Going via traditional publishing is a fools game. The author says you can get $10,000, but for most my books, publishers would only pay $2000. And even that amount is paid over 1-2 years.

And he's right about publishers trying sleazy things. Another thing they may ask for is "All future rights in any medium". So people who signed this clause in 90's/early 2000s lost right of their ebook/audiobooks, which are the most profitable.

I would not go with a traditional publisher unless you can afford to hire a lawyer who specialises in copyright law (and not an English lit graduate, which is what most agents are).

Self publishing-- from my experience:

* Typesetting has never been a problem, but then I write general programming books, and Leanpub handles the conversion really well.

* I never found copyediting/proofreading very useful for programming books (though I do use them for my fiction). Readers care more about technical accuracy-- ie, does the code work, does the text and code match. are instructions clear etc. A good set of 1st readers is very useful here.

The best way to make money is to sell digital copies via leanpub/gumroad, as these sellers pay 80-90% royalty. Amazon will only pay you 30% if you price your book over $9.99, which let's be honest, most technical books will be.

Nathan Barry popularised the formula of selling the book for $39+, and extras for higher pricing, and that works the best.

> Going via traditional publishing is a fools game

That depends very strongly on the publisher, and if you go with one of the industry leaders than it can be a very useful decision to go the traditional publishing route.

No Starch and Manning are both excellent publishers with fantastic teams. You'll get lots of attention from experienced editors, teams of talented people assisting you throughout that process, and very nice distribution channels. I've known many authors that have worked with these publishers and none of them have regretted it.

If you purely care about the money, then I think self publishing for a niche audience is probably the best route, though you have to put some extra energy into marketing. The math just works out that much higher royalties on a smaller audience means more direct income.

But if you want to make a really excellent book, and would like to be able to walk in to a Barnes and Noble and see it on the shelf, then going with an experienced, quality publisher can make a notable difference.

+1 for Manning, I've co-authored two "In Action" books and the experience was excellent throughout.

I agree with all of this. I wrote a book for Packt many years ago (2005-ish?), and I was kind of underwhelmed about the whole experience. The editors were not native speakers of English, and introduced grammatical errors into the book. They published the wrong version of chapters I submitted. (Things would be revised after feedback from editors, I would revise later chapters for continuity with future chapters, etc.) Their editorial oversight basically made me look like an idiot. I could have done better on my own. (I got 3 stars on Amazon, and basically deserved that rating.)

They also changed the terms of payment at some point. I used to get quarterly royalties via Paypal, but they wanted to switch to European bank transfer or something. That is impossible for people based in the US, and they just didn't seem to understand that. It sounds like something I could have sued them over, but the book was definitely past its prime at that point, so I just said "remove my name from the book and don't contact me" and that has worked out pretty well so far. (I think someone else did a second edition. Good for them!)

It was nice to be forced to write an entire book. I signed a contract, got an advance, and delivered it. Today's me would just tell users "read the source code if you have questions", but a book length tutorial was probably good for the project in general.

If you have the mental energy to write an entire book without anyone pushing you to complete it, I think you'll enjoy the enhanced control that you get by self-publishing. Collecting money for PDFs is a solved problem, and honestly, PDFs are a lot more useful than printed books anyway. It is always "neat" to show people a printed book that you wrote, but I'm not really sure that's worth the downsides. I buy programming books, but I haven't gotten a printed copy in years. They just live on my computer, where I'm actually doing the programming.

Counter-anecdote - I published a book through Wiley about 10 years ago and I felt like they added a lot of value. They had a copy editor proofread the book carefully and I was really amazed at how she was able to focus on the grammar in spite of the fact that she didn't understand (or much care to understand) the subject material at all. They punched up the title and the presentation a bit and did all the marketing - I'm sure I never would have been on the shelves at B&N if I had self-published.

Yeah, a reputable publisher could add a lot of value. I've never read a bad O'Reilly book, for example.

I think my conclusion is -- don't write a book unless you really want to write a book. Nobody but your parents are going to care that your book is in a bookstore. No software engineering interviewer is going to let you skip the interview because you wrote a book. The only reason you should do it is because you want to share your knowledge with the world. That is a valuable pursuit, but you will be undercompensated for it.

(Fun story... many years ago, a Google recruiter reached out to me with a little survey; rate yourself from 1-10 in these categories. They said 10 was "literally wrote a book on this subject". I answered 10 for web frameworks, which I had in fact written a book on! They ghosted me. But I did end talking with another recruiter, and ended up working at Google for 6 years, so... I guess it worked out.)

(Author of The Art of Agile Development, which just came out with a second edition.)

I don’t agree that going with a publisher is a fool’s game. Yes, they take the majority of the income of the book, but most technical books don’t do all that well anyway. In return, they provide credibility and marketing support, as well as a certain amount of editing (depends on the publisher) and infrastructure support (ISBN, getting the book into stores, etc.)

For me, the credibility and marketing is more valuable than the money to be made. I spent a full year writing the new edition, close to full time, and I’ll likely never be paid what I’m worth for that time. But going with O’Reilly as my publisher means that a lot more people will hear about and read the book, and that’s a win to me.

I'm an author of a book also published through Amazon Direct Publishing. I've documented how my book is put together with source code, so if you want to produce something suitable for self-publishing, have a look at: https://github.com/faisalmemon/ios-crash-dump-analysis-book

I make very little money on the book itself because I have a free web-based version hosted on GitHub. However, I don't know how many sales I've foregone because of this.

Curious thing about it is that the GitHub analytics tells you how interested people are in your book. My in-progress book has much more interest just from the analytics. (The Road to Zero. This book explains how to develop your own zero day vulnerabilities for iOS.)

