> No one buys eBooks. You’d have to be pretty… special… in order to not be able to find a free ebook of Pro JavaScript Techniques.
Funny how things changed, today I would prefer the ebook version over physical for reading on an eink display. Actually, these days I hardly do any kind of reading on a regular light emitting display (only coding and video). It's just so much more comfortable to read e-ink despite its short comings. Does wonder with focus as well. I even started reading short form articles on my e-reader after first saving them on Pocket.
I've only had bad experiences trying e-readers for programming/math related content. The text is great, but the Kindle does not do a tolerable job mixing in math, images, or programming content. Generally any math equation was displayed as an image, and the Kindle had no concept of how to keep the letters in the image related to the size of the text. Literally some books would have just the letter X take up the whole screen, while others it was literally invisible.
I feel bad that writers of quality programming books don't get paid more for their efforts.
Yet I too am guilty of finding ebooks for free, maybe I'm a hypocrite.
The problem with paying for books is its like £30+ up front before you find out if the book is any good or not. And lots of programming books are very badly written.
You might make more money by making a series of Youtube videos than writing a book?
I too have downloaded a lot of e-books, but really have a hard time with managing them. Several years ago I decided to subscribe to Packt's e-book service, at $10/mo it's a pretty safe investment to try out. I honestly found the fact that it manages the book for you (favorites, folders, keeps the right page amongst multiple devices, history, etc) was pretty much worth the price. After the first year I upgraded to SafariBooksOnline, which is quite a bit pricier, but has all of the Packt, Orieley, and more books. There are still a lot of books that suck, or aren't what you're looking for, but you do get to look at the whole thing before investing any more money or time into it.
I've been pirating all I can since the first time I got my hands on a computer: from Windows to AutoCAD,etc. Fast forward some years, and I'm the one in the company who decides that we need more and more from Microsoft,so the bills just keep going up. I often download an ebook, read a few pages,if it's any good,I buy it from Amazon. I can't recall really reading any pirated book for more than a few pages, as I either delete it or just get a hard copy.
Martin Kleppmann, the author behind Designing Data Intensive Applications, wrote about his experience as well, and it shows an interesting contrast with Resig's experience with digital publishing. As you can see in Martin's graph, ebook sales starting Sept 2014 were a _major_ part of his royalties due to it being available as "early release", and integration with the O'Reilly platform increased his exposure, and therefore royalties.
Its hard to guage accurately, but it seems O'Reilly + ebook sales contributed to about 2/3rds of his overall royalty returns, which is a pretty darn good result!
Of course, Kleppmann and Resig are writing about very different eras in terms of publishing, but I can't help but wonder if Resig would have a different experience if he was able to publish an equally relevant work in 2015 vs 2008.
I knew this in loose terms but it's insane to see the revenue sharing percentages going to the creator vs. the publisher.
"My contract with the publisher specifies that I get 25% of publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing, 10% of revenue from print sales, and 5% of revenue from translations."
Imagine a world where the creators actually are the primary financial beneficiaries and the pipes/infrastructure (aka Publishers) are compensated appropriately for their value. Without creators, Publishers cannot exist.
The publisher is gambling. I don’t know much about non-fiction, but regarding fiction they actually loose on most books and win big on a few.
Would you think it’s better if publishers only published if they were really sure it would sell?
The publishers definitely take a risk, but back when I was involved in this, way before ebooks, the biggest part went to the booksellers. IIRC I got about 6% on book sales.
If I ever do anything like that again, I'll be self-publishing, because the contractual shenanigans have left me very wary about dealing with publishers.
The quantity of risk they take on is generally lower in non-fiction and has been going down dramatically over the past few decades. The publisher/author financial model was built for a world where:
- The publisher had to use expensive presses to print and bind hundreds of books at a time.
- The publisher had to maintain relationships with thousands of independent bookstores and ship boxes of books to them using relatively primitive logistics and shipping channels.
- Data on consumer demand and sales was hard to get and slow to update.
- Typesetting a book required expensive hardware, specialized skills, and tons of labor.
- Consumers had little information when choosing what books to buy, so a publisher's "brand" was an important and valuable signal for quality.
None of this is true any more. Authors are expected to produce near copy-ready manuscripts. Desktop publishing makes typesetting dramatically easier. Books can be printed on demand one at a time near the location where it is sold. Shipping today is highly optimized. Bookstores have consolidated into a small number of mega-chains, and most people are simply buying from Amazon today anyway. Consumers have access to reviews and lots of other data to make informed choices so couldn't care less what publisher logo is on the back of the book.
The fact that royalty rates have not changed to accommodate all of this is simply because authors are mostly unaware of this and let them get away with it.
5% from translations... ha! I remember getting told by a foreign publisher that they were publishing a version in their native language. No royalties, they just thought I'd like to know. They did, however, send me a free copy, which was nice.
I wrote a book[0] (published yesterday!) and, so far, sales are about 3:1 digital to print+digital. For me the biggest sales figures so far occurred when early access (MEAP) was launched.
Tangentially related: there's a guy in Poland running a blog about personal finance (i.e. some advice how to save money on your bills, or how to start investing in stocks, etc.) Some time ago he self-published a book, promoted it through social media, and of course through his blog. Later he made a blog post about how much money he made on that book. Believe it or not, but in 3.5 years, on the limited Polish market (the book was in Polish, so no more than 40 million people speaking the language worldwide) he grossed $2M in revenue, over $1M after-tax profit for about 90k copies sold.
