter|5 years ago
That would seem to depend on the publisher, and the business arrangement, as to whether it really signals anything (though I suspect that often hiring managers might not know enough to correctly interpret the signal.) Obviously, if the book is a success and widely-known for its technical merit, that's a positive signal, but that's different than just getting a book published.
Even where getting over the hurdles to get a book published signals something, there's a question of whether it signals something relevant to the job you are hiring for. The hurdles of getting a book published (where they exist at all, e.g., outside of what is essentially vanity publishing or a close approximation) aren't particularly similar hurdles to those encountered in most technical jobs even when the book is on a subject close to the job duties.
rllearneratwork|5 years ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC|5 years ago
A lot of it depends on the publisher. If it is for example OReilly, I would be impressed. If it is Packt, I would not be impressed at all. Some publishers do a much better job of screening and providing editorial support and technical reviews so that if an author is published by them, I can have confidence that the author is a subject matter expert. Some publishers are little more than self-publishing and so I would not have confidence that the author was an expert.
abhgh|5 years ago
Think of it as when a candidate claims she knows a language X well, but then is unable to answer reasonable questions around X. Saying you have written a book is like this claim, except dialing up expectations to the max.
Not saying advertising a book is a bad idea, but be aware of the expectations you are setting up.
ipython|5 years ago
alextheparrot|5 years ago
Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.
henrik_w|5 years ago
https://henrikwarne.com/2019/07/27/book-review-designing-dat...
st1x7|5 years ago
_____s|5 years ago
commandlinefan|5 years ago
Second-best, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book. ;)
redisman|5 years ago
jwr|5 years ago
avinassh|5 years ago
ponker|5 years ago
geerlingguy|5 years ago
> How to be a 10x engineer: help ten other engineers be twice as good. Producing high-quality educational materials enables you to be a 300x engineer.
Jtsummers|5 years ago
The PM meeting was not a status reporting meeting. It had no management beyond the PMs (that is, no supervisors proper). The entire purpose was to facilitate sharing information across project boundaries (technical, procedural, or even just a chance to vent). I considered it to have "paid for itself" after two PMs discovered that another PM had already solved a procedural problem (how to get something done, not a technical problem) that they'd been stumbling over for months. That was also the day the PMs stopped complaining about the (non-mandatory) meeting that I'd set up for them. Another time, a PM discovered that another project had exactly the test capabilities they needed (but because of physical separation was totally unaware of this test lab tucked into a corner). Saved a lot of time and money that day, and the project ended up ahead of schedule in that aspect (not sure if they kept that lead, I left shortly after).
I wish I'd been able to get the technical meeting going, but management wasn't willing to give people the hour I asked for and "lunch & learn" only works for the motivated when you aren't getting paid and you aren't getting training credits towards some certification.
chasd00|5 years ago
imtringued|5 years ago
Thaxll|5 years ago
filmgirlcw|5 years ago
I got a kill fee (which was almost nothing) and a great story to tell, but it taught me a good lesson about how to balance an advance vs going for more residuals on the backend (this is true primarily for technical books. For traditional publishing, get as big of an advance as you can get).
The secondary lesson was to not sign contracts for books about Google products (only slightly joking), or really any upcoming product or language without understanding the risk you as the author take if the project is canceled or delayed or there is some other fundamental change.
I was 25 when I got the Wave book and it was a lot of work and research for nothing, but I can look back and laugh at the experience.
I’ve turned down technical books over the last few years, just because unless you sell 100,000 copies, it can be hard to make the economics work — unless I would be willing to take it on as a side-gig. That said, if it is a hit, the speaking fees/workshops/consulting options from that book can pay dividends, as I’ve seen from many of my friends.
dbrueck|5 years ago
I think the author nailed it with, "I strongly recommend that you estimate the value of your future royalties to be close to zero."
