| Author here of a technical book published with Packt several years ago. I had the first mover advantage as the only book of significance covering a Java library that was (and is) very widely used. Total page count was ~350-400. It took me approximately 600-800 hours of research, authoring, editing, and final to complete the book. I had a full-time job and so spent about 6-9 months of nights and weekends. I actually haven't added up the total of royalties but it was probably somewhere over $15-20k on sales of several thousand copies. I wasn't in a position at the time to capitalize on the consulting / speaking gigs that folks have mentioned, and had I thought more about it I would have put myself in that position. It definitely has been worth the experience as folks mentioned both in terms of resume-building (a book is a great thing to bring to interviews) as well as general reputation. Also, if you are truly building a quality technical book, the level of research and knowledge required to do a good job was (for me) at least 5x the depth of my day-to-day work. As goes the old adage, you think you know something well until you try to teach it -- this was definitely true of my research efforts. Summary - not worth it financially, but it definitely changed my career overall for the better. If anyone wants to know more details, please reply here or PM me and I'm happy to answer as best I can. |