| I think this is a fairly accurate article, although I think it overlooks the indirect benefits of writing a book. My book, Effective Haskell (https://pragprog.com/titles/rshaskell/effective-haskell/), is a pretty well reviewed book on a fairly niche technology. It's been in print for about a year, and was in beta for around 6 months before that. I'd estimate I spent around 4,500 hours over 5 years writing my book and the royalties so far mean that the value of that time was around $5/hour pre-tax. That hourly rate will go up slowly over time until the book stops selling, but it's pretty hard to argue that it's objectively worth it just for the royalties. My motivation for writing the book was never the money, and I've generally treated the royalties as a nice bonus. I started writing because I cared a lot about the technology, and I wanted to share it with other people. Writing the book was my way of contributing something to a community that I'd benefited from a lot in my career. In addition to the satisfaction, there have been other benefits I've seen to writing a book. It's opened up opportunities for other side income. I've had paid speaking opportunities, and I've been invited as a guest lecturer at a couple of universities and been offered to chance to design and teach a course at a well ranked local university. If I wanted to actively pursue consulting as a side gig I think the reputational gain would help me there as well. Writing a book has also helped me in my career. In a direct way, I think the benefit to my reputation helped me get interviews. The communication and technical writing skills I gained writing a book have also helped me as I've moved into a leadership role. It's impossible to know precisely how much writing a book contributed or to put a clear monetary value on that, but I do think it's contributed. The other side of this is that, a year after finishing writing on my book I'm still recovering a bit from the burnout of working so intensely on a side project for so long. I still have some follow-up work (extended solutions to all exercises, errata, fixing up and publishing some cut chapters as free content) that I intend to take on and it's been really hard to find the energy to do it. I'd like to write a second book one day, but I'd still advise people to be mindful of the amount of work it takes and to avoid writing one unless they are absolutely certain that it's something they want to do. |
Kudos for spending so many years on this, that's very inspiring.