Do it as a way to give back / contribute to a topic you are passionate about, do it for the amazing learning experience, do it for the challenge. And then if you also make some money off it, that's just icing on the cake.
steveklabnik|5 years ago
CrankyBear|5 years ago
I'll also add that he must have one heck of a deal with ORA to get those kind of royalties because the standard ORA contract based on his sales, would not come to anything like that much money.
bcherny|5 years ago
wtetzner|5 years ago
I'd revise that, and say it's not worth your time and energy if the goal is to make money from it. There may be other goals (e.g. to evangelize and popularize some piece of technology, or maybe to make certain tech more accessible).
ponker|5 years ago
j2kun|5 years ago
erikbye|5 years ago
DanielBMarkham|5 years ago
I think it's probably good to go into the project with an idea of why you're doing this. Are you creating what's basically an extended business card? Are you trying to help a particular kind of person that you know very well? Or are you chasing the goal of matching up a slice of knowledge with an eager audience?
There are other goals. For instance, a lot of disparate experiences in your career can come together to help on a certain section you're working on. This allows you to personally gain some synthesis from your experiences you might not otherwise. You can find new depth in ancillary areas as you go through and footnote, adding more depth to the things you're talking about both for yourself and the reader.
It's good to have those goals, even if you end up delivering a different kind of book than you had planned, because as a sole author something's got to keep you motivated for years. This isn't a software project, a job, or even a romantic commitment. Whatever you write, if it's worth writing, becomes a part of you. Like one of the other commenters says, if you have people on your team with published books they're likely to be busy responding to and helping folks interested in those areas. That doesn't go away simply because you move on.
Probably the best advice I can give for new authors is that it should be a lot of work, and once you finish each phase you'll say to yourself, "Now comes the hard part". This essay writer gave 50 presentations. Wow! That number of public appearances alone is a non-trivial amount of work. Don't forget contacting bloggers, podcasts, tech publishers, and so on. No matter where you are in the process, next up is the hard part.
None of that is any reason not to do it, of course. You just should be aware that if you're going to do a good job it's a major commitment. Prepare your outlook accordingly.
MrPowers|5 years ago
My book writing experience was much different:
* just took a few weeks of part time work, mainly just organizing blog posts
* Leanpub pays much higher royalties (80%)
Books are a great way to learn more about the topic and help others. It makes training and employee onboarding a lot easier. You can tell folks to read a chapter and then review.
Books aren't a great way to make money, but they're fun to write and a great way to give back to the programming community.
rco8786|5 years ago
Were these your own blog posts, or posts from other folks? If the former, you should include that time as time it took to write the book!
asicsp|5 years ago
I don't use leanpub to create my book, but I still put it on both leanpub and gumroad. In case you aren't aware, gumroad [0] gives better returns and holds your payment for 1-2 weeks instead of 45-75 days on leanpub.
[0] https://gumroad.com/features/pricing
UncleOxidant|5 years ago
andreygrehov|5 years ago
I second. If you can't explain it, you don't understand it well enough. I'm the author of a YouTube course "Dynamic Programming for Beginners" [0]. Helping people to better understand the topic is a pure joy by itself, but it's also extremely rewardable for an author in terms personal growth. If you want to understand something, start teaching, you won't regret.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVrpF4r7WIhTT1hJqZmjP...
baby|5 years ago
The book is almost done at this point, but revising and polishing it will take a lot of time. I really wish I could take some time off for that like the author of the post did.
I can say that it has been a long journey, but I have learned so much along the way.
[1]: https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=...
[2]: https://cryptologie.net/article/504/why-im-writing-a-book-on...
thewebcount|5 years ago
wiremine|5 years ago
The different between 30% and 75% is mostly historical, and the app market vs. the publishing world run on different models: There is not really an equivalent of advances or physical publishing in the app world. Royalties and app revenue splits are are roughly equivalent, though.
As an author, your leverage on advances and royalties is your personal brand equity. "Becoming" by Michelle Obama is almost an automatic winner due to her brand. If you're not well known, your publishing deal is abysmally standard.
It costs some money to print and distribute a physical book vs. a digital book. This is slowly changing as digital distribution flexes up. But print is still the preferred model for people. [1]
And there are additional layers of writing a book in the traditional model: acquisitions, developmental and copy editing being some of the big ones. And you'd be shocked how many non-fiction books have a ghost writer.
Finally, there's the reality that the publisher is taking a risk: their high percentages are covering all the books they took a loss on.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/physical-books-still-outsell...
ghaff|5 years ago
Remember too that publishers aren't seeing a big chunk of the list price which is going to discounts and middlemen of various sorts.
