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/
Didn't think i'd actually be responding to an author whose book I have spent multiple hours with.
Thanks for the great book!
All the best for your new book :)
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/
I think this depends on the field and the audience. I'm not sure about other sciences but, when I was working in Biology and Ecology, there was much higher regard placed on people who'd been published in reputable peer reviewed journals than those that published books on topics.
It usually came down to the assumption that if someone published their research in a book rather than submitting it for peer review, it meant the quality of the research wasn't up to standards and likely would have been rejected and information from scientists published only in books is looked at as questionable and not really a good source to use as a primary reference.
That being said, the general public tends to place book published scientists in almost higher regard than many working scientists and will take information published in such form as undeniable fact.
The blog approach might get a similar benefit if you can get a lot of feedback and discussion for each one. But it seems like it would have a degree of self-selection of readers, where you only get the most motivated commenting on any given post.
I got an invite to write a book in 2014. Initially i thought it was very easy and can complete within 3 months. By this assumption, i agreed and start writting. When I start writting, i understood that, it is not easy at all. As a first time author, i was litterally struggling. The only factor that pushed me was, I already spent months for this, so If leave the project, I will lose that months. So I kept going.
After 1.5 years, my first book poped up and it was well recieved. Immediately after that, I got the next invitation to write second book. The thing is, the book subject was very good. So I agreed again by understanding all the cons of writting. I have spent 6 full months (full time for completing the next book. And I am keep on getting invitation and because of the experience of first book, I could easily draft the other books. It was a tough time for me too. Only less income, but only motivation was, I am doing something challenging and I am learning lot of stuff, also I am writting about the technology I like the most.
These factor pushing me for writting me again :)
Sorry for the typo and grammatical errors. :)
> 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.
And I can tell you, after I finished my book, I didn't want to think about the topic for a month or so. Can't imagine committing to a revision or two.
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 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/.
"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.
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."
It is precisely what I have done in the past.
I will certainly try to see if I can repurpose some of my better responses to common questions as blog posts.
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...)
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
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?
I also spend a lot of time updating old articles with new information, and that new information trickles in at random intervals.
Most of your readers will find you through Google, when they're trying to solve a specific problem. They won't subscribe to your content or return without a specific goal in mind, so consistency is not that important.
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.
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 :)
I write about health insurance and visas. My guides are not page-turners, but they're a welcome introduction to really complex matters.
Compiling your answers into semantically sensible standalone posts- that's something that some specific people do very well, very easily, as easily as you respond.
Whether it is economically advantageous for you to hire someone is a different question- answer is probably not- but if you knew someone in the Rust space who was an editor rather than an author, they could, in 2-3 hours a week, scan your posts, distil the useful elements, and write something for you to approve and post. Very common workflow in the publishing space.
Ghostwriters are this at book-scale- interviewing the named author, which, like forum posts spurs answers, which get aggregated into subject areas and distilled using a common voice.
You definitely don't have to beat yourself up about it, or try to solve it with "activation energy" processes- which to be fair sometimes work. Some people are just good at some stuff and other people good at other stuff.
Cheers, good luck.
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.
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?
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. :)
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.
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."
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"
It is listed on my resume, but i don’t mention it at interviews because it was so long ago.
Last year at a job interview, the interviewer told me he still had my book. I got the job.
Heh- you are quite accomplished I see from some googling. And I have to be honest, I fail to see how having an Addison Wesley book under your name in any context could be seen as a negative- the guys I was referring to were writing "Learn the MEAN stack in 21 days" type of books. But yeah I of course agree that you don't slam a copy down in the opening of the interview and try to use the fact that your name is on it as your primary selling point- its really more to get you in the door and have people reach out to you about interesting opportunities you might otherwise not have found out about.
You might just be running in much more intense circles than I am, but the number of people who have written a technical book is small enough that I have ran across only a handful in my career and my reaction was much more about surprise and delight than worrying about the motives behind it, but YMMV I guess.
This is a real problem. People writing some really bad quality tech books from certain publishers. I'm not going to trash the publishers because some of the authors care about writing good books (rather than being able to say they wrote something) and do it with little editorial help. They produce something which would have been better in other circumstances.
