I've had four technical books published and I've finished writing my fifth which I'm in the midst of negotiation with publishers about distributing.
I've seen many similar articles to this one before, but I want to complement the author by saying that this one rings the most true and is the most comprehensive of all of them.
However, I want to emphasize a paragraph from his article, that I think needs more emphasis:
> I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one. According to this blog, 96% of books (mostly fiction) sell less than 5000 copies per year. For technical books, it may be worse.
I've heard that 10k number before. I've also been told by one of my publishers that 2k copies is the break even point for them. While I've had the fortune of three out of four of my prior books selling more than 2k copies (and one selling many, many more), it seems that a significant number of traditionally published programming books do not. And I'm sure that ratio is even worse for self-published books.
In fact, I think the "Reality Check" section of the article is not harsh enough. The author cherry-picked some data on very well selling technical books, which doesn't make the point well. The reality is simple: the vast, vast majority of programming books do not sell "well" (let's consider "well" 10,000 copies) and many don't even break the 2,000 copy barrier, even from traditional publishers.
So, what are the economics of technical book writing? Not good. And it's only going to get worse as the market gets flooded with LLM-generated garbage.
So, do it because you really want to do it for another reason (career, teaching, etc.). Not to make money.
I always want to put an asterisk by "not to make money" when I see this topic being discussed. I think you can write a technical book to make money, but the monetization path is not "by selling books." It's "make money by selling a few books, which then establishes your credentials, which opens the way to speaking gigs and, from there, to the actual money: consulting jobs."
Right. That was my takeaway too. Some of the examples of success stories he gives aren't technical at all - they're business books. It would be absolutely exceptional for a software engineering book to sell 100k copies. If you're writing about a specific technology, selling a thousand would be a pretty typical result. And this happens over the course of years.
There's just no money in this. There is a small market for authors who can crank out passable technical content serially for series such as "...for Dummies": if you have ten books generating royalties in parallel, it might be worth your time. But one or two books? Absolutely not, you'll make more working a minimum-wage job.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but it's basically a hobby for folks who have something to share, and have a daytime job to pay the bills. Plus, yep, the sucky part is that books piracy is widespread, and that even people who benefit from your writing and have the means to pay are just accustomed to sharing bootleg copies for free.
Yeah, "technical" here seems to mean "computer-related" - where are the other examples like, say, car repair, housebuilding, or "agriculture for dummies" ? (Yeah, I know, these might involve computers too these days, but you get my gist.)
> as the market gets flooded with LLM-generated garbage
That's already happening, and getting published. Recently read an awful tech book that was obviously generated by an LLM, it was so bad that I reached out to the publisher, who assured me that this was just the author's style, and that they promised no LLMs were involved. All lies, of course.
Apparently publishing awful books can somehow generate revenue.
Before LLMs became widespread it was already a bit risky to buy technical books, with some books on Amazon being nothing more than a collection of vaguely related Wikipedia articles collected into a “book”.
And even without that, there are publishers like PacktPub which had a lot of poor quality hand written books. I know because I signed up for this thing where they were giving away a new book every day, and a lot of those books were just so bad. There were some gems in there too, hence why I kept looking at those free books. But I’d say 85 to 90% or more were just not worth even trying to read.
I remain hopeful though that even in the face of LLM generated garbage, quality publishers like O’Reilly and Manning will keep the bar high for what they publish.
My guess is the average technical book is probably in the hundreds of copies over a reasonable lifetime. Mine's sold 91 copies in 5 months. It's a book about how machine learning works. Unknown author, I have no social media and zero advertising budget. It's just Amazon organic listings. The economics are definitely not good but I didn't write it for money. I wrote it mainly for more existential reasons that I wanted to put my words out there and leave something behind in the world.
I agree that a bookshould be written for its intrinsic value, but it's possible to have an extrinsic value as well: even if you don't sell many it could be a credibility tool for a consulting or (shudder) 'influencer' campaign.
I guess that means printing on demand was the way to go here. Out of interest, are you willing to share the name of the publisher? And how was the print quality?
Lightning Source, now part of Ingram. Wouldn't recommend them for working with you to get your book on shelves, and this was before POD really took off so I'm sure there's better alternatives these days. The print quality was top notch though.