That said, publishers in general don't do as much as they used to and independent publishing will be the right answer for many people--understanding they'll probably have some money out of pocket to make up for the services publishers provide.
jacques_chester|5 years ago
patrec|5 years ago
dredmorbius|5 years ago
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Authorship
For professionals in technical fields where skills-assessment itself is expensive and uncertain, a book serves at a minimum as a signifier of one's own skill and ability. In exceptional circumstances, a book can lead to the author becoming part of both the skill-generating and certifying mechanism. Writing "the book" on a topic, and the teaching, lecturing, training, or technical leadership roles availed ... may ... prove worthwhile. Others then display their copies or familiarity of the book as evidence of their own ability. (Knuth, Gang of Four, Kernighan & Ritchie, etc.)
It's critical to realise that this signalling capability, as with attention, is a fundamentally rivalrous and finite space (perhaps not fully zero-sum), such that there can only be one truly leading authority or reference at a time. Though if like Martin Kleppmann you hit that spot, it can prove rewarding.
Retric|5 years ago
ghaff|5 years ago
This has been the real value of writing books--especially through a known publisher--for me. (I'm updating one at the moment.) Even if you're not a consultant, publishing a book on some topic still can give you cachet--and, in fact, because of the research you did, you probably are pretty expert on the topic even if you weren't before.
I agree that the expected future value of royalties isn't much--but there are other ways to earn money related to a book.
rossdavidh|5 years ago
The second part of that sentence, is not really the same as the first. By his own admission, his book is a real outlier on the high side (second highest in his peer group of O'Reilly books), and it only basically compensated for lost income. This strongly suggests that the median case, is you lose money.
Now, there are lots of other great reasons to write a book. The satisfaction of helping others, the space to focus and expand your thinking on a topic, the increase to your reputation, etc. But, "economically viable" doesn't really equate to "at least one or two people didn't lost money doing it".
User23|5 years ago
ghaff|5 years ago
(With the most obvious exception being if you're a public figure of some sort.)
bambax|5 years ago
But, I'm super happy to have done it. I wrote poems and novellas when I was younger. A complete novel is something else entirely. Even if it doesn't go anywhere, the feeling of having done it is really great.
asicsp|5 years ago
leephillips|5 years ago
stanrivers|5 years ago
This is the key - you need to create more value for your customer than you are asking them to pay you. If you do that, you will never be want for income because people actually value having you around. Otherwise, you are just a rent extractor.
Murkin|5 years ago
Wrote a book about Redux (https://leanpub.com/redux-book) brought about $15K for 4 months of work. (Granted, did no marketing at all)
It always feels strange to say "I wrote a book" and it never seemed to really impress tech people or cause an inflow of consulting work.
But it is very fun and you get to really get into the tech (other projects, sources, blogs, testing ideas).
Prob would do again one day
ticmasta|5 years ago
swyx|5 years ago
i feel that self published book authors should all have a "marketing partner" since they all seem so shy about marketing
booleandilemma|5 years ago
And you'd be able to call yourself an author, how cool is that?
k__|5 years ago
I wrote a book about React and after that didn't get asked stupid interview questions anymore.
sdevonoes|5 years ago
> Hi, I wrote a book about X.
> Hi, I wrote a good book about X.
A the difference is abysmal.
imtringued|5 years ago
Procrastes|5 years ago
tyingq|5 years ago
siltpotato|5 years ago
[deleted]
j2kun|5 years ago
phtrivier|5 years ago
Is it too creepy to wonder how the author sustain himself during the "full-time without income" part ? (Did he start saving earlier on to get a big safety cushion, did he get an advance, etc ?)
mac01021|5 years ago
ghaff|5 years ago
That said, given his comments about finances (which are spot-on), it does seem like sort of a leap to take 1+ year off. Nothing wrong with taking some extended time off, but most wouldn't use it to write a book full-time. Of course, going in he may have had unreasonable expectations which were indeed met.
bonestamp2|5 years ago
My best friend has written a couple of NYT best sellers and a number of others that weren't best sellers. Even after his first best seller, his next advance was only around $100K. For about 6 months work (over a 1 year time period), that's not a great wage for many of the engineers here. But, he makes over $1 million/year on the aftermath (mostly speaking).
ponker|5 years ago
inglor_cz|5 years ago
The key was having my own e-shop and a set of readers who come to read the blog. Once people buy directly from you, the whole balance shifts. Normally, distributors and bookshops take a large cut before sharing a slice of profit with you. Avoid them and the whole thing turns profitable.
asicsp|5 years ago
An apt conclusion that resonates well with me.