I am routinely amazed at the arrogance shown by interviewers. Even people that are usual humble and great to work with get in that position of authority and judgment and suddenly act different. It's a very disappointing aspect of human nature.
When the above doesn't apply you still need them to know you wrote the book because sometimes they will look up the book and a good book will overcome your bad interview.
The exception to the above is when you are bored of the topic and are interviewing for something completely different. In that case you hide it because they might assume you will leave for a better job in your field latter - after all you wrote the book in something else so you must be valuable.
I attended a talk you gave at AWS Re:Invent 2019. You need some serious, serious help.
No company should ever be speaking to you like that. You should be showing companies the door, not the other way around.
Early on in my career I learned most tech companies are absolute garbage and are not worth working for. You're worth a lot more than they are, brother.
> 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
This was the core problem: Modern technologies and frameworks move fast. His book was about the state of the art five years ago, but it was woefully out of date for what we were doing. That didn't stop him from trying to exert superiority over the more knowledgeable team members.
Some of us read his book. It wasn't even a great resource on the topic. Re-reading the Amazon reviews, I have to believe most of the positive reviews were bought or fabricated.
Since then, I'm cautious about hiring anyone who tries to portray themselves as an expert in the field. And if you're hiring an author, at least read part of their book during the interview phase.
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.
I love writing (and I’m working on another book), but other than maybe getting you in the door, you’ll still have to deal with typical tech interview nonsense.
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.
Which is too bad. I want money!
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.
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.
Nothing wrong with that. I see it as a conversation starter.
Honestly, the best technical book I’ve ever owned.
https://henrikwarne.com/2019/07/27/book-review-designing-dat...
Anyway, some reasons:
* Draws together a wealth of material on databases and distributed systems that wasn't explained in a systematic, accessible way anywhere else. It provides a map to someone coming to this hard-to-navigate area for the first time.
* Great balance between being conversant with the academic research (without being too abstract) and being practically applicable (without being too tied to details of particular technologies)
* Shows underlying unity and concepts of very different data technologies, e.g. why classic relational database write-ahead logs and replication are very similar to streaming platforms like Kafka
* Subjective, but it is very clear, accessible, and well-written. This is very very hard to do and quite rare in technical books.
It's my favorite technical book of the decade and my first recommendation to anyone who asks me how to really "level up" as a senior engineer.
Its a practical overview of a difficult and modern topic. That in itself would make the book good, but for me, it is that the book goes deeper into the research and algorithms than most O'Reilly books -- but it does this without becoming a Science textbook.
It is easy to tell the people working in big data that haven't read the book, just from the mistakes they make.
where:
- if Expectation > Perception then your experience is +ve (e.g. surprise);
- if Expectation < Perception then you experience is -ve (e.g. disappointment).
So the question I'd ask you is this: what were your expectations when you picked up a copy of DDIA?
Second-best, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book. ;)
> 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.
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.
At my last office, I set up something very similar for our org with similar success. Your PM procedural problem case is a perfect example down to the complaining about having to attend a meeting they weren't required to attend.
Enter new management. After 8 weeks of ice-breaking meetings in triplicate and taking cues from all the wrong people, the first concrete thing they did that touched me was cancel that meeting. I found new employment shortly thereafter.
It's now an essential part of my repertoire. For technical people? Well that's mostly my team. We have a Trello board where anyone on team can drop RFC cards. Members of my team meet every couple weeks to review and discuss. It's visible to the whole org if anyone else is interested. (Generally, they aren't.)
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 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.
The greater context of the above was dealing with procrastination: Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses.
Not having written a book I don't know what the scars are about writing one that make the process very painful,I don't know if it's the writing itself, or the editing and getting feedback that makes it painful. But maybe procrastination does play a role, especially when one reflects on how much time they've wasted.
So to stop procrastinating, change your environment or profession to one where you don't fight your natural impulses. Easier said than done in this world though.
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.
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).
Do good once with a connected lawyer, and your name gets passed around.
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.
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.
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!