I disagree.
This is the case for anything entrepreneurial. Vast majority of ventures fail.
Reward/Risk ratio (in finance we call it Sharpe ratio) generally equalises across the spectrum. That is there is no free lunch.
You can choose an activity that has better odds of making money. But you will make leas money on average.
I think you underestimate the cost of writing a well-researched book.
Pre-publication, the process consumes lots of time and energy and money while generating zero revenue, output, or other benefit. Very different from most business ventures.
Source: I have written a book, and have also started my own business and have worked for many startups. (VC-backed startups pay their employees.)
Isn't this the case with any new business venture? There is going to be a period of spending (looking it as "investment" is therapeutic) and negative cash flow. In many cases this can be years.
Publishing, professional sports and entertainment, start-ups - all seem to have similar distribution of reward.
Being a paid employee of a start-up is different. That would be similar to receiving an advance from a publisher to write a book.
I don't think many would disagree that most businesses fail. Which aligns with the author you disagreed with. So what exactly was your source of disagreement? Make it profitable anyway instead of picking a more proven market/audience?
Not all investments are created equal. the bigger Startups convince rich people to give them millions to work on their idea. Publishers completely invert this; you show them a product and you get a piece of the pie in exchange for them distributing. One's a much safer bet even if everything falls apart. And in the corner, entertainment is pretty much the biggest gamble. Always was, probably always will be.
Sharpe ratios are not equal across different opportunities for the simple reason that actors are irrational. Many people write books even when the expected return is negative, which drives down returns for everyone.
Sharpe ratio is fairly useful in roughly apples to apples comparisons, e.g. investment opportunities, and basically useless when it’s applied to broadly to human endeavours. Mostly because people are a) not economically rational in any pure sense and b) not primarily motivated by financial factors.
In 2020 I wrote a book on FFmpeg after going through the entire FFmpeg documentation. I wanted to learn FFmpeg inside and out by actually using it to convert audio/video based on what the documentation offered. In the end I open sourced the results as an extension to the official docs[0] and then released in on Kindle as well[1].
In the last 4 years I've sold 743 books which is just shy of $2000. Still I love the fact that every month I'll get a KDP payout email and it feels more gratifying than my own FAANG+ paycheck for some reason.
That is cool! I turned to ffmpeg to reduce the size of some family videos because despite the command line it was possible whereas the Windows flavour of the year editor just can't do it.
This made me think that hey why not use it for all video editing needs! Although harder to use than a UI the commands will be the same in 2050 as they are now! Plus it is scriptable.
Because it was entirely^ the fruits of your own labor!
^well everything is connected, I guess you didn’t write ffmpeg nor are you responsible for the creation of video encoding or camera technology, but I’ll go back to splitting my own hairs
As the article correctly states, writing a book is a good idea for many reasons, but generating income isn't among those.
My personal experience: during the golden days of the technical book market, a good 15-20 years ago, writing a chapter would net you $1500 (for, like, 2-3 weeks of work, better pay than a magazine article that would take approximately the same time but pay a bit less) an entire book maybe $25K, but that would take you at least 6 months to complete.
Of course, that was just the upon-completion payment, with the promise of later royalties if the book did well, but, unless you were very lucky, that pretty much never happened.
Still, a payment of $2500-in-todays-dollars for less than a month of work isn't entirely bad, and being a published author did have its perks for getting consulting gigs.
But these days, "a magazine or book deal that pays actual money" just isn't a thing anymore, so, yeah...
I have written a textbook on using Cubase (a DAW), but including all the background that I think you need to be well-rounded (music theory, audio concepts, mixing, effects, instruments, etc).
It took me 2 years to write, one of which was all my spare time, so probably about 9 months to a year's full-time work.
Then I found out no-one bought it! Only pure chance led to it being promoted by someone in the industry, maybe 2 years later. I've kept it updated (started on Cubase 6, now on Cubase 13), and it sells reasonably well; maybe £400 a month in revenue, typically for me. So it's not a big earner, but it pays some of my bills, and means it's worth the 2 weeks of work (average) to update it each time Cubase releases a new version.