Another thing I think is important is to know the difference between a subject book and a topic book. Subject books provide a wide coverage for a domain. You can make a lot of money if it is a hit. Topic books drill just one detail but authoritatively and comprehensively, so gain you reputation rather than money.

For me, the pleasure is in the research and writing of a book, and having people read it. Professionally, I see it as advertising for my skills. I've landed a FANG role as a result and it certainly makes contracting for roles easier.

Do you happen to know where does the "So you want to" prefix originates from?

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

This is a poem by Charles Bukowski, I don't know if it's the original use: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer

Yes, the Byrds, 1967: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_You_Want_to_Be_a_Rock_%27...

Gotchas with traditional publishing is shocking, especially the "Deep discounts" part.

>It turns out that a 55% discount was the standard wholesale rate for many booksellers, including Amazon. The publisher lied straight to my face.

I started with self publishing since I was writing 100 page niche programming books. My main marketing startegy is giving away books for free often, which turned out to be more effective than asking for donations.

I've published a book on Go and one on Python on Leanpub with the "pay whatever you want model"

I got much more money + satisfaction via this and organic traffic + reddit posting than what a top publisher was going to give me for a book

They were going to give me 40k INR as upfront deposit and then some % on 1000 copies sold

Contrast that with Leanpub, 1000s have downloaded my Go book, most of them have for free, while some have paid. Win-win.

It is a big deal for me that 1000s have downloaded my book! Have received good feedback on email too from few. So overall, I love self publishing for technical publishing!

I have a friend who co-wrote a book on TCP in the early days and it still sells because it hasn't really changed much in the interim.

On the other hand, how many times do you see something like Java 2.0 or C#2 books which are out-of-date very soon after the author has slaved over the whole process!

The trick is obviously writing about something that won't change too much like Design Patterns and avoiding very specific things unless you are motivated by love!

After talking to a handful of successful technical authors, they have all said - don't write a book for the money.

I'd agree with this, having been a contributing author to a technical book. It was a very interesting process and I learned a lot, but it was not something with a good return on investment, in terms of straight money.

What I've heard from speaking to other technical authors is that the value comes from the opportunities it can generate. Writing a good book in a technical field can help establish you as an expert in the field, which can generate things like consultancy opportunities.

> the value comes from the opportunities it can generate

Yep, exactly what I've been told too.

I think the two reasons to write a book would be if you're super enthusiastic about a topic and are dying to tell the world about it, and/or you want to establish yourself and use the book as a lead generator.

I'm personally playing with the idea of starting a blog, not a book, in the mid future. I have tons of unpolished article drafts laying around.

On one side I'm painfully aware of the work required to write useful texts and the monetary incentive is almost non-existent. But what motivates me is to finally take a leap to try and be competent at writing in English, which is not my first language. As of now I'm terrible at it and I feel having a real project that people might consume in some way might be the best way to really learn that.

Secondly I think being able to communicate ideas clearly in an engaging fashion is very beneficial for someone in our field. Writing better documentation, clearer code, comments and specs all depend on that.

A book is a different undertaking all together in terms of scope and polish, but my guess is that the benefits might be in a similar category.

I can recommend starting a blog. The big thing, at least for me, is it that incentivises you to finish side-projects and complete thought pieces (at least finish/complete them enough to be able to write about them). Prior to starting my blog I'd years and years of unfinished and undocumented, but potentially quite interesting and/or innovative, side-projects.

Just to add - for technical folks a blog can be free and relatively easy to setup and self host with something like Hugo or Jekyll on GitLab or GitHub pages.

I also wrote about this topic at: https://andregarzia.com/2021/04/writing-a-technical-book.htm..., it might me interesting for people who enjoyed this post to also read mine.

The author has very good points but their assumption of a 10K advance is not what I have seen (or been paid) in the traditional industry. Most publishers I’ve worked with or approached were paying between 1K and 2K in advance depending on which terms you accept. You usually get some more money if you allow the book to be distributed to libraries or be placed in some all-you-can-eat services.

Regardless of the publishing route you chose — traditional or self-publishing — it is very hard to make money with a technical book. Most people who are financially successful are those with an established platform. The traditional publisher will do very little to push your book. As an example, I made much more money from my self-published books than my recent traditional published book even though they sold less because I keep all the money instead of getting a small royalty.

Publishing a book is not all about making money, each of us have their own reason to write and money is more of a side-effect than the primary cause. I hope posts like these inspire more people to publish.

Oh, I’ve also shipped a prototype ebook generator at https://little.webby.press that runs purely on the client-side, no accounts, no tracking, no state. I think people here might enjoy it.

Good post.

I think that for most it's best to start with self publishing which is what I did for Deployment from Scratch[0]. I cannot imagine I would have just half the revenue or something like 15%/2.

Technical publishing won't make you rich but you can have an equivalent of a minimum salary at least.

[0] https://deploymentfromscratch.com/

Self publishing has been great for me... given me more control and brought me closer to my readers [1]

It also means I've been able to work on "early access books" with regular updates

[1] https://datacrayon.com/shop/

I couldn't be happier with self publishing. As someone who is an expert at overthinking things, I finally just bit the bullet and went with what was easiest - for me, that was Gumroad.

Even in early access, it is nearing $100k since I opened it up for sale May. The best part of self publishing is I've kept nearly all of that money.

Writing a non-fiction (technical oriented) book is on my to-do list for the next 1-2 years, so this post is very much appreciated.

One thing I've noticed a lot when it comes to advice for traditional and self-published authors alike - having an active community around your expertise is essential.

"So you want to do X" is a standard phrase which is used to introduce advice on how to do something, or why not to do it. See the poem "so you want to be a writer" by Charles Bukowski.

Without the "so", the title reads like an order.