>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.
Self-publishing is relatively new compared to the history of traditional publishing. If someone wishes to write a book and hasn't been able to land a deal with a publishing company, I'd definitely suggest self-publishing. Returns are much higher and you retain the rights to do interactive course, translations, video course, etc. The downside is that you have to do marketing, get reviewed, etc all by yourself. One of the main reasons self-publishing is attractive to me is that I can easily update for newer versions and I can give them away for free whenever I want.
jedberg|5 years ago
I think he’s underestimating his salary and stock value.
Most Silicon Valley engineers at his level would make more than $200,000 a year with stock and salary.
snypox|5 years ago
angst_ridden|5 years ago
jawns|5 years ago
First book (2013) did extremely well and continues to sell well. Lots of good press, translated into multiple languages, excerpts in a national magazine, promotion on a network TV show. Second book (2014) tanked hard. Third book (2019) looked like it would suffer the same fate as the second, but sales have been slowly inching up. Fourth book (2020) has seen abysmal sales, likely because of the pandemic, but it's a direct sequel to the first book and there are opportunities for cross-promotion, so I'm hoping sales eventually pick up.
I've been fortunate that throughout the course of writing these books, I've had a full-time job that pays the bills, so any advances or royalties have been gravy.
But if I could give advice to those who are interested in writing a book, it would be this:
* Unless this is purely a vanity project, do not go in the red. I would not have written my books if I hadn't gotten book deals. I wouldn't have put myself in the red by hiring an editor, a proofreader, an illustrator, a designer, a publicist, etc., which is what you likely will have to do to produce a quality book when self-publishing. A "you have to spend money to earn money" mindset is not the best mindset to have in a category where relatively few books succeed.
* Publishers these days aren't looking for good writers or great writers. They're looking for marketable books in established categories written by half-decent writers with solid platforms. There are certainly exceptions to that, but you can't hurt your chances by strengthening your platform or doing your own market research before even approaching an agent. (By platform I mean a built-in audience -- people to whom you can market the book. For better or worse, this means having lots of newsletter subscribers, YouTube subscribers, a big social media presence, blog readers, etc.)
* If you are an introvert, you will likely find being an author uncomfortable. You might have no problem with the often solitary task of writing the book. But the hardest part (and potentially the most time-consuming part) of being an author is not the writing itself but the marketing and promotion that comes afterward. Don't expect to be able to lean on your publisher for this. After a brief promotional blitz around pub day, you're likely on your own.
* There is a quote attributed to a number of famous writers: "I hate writing, but I love having written." I can all but assure you that if you're working on a book of any decent length or depth, you will reach an "I hate this" moment. But once the book is published, for the rest of your life you get to say that you're an author. It's a pretty cool feeling.
Diederich|5 years ago
Can you expand on that?
Very interesting comment, thank you!
ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago
I think one thing that helps, is to have a "timeless topic." People still read Knuth's stuff, and Steve McConnell's Rapid Development is just as valid today, as it was, 25 years ago.
greg7mdp|5 years ago
TheOtherHobbes|5 years ago
You need a topic where the people who work in it are well paid, even by SV standards, and you can save them a lot of time and effort by condensing the state of the art into actionable information and examples.
So this is not "writing a book" - this is writing a book for a niche market that will pay well for non-obvious high-value technical content.
Something like "Xcode for Beginners" will not be nearly as successful - especially not now that app dev is so established.
Even though Xcode has a lot of quirks, the features and the build process aren't too much of a mystery and most people in the industry will be able to work out the essentials for themselves.
jnurmine|5 years ago
...and that's mostly it. I don't know what could be the next step, except actually writing the thing.
Are there websites/communities? I don't follow nor know of any relevant ones myself.
Start with short stories? Or something longer?
Self-publish whatever I write? Or start spamming "real publishers"?
When I was younger I read a monthly science fiction magazine in the library. That magazine had all kinds of short stories ranging from hardcore space sci-fi to some kind of horror fantasy things. Some stories were so interesting that it was a bit frustrating for the story to stop after only a few pages.
muffinman26|5 years ago
- Writer's Digest publishes large yearly lists of places to submit books and short stories.