All of this is selling via Amazon, worldwide, print-on-demand. Previously on Lulu but they were really just sub-contracting on Amazon and while you get less money per copy on Amazon, it out-sells Lulu by 3x (and then Lulu discontinued the sizes I was using so it was a no-brainer).
I've done another book (which is less of a seller in terms of price and numbers), and quite enjoy them, but it's difficult and I think it's more a case of "if I have the time spare I can put this work in and eventually it will pay me back" - possibly over a year or two...
To fuess some numbers for this, Cubase 6 was ~2011, so sales would start in 2013, 11 years is 132 months, at $400/month that's $52,800 total over the years, and that was for about a year of work.
So it paid something, but probably not as much as a 1 year full time job would have.
I wish the numbers were that good. It only paid that much over the last ~4 years or so. The first 3 years it sold precisely 7 copies, all of which were to students of mine (and I was specifically not selling to them, they asked me about it, as I don't like the conflict of interest there).
I went to check on it and noticed that the repo I have starred is archived and that there's a new one recently put up. I don't see an explanation--can you reflect on or link to anything about the update? (Is this a content update, just ~refactoring how the book is built, etc.?)
Co-author here. We rewrote the book in Typst. On the hypermedia.systems website, the new EPUB ebook release is built from the new codebase. I'm working on a blog post with details on why we switched and what the process was like. The content of the book has not meaningfully changed.
Generally curious about new authoring/markup tools and systems, so I'll keep an eye out for the post.
(The quoted blog post is part of an effort to explain some work I've been doing to single-source documentation and output multiple formats while taking advantage of the idioms/affordances of each format. I spent quite a bit of time reviewing and trying markup systems before deciding what I wanted didn't quite exist. Typst wasn't released when I did all of that; I'm aware of it but I haven't read enough to pull it out of my blind spot.)
On that note, you can just do it for the good of the world. A lot of us have high-paying day jobs that can support us and good writing can be done on the side.
Benefits include not needing to hit some page count (so you can be concise), and bug reports from the community.
I don't look down at people who make money from books at all. I admire all writers and editors. (Some publishers can go f themselves, though. :)
But there is another path available to many of us, one that isn't driven by money. Remember the old hacker ethic!
>A lot of us have high-paying day jobs that can support us and good writing can be done on the side.
Meanwhile, me as a laid off gamedev counting pennies from the bits of freelance I can grab...
I guess that explains why so much gamedev literature is behind closed doors ($500 vault access for GDC. Or just oral knowledge inside industry) or non-existant. We can barely get good documentation, let alone technical literature. I'm guessing the energy expended from potentially 70+ hour crunch weeks doesn't leave much left for passion writing either.
Historically, great books and great science has not been made by people seeking to be paid. The profit motive muddles the water. Herodotos, Newton, Darwin, these guys were writing things worth thinking about. This is what makes society tick forward.
This whole idea of greed is good and the profit motive being the prime mover is a very recent and arguably detrimental mindset for the long term development of civilization.
Nah, people should pay, at least a minimum amount for others's work. Look at open source, it's a mess, exactly because of the nonexisting payment layer. And what they used open source code? To bootstrap llms, for free.
Yes, don’t write technical books for the money. But also do! If you approach the book as a business venture, there’s plenty of money to be made.
Here’s my recap of making almost $400k over a few years of working on books-and-such as a sidebiz alongside a full-time job. Not all of it was from books directly, a lot was from opportunities that the books unlocked. And that’s not even counting how the books enabled me to sponsor my own visa/greencard to come into USA and unlock oodles of opportunities.
The main insight I’ve learned is that the book is a product. Write your thing for someone to benefit from. What [useful thing] will they be able to do after reading your book that they weren’t able to before? How does it help them get more of what they want faster?
Sharing this to encourage, not to brag. We need more insightful and useful books out there.
If you’re gonna do this, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of Write Useful Books first. Wish it existed when I started. http://writeusefulbooks.com/
How much is this income do you think was a result of your following? From here, you look quite established.
My pet peeve is indie dev influencers who tweet “anyone can do it” while ignoring their own built up momentum. I don’t know enough about you to ascertain either way.
