[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.)