[ansible]

The author's assumptions about compensation are off though. You're lucky if you sell 2000 copies in most technical markets, and your royalty rate is above 12%.

The author was making the point that the good-case scenario for book sales results in a not-very-impressive royalty. And that implies the average-case will result in a really-not-impressive royalty as you've personally seen.

So we do need to buy more tech books if we would like to have authors compensated fairly... which will hopefully attract more talent and effort towards creating more good tech books.

[WoodenChair]

I guess my point though is that there's basically no way you're making much money - so the compensation really is the brand building.

[jaycfields]

https://twitter.com/marick/status/455143028177764352

$45K is good money as far as I'm concerned.

[WoodenChair]

That's definitely the exception, not the rule, which is the point of all of this!