Lots of influencers out there claiming that anyone can follow their outlier performance. Super annoying but gets eyeballs (at least on LinkedIn).
I've been writing books for over 10 years (have published over a dozen). If you keep at it, there is good money to be made. Because you learn how to market and treat it like a business.
I now make more from my books than I make when I was in industry. But it took a long time. And a lot of work.
I've written 9 technical books, including 4 for a major publisher (Apress), and 5 independently (https://wjgilmore.com/). One of these books (Beginning PHP and MySQL) has incredibly reached its 20th year in print[1], and has been translated into a bunch of languages. Many years ago I also wound up editing ~70 or so books for Apress plus a few for Wiley. In summary I know this business pretty well, and still follow it closely despite not having participated in it for several years.
My advice is this: if you want to write a book, then write it. But if you do have this sick, twisted desire to spend countless hours writing and editing your work, telling yourself you are an idiot, not good enough, and a horrible writer, then at least do so with the thinking people are going to read it and as a result you will make money. Set yourself up for the possibility of success. How can you do this?
* Package the book in different ways (print, print + videos, print + videos + consultation). This has been extraordinarily successful for me personally.
* Use the amazing Leanpub.com to do the book production (turn your Markdown into PDF, epub, etc). Not an affiliate or whatever, just mentioning it because you will save untold hours of pain.
* If you want to work with a publisher (and in 2024 I don't suggest you do), then choose very, very wisely. There are two who I would even consider working with today, and even in those cases I would absolutely not cede the usual rights.
Hope this helps,
Jason
[1] As of this fifth edition my name is no longer on the book due to a disagreement with the publisher.
I would also recommend writers to keep their digital books up to date and current. The book should not be considered finished the day it is released.
Jeff Geerling gave his devops books away (free) on multiple occasions. I chose to pay for them as he kept working on and improving them well after release.
If more writers took this approach, the quality would increase.
It isn't about technical books exactly but it does speak mostly on how to write recommendable non-fiction, some of which can obviously be technical. It's got a lot of practical advice for the actual "doing" of the book, and has inspired me to at least start dipping my toes in.
I wrote several books. My first book was terrible but sold very well because there was no Stackoverflow, OS platforms did not spend enough to support developers, and their documentation sucked. None of these are true anymore. Also printed books as a medium is in sharp decline. My later books were much better books but sold fewer and fewer copies.
Now I do tiktoks on current topics of interest mixed with my project management content. That will probably turn into a series of YouTube long form video lessons.
I took the liberty of looking up your books from your Hacker News profile. Perhaps they are not all listed there, but the most recent one you listed I think is on a much more niche topic ("Enterprise Android" as opposed to say your prior title "Programming Android") than the prior ones. Even if it's a better book, that won't outweigh that there's just a much smaller audience.
Personally, I think my first book, 10 years ago, was my best book but it sold much worse than my later books because the topic was too niche.
Also, there are many, many more programmers now than there were before. Maybe they don't read books as much as their predecessors did, but to say Stack Overflow and open source platforms killed technical book publishing is highly inaccurate. I honestly think you're projecting a "you" situation to talk about the whole market. Please don't take that as an attack, but just as an additional perspective.
My first book C Programing Techniques for the Macintosh was pretty niche. For example, it required third-party compilers and other tools to do self-hosted development on a 512k Mac. But you had to buy it because Apple's documentation had no tutorial content at all, just an API reference.
If you look at Google's documentation of Android now, you don't need to supplement it.
> My later books were much better books but sold fewer and fewer copies.
This resonates with me. I've written and published a few books, and the one I'm most proud of has sold the last.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1484232275/ has a 5.0 star rating on Amazon (at 20 ratings), and I've gotten lots of positive feedback about it via email, chat and in person. The topic is just so niche that virtually nobody cares :-)
(I apologize in advance for offering unsolicited advice)
As someone who is interested in the topic of regexes and parsing, Perl in the subject made me... uninterested. I know this is a sample of size 1, but maybe splitting the principles / theory from the language would make sense?
I think this is a fairly accurate article, although I think it overlooks the indirect benefits of writing a book.
