[jashmenn]

These numbers are possible and repeatable. I've made over $100k on software books at least 7 separate times [1].

If you're going to try to do this, the key idea is to build an audience e.g. an email list. You need to budget 50% of your time to writing the book and 50% of your time to blogging/promoting the content.

There's basically three key aspects to making $100k on a programming book:

1. Market - is the topic broad enough to sell $100k in copies?

Weak market: Build an Adblocker with Clojure on Arduino

Strong market: Complete Guide to D3

2. Offering + guarantee - what does the student get when they buy?

Weak offering: my 200-page pdf

Strong offering: my 400+page pdf/epub/mobi, 2 hours of video intro, invite to community chat, interviews with experts, support, questions answered by the author, quizzes, and worksheets

3. Promotion Effort

Weak promotion: posting 3 times to medium

Strong promotion: writing remarkable content, posting weekly, creating downloadable resources, collecting emails - launching to an email list of 10k-100k+

When you hear someone say, "you can't make money in programming books" run their strategy through the filter above. It's no wonder most folks don't make much money, because doing it right is hard.

It can take months to build an email list of 10k, but that's how the game works.

[shameless self plug]

If you're thinking about creating a programming book or a course, this is what I do and I'd love to chat. See here: https://www.newline.co/write-with-us

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015117

[quietbritishjim]

> Strong promotion: ... collecting emails - launching to an email list of 10k-100k+

One thing I've often wondered about this: who are all these people posting their email addresses everywhere?

Even if I'm reading a blog post I'm so interested in that I'd like to read more later, I would never dream of putting my address in one of those "sign up for more" popups. I know many will comment that it's offensive that they popup over the page, but for me that's not even the main reason - email is just not the right place for that sort of thing, I already get enough cruft in my email account without adding blog post notifications too. I know not everyone is exactly like me but surely that is the rule rather than the exception?

[jashmenn]

Email fatigue comes from self-serving emails. When you get value from an email, it isn't a burden.

Context: We have 100k folks on our list, and our typical open rate is 25%. Almost all are web developers.

I think the key thing required to maintain this is to give value. I'll spend hours personally writing high-quality email tutorials. My friends and family are subscribers and so I treat each email as such.

I feel an obligation that if you open an email from me you're going to get value from it. I might send out 19 emails that teach before I ask for a sale on the 20th (but even then, I'm only going to ask you to buy something I think you might also find valuable).

[esrauch]

I'm not sure that the value can explain the 100k signups though; except for a small amount of word-of-mouth the vast majority of those must type in their email based solely on the website content and the promo?

[peterwoerner]

I asked that question, and then I realized I have subscribed to 4 or 5 free newsletters--currently money stuff, orbital index and stratechery.

And I have in the past bought books from peoples blogs as a way of saying thank you for providing great free content.

[pc86]

Even among technical folks you are in the minority. Especially among non-technical folks, who will toss their email into just about anything that asks for it for almost any reason.

[archagon]

This sounds less like “publishing a book” in the traditional sense and more like “becoming an education and training entrepreneur.” (Which is fine if you enjoy that kind of thing, but seems like the book part is only a tiny % of the work involved.)

[vladmihalcea]

When you use a publisher, you only have to write the book, and the publisher will take care of editing, printing, distribution, marketing, advertising, etc.

When you self-publish a book, you need to do way more than just writing the book. You have to do all the things the publisher would have done for you.

By self-publishing, you can get 80 or 90% royalties, instead of 10%, which I think it's worth. It might not be worth for everybody, but, considering how much time I put into writing the book, I wouldn't be happy getting just 10% profit.

[archagon]

I wonder how feasible it would be to write a (great) book, skip most of the coursework/training/audience-building bits, market it using more conventional means (reach out to journalists, etc.), and make ~$10k?

Personally, as someone who loves technical writing but less the people bits around it, I'd much prefer doing something like this to "building my brand" and essentially becoming an instructor. (This is roughly what I ended up doing when releasing my first iOS app, though the journalist cold-calling was arduous and questionably reproducible. The success I had was mostly on account of Apple taking notice, perhaps with a small push from positive blog coverage.)

[jashmenn]

Right. This is why you partner with someone like me - because we already have an audience, a process, and some capital+labor we can use to help produce & promote your book/course.

[ghaff]

>though the journalist cold-calling was arduous and questionably reproducible

To do this seriously you probably want to contract with a decent PR person.

[lukaseder]

Great. With this spoiler, I'll never get to read about how to write that Adblocker with Clojure on Arduino

[Mathnerd314]

There might be a market for a Pihole book, if the existing documentation is insufficient (https://docs.pi-hole.net/ looks pretty thin). But Clojure seems unlikely.

[jashmenn]

This is a good point. There probably is a market for a Pihole book.

[AlchemistCamp]

> launching to an email list of 10k-100k+

Wow. I "launched" the premium version of Alchemist Camp just over two years ago to a list of about 250. Now my list is between 3,000 and 4,000.

