[billme]

>> “conventional tech publishers make no sense economically” [...] “It is possible to make decent money from writing technical books if you self publish and build an audience yourself.“

Do you have an example of an author doing this? (Meaning all they do is self-publish books and have disclosed financials.)

[munificent]

Yes, me.

My self-published book "Game Programming Patterns" has made me a lot more money every year for the past six years than I ever expected. It's not enough to live off of, at least not in an expensive city while raising a family, but it's nothing to scoff at either. I could probably make quite a bit more if I put time into marketing, supplementary materials, etc. As it is now, I just let the checks from Amazon etc. roll in and treat it as a nice bonus to my day job income.

If I lived somewhere cheaper, wrote full time, and made some adjustments in my lifestyle, I could probably get by on just my writing.

[billme]

First, congratulations, thanks for publishing, thanks for sharing your experience!

Second, yes, maybe I was not clear, my advice relates to the average author on a simple straightforward method of write a book that reduces the odds of it not being of use of the audience it seeks.

Lastly, might be wrong, but it appears:

(A) at least on Amazon, your book appears to be rank in the top 20,000 of all books;

(B) you appear to have published a singular book;

(C) as you say, yourself, it does not make enough for someone to live in a major city;

(D) writing books is not your primary means of income;

—- to me, what I hearing does not conflict at all with my analysis and your example, to me is survivor bias: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

——

Writing multiple best selling books year after year is VERY hard to do as a means of income. There are much easier ways to earn an income and share what you know. If someone wants to do that, awesome, though I do not have advice for doing that, nor do I know of anyone else that does; that would result in publishing 1+ successful books a year. My advice is just no nonsense take on being reducing odds of book being useful, which for the average author is much more of a challenge.

[munificent]

All of that is true, but it's also worth balancing that with the fact that when I was writing that book, I was only spending about an hour a day on it, and now I spend zero hours a day. The long tail of passive income seems to be pretty long so far.

You're right that it will be hard for many people to make a living solely off writing technical books. But I also think it's true that you can make more money that most people realize just by not giving a traditional publisher a huge cut of it. Maybe not enough to live on, but likely enough to make it worth your while.