My book, Effective Haskell (https://pragprog.com/titles/rshaskell/effective-haskell/), is a pretty well reviewed book on a fairly niche technology. It's been in print for about a year, and was in beta for around 6 months before that. I'd estimate I spent around 4,500 hours over 5 years writing my book and the royalties so far mean that the value of that time was around $5/hour pre-tax. That hourly rate will go up slowly over time until the book stops selling, but it's pretty hard to argue that it's objectively worth it just for the royalties.
My motivation for writing the book was never the money, and I've generally treated the royalties as a nice bonus. I started writing because I cared a lot about the technology, and I wanted to share it with other people. Writing the book was my way of contributing something to a community that I'd benefited from a lot in my career.
In addition to the satisfaction, there have been other benefits I've seen to writing a book. It's opened up opportunities for other side income. I've had paid speaking opportunities, and I've been invited as a guest lecturer at a couple of universities and been offered to chance to design and teach a course at a well ranked local university. If I wanted to actively pursue consulting as a side gig I think the reputational gain would help me there as well.
Writing a book has also helped me in my career. In a direct way, I think the benefit to my reputation helped me get interviews. The communication and technical writing skills I gained writing a book have also helped me as I've moved into a leadership role. It's impossible to know precisely how much writing a book contributed or to put a clear monetary value on that, but I do think it's contributed.
The other side of this is that, a year after finishing writing on my book I'm still recovering a bit from the burnout of working so intensely on a side project for so long. I still have some follow-up work (extended solutions to all exercises, errata, fixing up and publishing some cut chapters as free content) that I intend to take on and it's been really hard to find the energy to do it. I'd like to write a second book one day, but I'd still advise people to be mindful of the amount of work it takes and to avoid writing one unless they are absolutely certain that it's something they want to do.
As a person, you, having written a book on FP, would you consider this book an okay starting point for a programmer, me, with very little FP knowledge ?
Kudos for spending so many years on this, that's very inspiring.
Yeah, my goal with the book was to write something accessible to anyone with some programming experience. I don’t assume any FP experience, nor any experience with typed languages. The goal is to help the reader get an intuition for how to think about FP naturally and understand how and why we approach problems in a particular way.
There’s a hack if you work in Developer Relations for a tech company.
1. You write the book as part of your job during the workday.
2. Your company buys the published book to distribute at events and conferences for free.
3. The book seems successful and you get paid.
4. The book gives you credibility in industry events and may even help you get a special visa if you need one.
Full disclosure: I have never written a technical book, but you should if you work in Developer Relations.
Off these, I’ve made $65,000USD. That’s over 13 years. None of these books have sold anywhere near as close to the Unicorn Project! (Which imo is fanfic for the tech-inclined)
The money is nice, but hearing from people who’ve read the books (especially those who ask questions!) is the best part.
Huh, maybe it is the friends we make along the way after all.
I enjoy reading posts like this. Very thorough description. I am wondering if someone has insights into how the publishing model for more traditional publishers like Wiley and Elsevier work. Those guys are selling books for more than $200. Does the author get more money from their sales or is it all absorbed by the publisher?
Slight OT: can anyone recommend websites that have good technical documentation?
What I mean by “good”, is the design & layout of the technical documentation is easy to consume and visually appealing.
(I’m revamping my customer facing tech reference docs and wanting have a visually appealing doc but not so much visually appeal it becomes distracting)
I haven't used mathematica but look forward to learning it one day as an indulgence. I code mostly in R, and it's renowned for having some hurdles to jump through in order to get a package published on its primary repository (CRAN), but what that high standard means is you can download almost any library and expect to find extremely well documented functions with examples that can be run with minimal (usually zero) additional data/dependencies. It's a real treat, and I miss it massively when using languages with less rigorous and less uniform approaches to documentation.
I wrote and contributed to several programming books, back in the glory days when your local bookstore had shelves of 1500 page tomes on programming topics. It really is true that you didn't do it for the money - up to six months work for a couple of £k up front and then meager royalties if it sold. ISTR that in my case 6k sold was when the royalties kicked in.