My business model is a bit different since I'm selling subscriptions to a growing library of screencasts instead of one-off books or courses, but the number of people signing up and staying on my email list is a critical business driver. I get very few unsubs and have approximately a 40% open rate, so it's definitely a top of the line issue.

I suspect my main problem is #1. Elixir is a small market. That said, I'm a bit weak on #3 as well and would love to see some examples of your promotional efforts!

[teleforce]

As also mentioned by OP, blogging for your book while writing it, is a very important exercise and it's so underrated.

I've spent countless hours during Covid isolation looking for good to excellent books on Engineering and Computer Science. Excellent book authors for examples Lewis Van Winkle, Pieter Hintjens and Andrew "bunnie" Huang do have blogs.

p/s: To be honest the three authors examples are from an Amazon's book reviews but I hope you've got my point.

[rglullis]

Honest questions:

- how much work do you estimate need to be put for those (a) writing the book and (b) to turning a weak offering into a strong one?

- what is the shelf life of a software programming book?

- Do you make more money by writing the book or by providing consulting for those that want to create content?

Your self-plug in the end implicates that you are more interested in selling shelves than going after the gold.

[jashmenn]

(a) It takes me about 20 hours of work - and 1 week calendar time - to finish a chapter. A typical book is ~10 chapters.

(b) Hard to say. Some weaknesses (wrong topic) are unrecoverable. Blogging well is way more work than, say, tacking on interviews to an already-great course.

shelf life: longer than you'd think. we wrote ng-book in 2015 and it still brought in thousands last month. (To be fair, I have been releasing updates.)

I don't do consulting. It's the worst of both worlds: the unreliable income of entrepreneurship, but you still have a boss and don't get to accumulate any long-term value.

Re shovels: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." - It's more fun with friends, and we can teach more topics than just whatever I'm an expert in

see also: https://twitter.com/fullstackio/status/1225462654174744576

[archagon]

I assume writing books is a full-time job for you. How do you maintain enough in-anger technical expertise to keep writing books that people find useful? Or do you learn as you write?

[jashmenn]

I've started to collaborate with other folks to sort of semi-self-publish. Meaning, I have structure, a process, and an audience and I've been working with other folks who want to teach, but don't have an audience yet.

So I maintain my technical expertise by just asking a lot of questions. It's pretty great because I have a personal tutor to learn some of the most interesting technologies.

Andy Weiss (Fuschia at Google) taught me rust as he wrote Fullstack Rust.

David Guttman (Js.la) taught me advanced Node with Fullstack Node.

Amelia Wattenberger (the Pudding) with Fullstack D3 etc.

Having such awesome personal conversations - that were essentially lost to the ether - was actually the inspiration for us to launch our podcast: I just wanted everyone to learn what I was learning.

[paulryanrogers]

While it's great you're sharing your success and formula one must consider market saturation. Once that point is reached there may not be enough underserved demand to support similar gains for others.

Edit: you're not your

[jashmenn]

You're right in theory - you can't write dozens of books about exactly the same topic, but I feel that scarcity mindset may miss the broader trend that programming isn't slowing down.

We're sort of the inverse of Web Development (programming) fatigue. We'll run out of products when developers stop creating new web frameworks (and programming languages and platforms and and)

[hejja]

Hey Jash, Curious: with your email list, do you send value-giving emails at regular intervals -- ergo a weekly digest

Or is it more just for paid offers whenever you have one? Or both?

I feel like content strategies are a double edged sword. Sure you could have YouTube, Twitter, email, and a blog but then what time do you have left to work on product?

Anyway thanks for the info

[siscia]

How wide need to be the market?

It is useful to focus on a single technology or it can be as wide as a general topic?

[jashmenn]

People want to learn what you do at work. Real projects, real code, with usable output. Blog posts tend to teach in an idealized, shallow way - because it's easier to write about and easier to teach.

If you, instead, put in the work to show every step, every detail, and every hack that sort of quality is extremely valuable to beginners.

So I could say, go look at the Stack Overflow developer survey, or State of X 2020 survey, or Google Trends -- and that will help, for sure. But the most valuable thing you can do is show someone what you /actually/ do at work.

[siscia]

I am in the fortune situation where I work on very low level details of foundational technology. Basically I believe that I got like 20 colleagues (people working on the same topic as myself) everywhere in the world, and all of them in big-tech companies.

I had the idea to work on this: https://jr2sr.com but I don't see much interest yet... Even though I am not pushing it nearly as hard as I should

[jashmenn]

There is a huge amount of interest in learning how to become a sr. engineer. Go check out the work of swyx (also in this thread [1]). I believe he said he made $25k+ from his book.

He is inspiring, articulate, prolific, and all-around amazing. He just wrote a book on this exact topic. (No financial incentive, just a fan. He was recently on our podcast [2]).

What you'll notice about swyx is that he writes constantly about what he's learning. He takes tons of notes, and is able to digest them in a way that's easy for jr's to digest.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23819320 [2] https://podcast.newline.co/episodes/cracking-the-coding-care...