[sanderjd]

Curious about this too. I wonder if he means that you don't really make any money compared to the opportunity cost of all the hours you spend on it, or if you really don't make any money in an absolute sense. Unfortunately, I suspect it's actually the latter due to the relatively tiny size of the target market for such books.

[lazyant]

From other tech book authors it seems it's the former; they work many hours for a year and then they make 20k or that kind of minimum wage money

[julian_t]

That's right. I wrote some computer books some years back, and the royalties were somewhere around 10% of the wholesale cost of the book. So a book with a $40 shelf price might have a $20 wholesale price... and with only about 6000 copies as a typical print run, I didn't make much at all.

And also bear in mind that an advance is just that: it comes off the royalties, so you may not end up making any money for quite a while.

[jarcane]

That's a good point. With a run like that, the advance may be all you ever see.