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by tomwheeler 21 days ago
Aside from any downward trend attributable to LLMs, technical book sales were always lower than most people would have imagined.

I've known a few authors who published with O'Reilly and other major publishers and most told me that they made less than minimum wage in the end. There were other benefits, such as increased name recognition and credibility that let them charge more as consultants, but the direct proceeds from writing a technical book seldom paid off even two decades ago.

1 comments

In general I get that, but O'Reilly has enough prestige/recognition that I assumed they'd be the top outliers, if they don't break the thousands, I assume basically no one does in the field (Barring books for beginners, that have a significantly larger potential buyer pool)