Martin's book is clearly a masterpiece and mine isn't. Just though I'd chime in and let folks know that writing a book doesn't have to be a 2.5 year full-time commitment.
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.
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...
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...
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...
Not really. Whether it's writing ability or simply time a lot of successful people aren't really equipped to write a book from scratch. I assume a pretty common model is to conduct a long set of interviews, make some background and other material available, and the ghost writer creates a draft. Even if the subject wants a lot of direct involvement, starting out with a lot of content is a lot easier than a blank page.
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.
Retail markup is usually 35% to 55%, but what a lot of people don't realize is that retailers usually have a method of returning their unsold stock, which the publisher is on the hook to liquidate somehow.
-- 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.
But the skill remains in competition with all other skills --- some specialisation or specialisations must shrink for another to grow.
With a century of universal compulsory education, US adult literacy rates have difficulty cracking 91%.[1] That's about 10 million people with no effective English literacy. (Some are literate in other languages.) Some other industrialised countries see similar results, though most fall at 98% or higher by UNESCO rankings.[2] And even basic literacy expresses a minimal language and cognitive capability.
Skill itself is finite. Over half the population, and over 2/3 in most surveyed industrialised countries, have poor, "below poor", or no computer skills at all, by an OECD survey.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
The population with the demonstrated capacity to aquire any advanced computer skills seems to be about 5--10%, and this competes with all other high-skill, technical, or professional occupations. Increasingly it's a prerequisite for them, possibly shrinking that pool.
Again, the larger point is that attention, a key component of skills acquisition, is rivalrous, in both individuals and populations
________________________________
Notes:
1. NCES reports 4% "could not participate", 4.1% "below level 1', and 12.9% "level 1", or 21% "low English literacy" ages 16--65, in 2012 and 2014, a level insufficient "to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences".
https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
2. Rankings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_...
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.
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".
(With the most obvious exception being if you're a public figure of some sort.)
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.
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.
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
If we could, we would of published with them instead
i feel that self published book authors should all have a "marketing partner" since they all seem so shy about marketing
The problem is that it's relatively easy to hire a marketing partner (does PR, etc.). But it will probably cost quite a bit more than your book advance. And most publishers these days aren't setting up book signings, sending out review copies, etc.
When I get pings to see if I want to review a book it's usually from a PR agency.
Not sure what is the best place to find such companies/individuals
And you'd be able to call yourself an author, how cool is that?
I wrote a book about React and after that didn't get asked stupid interview questions anymore.
I don't mean any disrespect to yours at all (since I've never read any book on React, so I can say with certainty not your (unshared name) book on React) but anyone can write a bad book and start selling (or rather, 'offering for sale') PDFs/ePubs on their website (I've thought about doing it!) that shouldn't make them an automatic authority on the titular topic though.
> Hi, I wrote a book about X.
> Hi, I wrote a good book about X.
A the difference is abysmal.
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 ?)
In any case, good for him, of course, no jalousy implied !
(Also, as for the "your lifetime must be quite extravagant"... Again, "fair enough", but apparently the whole "FIRE"[1] movement might beg to differ ;) )
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you expand on that?
Very interesting comment, thank you!
Paid advertising is effective, but extremely expensive.
Getting press coverage is great, and less expensive than advertising, but you've got to pay a publicist who knows what they're doing, and even then, there are no guarantees.
But if an author has a strong platform, such as an email newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers, or a popular website or YouTube channel with tons of views, then it's an incredibly effective and inexpensive way to market the book. The author has already established an audience who has shown interest in their previous content, so chances are good that they will show interest in the book as well.
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.
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.
...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
The book itself is also great, it gives an amazing lay of the land when it comes to databases / database methodologies and algorithms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Does anyone have views from having tried to do both - book and open source project?
What resources were most valuable for you in writing your book?
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.
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.
Platforms can help with distribution and mitigate inventory storage but your yield gets so small
As a money maker: no. Not even close.
Tl;dr:
Q: Should I write something if I kinda want to?
A: Write it. Even if it's just for you.
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)
As far as I'm concerned, that's the only purpose dead-tree books serve anymore.
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
