[WoodenChair]

I've had four technical books published and I've finished writing my fifth which I'm in the midst of negotiation with publishers about distributing.

I've seen many similar articles to this one before, but I want to complement the author by saying that this one rings the most true and is the most comprehensive of all of them.

However, I want to emphasize a paragraph from his article, that I think needs more emphasis:

> I heard from publishers that 10k copies sold is considered a success, and the publisher may ask you to write another one. According to this blog, 96% of books (mostly fiction) sell less than 5000 copies per year. For technical books, it may be worse.

I've heard that 10k number before. I've also been told by one of my publishers that 2k copies is the break even point for them. While I've had the fortune of three out of four of my prior books selling more than 2k copies (and one selling many, many more), it seems that a significant number of traditionally published programming books do not. And I'm sure that ratio is even worse for self-published books.

In fact, I think the "Reality Check" section of the article is not harsh enough. The author cherry-picked some data on very well selling technical books, which doesn't make the point well. The reality is simple: the vast, vast majority of programming books do not sell "well" (let's consider "well" 10,000 copies) and many don't even break the 2,000 copy barrier, even from traditional publishers.

So, what are the economics of technical book writing? Not good. And it's only going to get worse as the market gets flooded with LLM-generated garbage.

So, do it because you really want to do it for another reason (career, teaching, etc.). Not to make money.

[julianeon]

I always want to put an asterisk by "not to make money" when I see this topic being discussed. I think you can write a technical book to make money, but the monetization path is not "by selling books." It's "make money by selling a few books, which then establishes your credentials, which opens the way to speaking gigs and, from there, to the actual money: consulting jobs."

[doe_eyes]

Right. That was my takeaway too. Some of the examples of success stories he gives aren't technical at all - they're business books. It would be absolutely exceptional for a software engineering book to sell 100k copies. If you're writing about a specific technology, selling a thousand would be a pretty typical result. And this happens over the course of years.

There's just no money in this. There is a small market for authors who can crank out passable technical content serially for series such as "...for Dummies": if you have ten books generating royalties in parallel, it might be worth your time. But one or two books? Absolutely not, you'll make more working a minimum-wage job.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but it's basically a hobby for folks who have something to share, and have a daytime job to pay the bills. Plus, yep, the sucky part is that books piracy is widespread, and that even people who benefit from your writing and have the means to pay are just accustomed to sharing bootleg copies for free.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, "technical" here seems to mean "computer-related" - where are the other examples like, say, car repair, housebuilding, or "agriculture for dummies" ? (Yeah, I know, these might involve computers too these days, but you get my gist.)

[elric]

> as the market gets flooded with LLM-generated garbage

That's already happening, and getting published. Recently read an awful tech book that was obviously generated by an LLM, it was so bad that I reached out to the publisher, who assured me that this was just the author's style, and that they promised no LLMs were involved. All lies, of course.

Apparently publishing awful books can somehow generate revenue.

[codetrotter]

Before LLMs became widespread it was already a bit risky to buy technical books, with some books on Amazon being nothing more than a collection of vaguely related Wikipedia articles collected into a “book”.

And even without that, there are publishers like PacktPub which had a lot of poor quality hand written books. I know because I signed up for this thing where they were giving away a new book every day, and a lot of those books were just so bad. There were some gems in there too, hence why I kept looking at those free books. But I’d say 85 to 90% or more were just not worth even trying to read.

I remain hopeful though that even in the face of LLM generated garbage, quality publishers like O’Reilly and Manning will keep the bar high for what they publish.

[IMSAI8080]

My guess is the average technical book is probably in the hundreds of copies over a reasonable lifetime. Mine's sold 91 copies in 5 months. It's a book about how machine learning works. Unknown author, I have no social media and zero advertising budget. It's just Amazon organic listings. The economics are definitely not good but I didn't write it for money. I wrote it mainly for more existential reasons that I wanted to put my words out there and leave something behind in the world.

[jimnotgym]

Whilst a shameless plug is clearly beneath you, feel free to put a link to it in your bio!

[fire_lake]

Maybe put the whole text on GitHub?

[gumby]

I agree that a bookshould be written for its intrinsic value, but it's possible to have an extrinsic value as well: even if you don't sell many it could be a credibility tool for a consulting or (shudder) 'influencer' campaign.

[_DeadFred_]

I think this is a valuable post for those people here that love Z-library and think they should have access to these sorts of books for free.

[kamov]

Not paying for a book when you have the full ability to do so is just greed.

But there are also those who come from places where monthly wage is like $200, so they wouldn't be able to afford a $30 book even if they wanted to

[yard2010]

Z-Library is a library, not a bookstore. If you want to own a book - buy it.

You could get a book from your local library (in some places, even digitally) - the author ends up getting peanuts for it anyway.

[paulpauper]

Write a book to build credibility and opportunities, not the money.

[TheRealPomax]

I stopped tracking how many books I'd sold once my POD publisher was sending me monthly order reports that numbered in the ten. Not tens. Just ten.

[elric]

I guess that means printing on demand was the way to go here. Out of interest, are you willing to share the name of the publisher? And how was the print quality?

[TheRealPomax]

Lightning Source, now part of Ingram. Wouldn't recommend them for working with you to get your book on shelves, and this was before POD really took off so I'm sure there's better alternatives these days. The print quality was top notch though.

[elric]

Thanks, duly noted :-)

[trueismywork]

How much pay per hour do you think it will make it worthwhile to consider the book a success from authors point of view?

I'm thinking of a scenario where people are paid to write the book rather than from book sales..

[coffeebeqn]

Probably impossible to get close to a decent SW Engineer salary from writing at least in the US

[ghaff]

It’s more like writing technical books at least somewhat on the side help enable that decent SW Engineer salary or tech professional more broadly.

[richrichie]

I disagree. This is the case for anything entrepreneurial. Vast majority of ventures fail. Reward/Risk ratio (in finance we call it Sharpe ratio) generally equalises across the spectrum. That is there is no free lunch. You can choose an activity that has better odds of making money. But you will make leas money on average.

[hilux]

I think you underestimate the cost of writing a well-researched book.

Pre-publication, the process consumes lots of time and energy and money while generating zero revenue, output, or other benefit. Very different from most business ventures.

Source: I have written a book, and have also started my own business and have worked for many startups. (VC-backed startups pay their employees.)

[richrichie]

Isn't this the case with any new business venture? There is going to be a period of spending (looking it as "investment" is therapeutic) and negative cash flow. In many cases this can be years. Publishing, professional sports and entertainment, start-ups - all seem to have similar distribution of reward.

Being a paid employee of a start-up is different. That would be similar to receiving an advance from a publisher to write a book.

[johnnyanmac]

I don't think many would disagree that most businesses fail. Which aligns with the author you disagreed with. So what exactly was your source of disagreement? Make it profitable anyway instead of picking a more proven market/audience?

Not all investments are created equal. the bigger Startups convince rich people to give them millions to work on their idea. Publishers completely invert this; you show them a product and you get a piece of the pie in exchange for them distributing. One's a much safer bet even if everything falls apart. And in the corner, entertainment is pretty much the biggest gamble. Always was, probably always will be.

[e63f67dd-065b]

Sharpe ratios are not equal across different opportunities for the simple reason that actors are irrational. Many people write books even when the expected return is negative, which drives down returns for everyone.

[ska]

Sharpe ratio is fairly useful in roughly apples to apples comparisons, e.g. investment opportunities, and basically useless when it’s applied to broadly to human endeavours. Mostly because people are a) not economically rational in any pure sense and b) not primarily motivated by financial factors.