I did it mainly because I was starting up as a consultant and trainer, and having your name and picture on a book was a huge plus. A second benefit was that you learn a lot when writing a book; not just about the dark corners of the topic, but also about long form writing and how to express yourself.
But publishers, though... I'll just say that if I was going to do another book I'd try self-publishing, make more from my labour, and save myself a lot of hassle.
It would seem like the real $ in in Substack. Lots of writers making >$50k year of passive, recurring income to write maybe one or two articles a month. Good work if you can get it, compared to writing a full-blown technical book and earning less.
OTOH, from all the articles that get posted on HN, I know I'll have the worst reading experience when an article is from substack, because of their terrible website.
The prospects for making money selling as an artist (author, painter, athlete, musician, actor) are so poor why do they care so much about copyright law?
The route to riches for, say, a musician is to become famous and charge for the coliseum seats to hear him play. To become famous doesn't it make more sense to give the music away? Being famous means you get high consulting rates, get paid for personal appearances, get paid for putting your name on sneakers, etc. A famous author could get paid for writing movie scripts or snagging a professorship or teaching seminars.
If copyright law disappeared tomorrow, would the artists really be worse off?
I am anti-copyright, but I think you're considering this through the lens of a computer scientist/rocket engineer instead of someone who's had to work a worthless desk job or wait tables or paint houses.
As someone who recently (and probably unsustainably) got out of the cycle of worthless jobs and knows a handful of musicians, here's my perspective:
Indie (and indie label) musicians can actually do fairly well with recorded music. No, they won't be rich. Middle class is at most the target, usually under. Live in a third-tier city and have few expenses. You don't need to sell very much for a baseline livable state.
$10000 a month isn't an achievable target for most working artists. $800, on the other hand, is, even without touring. Sell a handful of Bandcamp copies, sell a few physical copies (cassettes are best for this in the current moment, being cheap to produce and having a fairly loyal audience), have your back catalog do well enough on streaming.
$800 is enough to live on, if you're living with roommates. In many ways, living with $800/month and no unfulfilling 40hr job is much better than living with $1800 and an unfulfilling 40hr job. Even if you don't want to live with roommates, it cuts the amount of work for an employer you have to do by a great deal. Working low-skill work is soul-crushing.
For authors, from what I understand, this baseline is even more achievable. If you have no hopes of getting rich, the current copyright system is fine.
But there are multiple other avenues for revenue. One can sell merchandise, such as the ever-popular band t-shirt. And there are still many who will want to buy an official cassette rather than just download a song. There are also paid gigs - a live performance is not replaceable with a download. One can livestream a performance, and get paid for the ad placements.
All of these are uniquely worse than the current system for the artists, though. Again, I agree that copyright should be abolished (or that copyleft should be enshrined in law), entirely, for all forms of media (including software). I just think it's important to realize that there are classes of people for whom the existing circumstances are better for. Acknowledging that a change will disadvantage or make circumstances materially worse for people is important.
Livestreaming and live performances and merch creation are all vastly different skillsets than making music in your bedroom, and some musicians are only really good at that part.
I've seen many similar articles to this one before, but I want to complement the author by saying that this one rings the most true and is the most comprehensive of all of them.
However, I want to emphasize a paragraph from his article, that I think needs more emphasis:
> I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one. According to this blog, 96% of books (mostly fiction) sell less than 5000 copies per year. For technical books, it may be worse.
I've heard that 10k number before. I've also been told by one of my publishers that 2k copies is the break even point for them. While I've had the fortune of three out of four of my prior books selling more than 2k copies (and one selling many, many more), it seems that a significant number of traditionally published programming books do not. And I'm sure that ratio is even worse for self-published books.
In fact, I think the "Reality Check" section of the article is not harsh enough. The author cherry-picked some data on very well selling technical books, which doesn't make the point well. The reality is simple: the vast, vast majority of programming books do not sell "well" (let's consider "well" 10,000 copies) and many don't even break the 2,000 copy barrier, even from traditional publishers.
So, what are the economics of technical book writing? Not good. And it's only going to get worse as the market gets flooded with LLM-generated garbage.
So, do it because you really want to do it for another reason (career, teaching, etc.). Not to make money.