- The Writing Excuses podcast covers all steps of the writing process, from research and planning to publishing with an agent or going the self-publishing route. The speakers cover a wide range of strategies on each topic.
- writing.stackexchange.com is a relatively useful resource on a range of writing and publishing topics
syspec|5 years ago
The book itself is also great, it gives an amazing lay of the land when it comes to databases / database methodologies and algorithms.
beezle|5 years ago
I knew I was never going to get rich from it, but felt the many hours I spent doing this job would be wasted if I did not make an effort to pass along to others what had been learned. That it sells 200 copies every year still amazes me.
CalChris|5 years ago
Gist: Writing a book is worth it.
But, it depends more on you than on the book.
Isn't that true for pretty much everything in life?
Yes. That doesn't change the truth of it.
simonw|5 years ago
It's pretty much the other end of the scale in terms of overall benefit from what Martin is describing here, but it's worth remembering that it could be a much less stressful and time consuming opportunity.
leephillips|5 years ago
johnadams283475|5 years ago
ausjke|5 years ago
What about some different models? While the internet/google presents everything, a well organized and to-the-point book still saves time and time is everything.
1. have your own website, and write online book only, ask people to pay for read?(free samples at the frontpage). 2. whoever paid can get automatic reminders on new releases, book updates 3. create a small forum on that site for questions and erratas. 4. give a link for whoever read your book somehow without pay, tell them if the book helped them to profit somehow, please press the donate button to show a little appreciation.
As there is no other costs involved(other than hosting fee), your book can be cheaper, to the point people might want to pay even though they can get a free version somewhere.
user5994461|5 years ago
For reference, there are twice as many books published last year than in 2014. It's cumulative of course, you're competing for limited readers against every book written every year since the dawn of time (unless you're writing on a brand new subject).
theodric|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
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Daub|5 years ago
aazaa|5 years ago
Does anyone have views from having tried to do both - book and open source project?
csours|5 years ago
What resources were most valuable for you in writing your book?
jeromecornet|5 years ago
For me, I was working on a wine-related software project but I had all of these notes that I had accumulated over the years and I felt like they needed to be better organized. My original plan was to write a series of blog posts, but I ended up self-publishing the book on Amazon (under the title Essential French Wine) and it's had a modest success (but quite unexpected since I didn't put any effort into marketing it).
So if you are just trying to write a book just go and do that, don't waste time on other things...
On the other hand if you are trying to know good strategies for book marketing or to get published, I don't think writing should be your primary concern but rather getting yourself known (building an audience) and that depends very much on where your audience hangs out.
jacques_chester|5 years ago
watersb|5 years ago
BUT
I wrote the book at a time when I wanted a change in my career. I had been doing Network administration and tech support and simple repair work, but I wanted to switch into software development.
The book got me interviews. And my life was very different after that.
vmception|5 years ago
Platforms can help with distribution and mitigate inventory storage but your yield gets so small
hgs3|5 years ago
cable2600|5 years ago
dunemaster|5 years ago
atum47|5 years ago
As a money maker: no. Not even close.
philistine|5 years ago
personjerry|5 years ago
Tl;dr:
Q: Should I write something if I kinda want to?
A: Write it. Even if it's just for you.
nottorp|5 years ago
fault_tolerant|5 years ago
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fault_tolerant|5 years ago
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yanis_t|5 years ago
Here's why I think it worths it:
1) You can write it slow in your free time. No hurry. 2) You learn a lot and organize your thoughts in your head. 3) You can start selling before the book finished. It will allow you to test your audience and keep motivated. 4) When it's finished it's mostly passive income (though it's a good idea to also build a website and publish some blog posts regularly)
unknown|5 years ago
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ExcavateGrandMa|5 years ago
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sizt|5 years ago
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non-entity|5 years ago
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hikerclimb|5 years ago
myself248|5 years ago
As far as I'm concerned, that's the only purpose dead-tree books serve anymore.
Jtsummers|5 years ago
henrik_w|5 years ago
zaphod12|5 years ago
I did a reading group at work a couple of years ago (for Designing Data Intensive Applications as it turns out!), and half the group looked at me like I had 3 heads when I offered to buy them hard copies and the other half was insulted if I didn't offer them hard copies
eplanit|5 years ago