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.
It's always been this way too. For example, in high school, I spent the time on https://math.stackexchange.com/.
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."
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.
My favorite line in the post, and one that inspires my own efforts lately:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I wrote two books this year, Beautiful Spark being the more popular of the two: https://leanpub.com/beautiful-spark
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.
> 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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVrpF4r7WIhTT1hJqZmjP...
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.
[1]: https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=...
[2]: https://cryptologie.net/article/504/why-im-writing-a-book-on...
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%?)
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.
-- 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.
>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".
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.
"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.
Very different experience for me.
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
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 ?)
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).
“A Career in Professional Basketball: is it worth it?” by Lebron James.
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.
Funny coincidence... I just ordered a copy of this book yesterday after reading https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-are-the-future/. I might not be the only one.
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.
Martin Kleppmann is a great speaker, if you have a chance watch any of his talks on youtube.
The book itself is also great, it gives an amazing lay of the land when it comes to databases / database methodologies and algorithms.
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.
Shamelessly plagiarizing from the Is Y Combinator worth it? comments.
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.
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.
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).
If you weren't going to do it anyway, no.
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?
I made about $0.03 per hour from my book.
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.
No. Its not. Do anything with photos and color and try to do anything outside of platforms and its worse.
Platforms can help with distribution and mitigate inventory storage but your yield gets so small
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.
Are there any writers of technical books here that write in their second language? Do you translate it to english or just write it in english?
As a personal goal: yes, very rewarding. The signing night is also very pleasant. You get to meet a lot of people.
As a money maker: no. Not even close.
I wrote two useless books no one should read. I love them with all my heart and they make me feel great about myself. Case closed.
I saw a related Stackexchange post the other day: https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/52772/everyone-h...
Tl;dr:
Q: Should I write something if I kinda want to?
A: Write it. Even if it's just for you.
A tech manual, he means?
Also author of an O'Reilly book here, sold 7K+ paper copies, and about 10K+ ebooks over the year, been in Amazon best-sellers in several categories for quite some time. Even though the book was not by any means a disaster, and has made me some money, I do not feel like this was a worthy time investment. Martin's book is one of the (few) books that are selling that well, and, let's face it: most of the books people write won't be best-sellers. Unless you can quit your job and focus on writing for at least a year, it's not likely to be of a quality that will make you money, and even then it highly depends on timing and reception.
I'm very glad it has worked out for OP: well deserved.
Also author of an O'Reilly book here, sold 7K+ paper copies, and about 10K+ ebooks over the year, been in Amazon best-sellers in several categories for quite some time.
Even though the book was not by any means a disaster, and has made me some money, I do not feel like this was a worthy time investment. Martin's book is one of the (few) books that are selling that well, and, let's face it: most of the books people write won't be best-sellers. Unless you can quit your job and focus on writing for at least a year, it's not likely to be of a quality that will make you money, and even then it highly depends on timing and reception.
I'm very glad it has worked out for OP: well deserved.
I'm selling a book via Gumroad (https://www.vimfromscratch.com/book). Not much, around 30 books per month in good months.
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)
It ofc worth it if u know how to write... How to align words... :)
There is this thing called the internet. It is IVAM. Interactive, visual, audible and modifiable. Kinda like CRUD. It also doesn't kill trees.
Now what about books again?
Jdkvpekqgh
Writing a book isn’t worth it... who wants to put in that much effort.... to write down your thoughts...
As far as I can tell, writing and publishing a dead-tree book is the best/only way to get on NPR.
As far as I'm concerned, that's the only purpose dead-tree books serve anymore.
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.
The list goes on. Just want to share my list of my books here https://robocademy.com/product-category/robotics/