For those of you who speak Polish (or are willing to go with Google Translate) here's the link:
Donald Knuth wrote the criminally under-appreciated Mathematical Writing [1] [2] which was the collected lectures from a class at Stanford. One of the guest lectures was Jeffrey Ullman On Getting Rich. In it, he discusses the economics of book writing and compares its pay with that of other 'professions'.
- “it takes around a thousand hours of labour to write a book […] All in all, our talented specialist or so-so generalist can expect to net maybe $8000 over his book’s lifetime of perhaps five years.”
- “you need to aim for ten thousand domestic sales; say two thousand a year for five years. That’s 5–10% of the entire market in a topic like compilers or operating systems. There’s nothing off-the-wall about this, provided you find the right niche: Let yours be the hardest book on the subject, or the easiest.”
- If you drive a hard bargain with your publisher, increase your royalties, and sales: “your efforts can net you as much as […] say $100 per hour”.
(I imagine some of these numbers will no longer be accurate as of 2021, and even the nature of the publishing industry has changed in perhaps substantial ways…)
I publish non-fiction books on Amazon KDP, a way to self-publish paperback & kindle books without a traditional publisher.
When a customer orders a book, you make 60% of the profit, minus the cost to print the book. The cost to print the book varies. My books run 30-40k words and cost between $3-4 to print. I sell the books between $11 and $14, so I make a few bucks from each book. It isn't a lot if you consider the price of the book, but it's better than traditional publishers by a LOT, and I don't have to print any books ahead of time. My upfront costs are just getting the books written and the covers made. Then I pay for ads on Amazon as a continuing cost. And I get complete insight into how well my books are selling on a day-by-day basis.
I miss out on things a traditional publisher can do, like marketing and real in depth book design, but from what I understand they don't do much marketing unless you're someone famous anyway. I also don't get an advance.
I do keyword research before creating a book, and I've looked at technical books, and he's right, they just don't sell very well. Maybe they used to, before stack overflow, but they're just not worth the investment. If you're thinking of writing one, do it only as a resume builder, or to build a community around something you love.
> I miss out on things a traditional publisher can do, like marketing and real in depth book design, but from what I understand they don't do much marketing unless you're someone famous anyway.
I've heard the same about marketing and that was my impression when I was interacting with O'Reilly and Apress several years ago. For technical books today, they expect the author to bring the audience.
> I also don't get an advance.
Sure, but that's just a small loan. If you're in the economic bracket of a typical HN reader, you don't need this.
>For technical books today, they expect the author to bring the audience.
So what's the point to go with them? We all can save it as a pdf and upload to Gumroad,or even send it to Amazon to print. I appreciate books on JAVA or Docker don't sell in millions but I'd at least expect the publisher to try to put my book on the shelves..
It depends a lot on what the author wants to get out of it and what they want to do themselves. Going with a traditional publisher gives you:
* The prestige of your book coming out of a well-known publisher. If your goal is mostly to boost your resume or public speaking fees, then having an O'Reilly animal on the cover of your book can be very valuable.
* They provide developmental editors, line editors, copy editors, illustrators, and typesetters for you. If you don't want to do that yourself or find freelancers, that saves you from the headache.
* Likewise, they deal with the administrivia and legal stuff around distribution, translations, ISBN numbers, licensing, etc. I imagine they might provide some legal cover for you if you, say, defame someone in your text or use a copyright image.
* Your editor will create a timetable and some urgency for you to get the book done. That can be really helpful for people who have trouble summoning the discipline and structure to complete a book.
All of that stuff is valuable. The question is whether it's valuable enough for them to take the lion's share of the profit that the book generates.
That's correct. It's basically a loan that will be auto-forgiven. But publishers aren't dumb and they scale advance sizes to ensure they rarely lose any significant amount of money. For technical books, my impression is that advances are quite small or non-existent.
Thank you for an interesting perspective. Could you say any more about how you think about the timing of your book sales - are you looking to maximise sales shortly after publication by concentrating on subjects that are topical or do you focus on sales over a longer period?
I tend to focus on long term sales, vs seasonal books. That said, the first 30 days after a book launch is critical to convincing Amazon that people want your books (or so people like me believe, I haven't seen any real data), so I tend to run freebies and $0.99 kindle sales, and promotions to email lists that cater to people interested in those things. I also start off the books at a low price, and raise them as the month goes on.
There are other people who focus on "low content" books like journals, log books, and children's activity books. They tend to more often do seasonal books.
I have done one "topical" book, about a new term that is trending on google over the last year, but it basically gets no sales. My mistake for not following the formula.
35 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 61.1 ms ] threadProgramming Book Profits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101483 - Jan 2008 (4 comments)
> No one buys eBooks. You’d have to be pretty… special… in order to not be able to find a free ebook of Pro JavaScript Techniques.
Funny how things changed, today I would prefer the ebook version over physical for reading on an eink display. Actually, these days I hardly do any kind of reading on a regular light emitting display (only coding and video). It's just so much more comfortable to read e-ink despite its short comings. Does wonder with focus as well. I even started reading short form articles on my e-reader after first saving them on Pocket.
Yet I too am guilty of finding ebooks for free, maybe I'm a hypocrite.
The problem with paying for books is its like £30+ up front before you find out if the book is any good or not. And lots of programming books are very badly written.
You might make more money by making a series of Youtube videos than writing a book?
Martin Kleppmann, the author behind Designing Data Intensive Applications, wrote about his experience as well, and it shows an interesting contrast with Resig's experience with digital publishing. As you can see in Martin's graph, ebook sales starting Sept 2014 were a _major_ part of his royalties due to it being available as "early release", and integration with the O'Reilly platform increased his exposure, and therefore royalties.
Its hard to guage accurately, but it seems O'Reilly + ebook sales contributed to about 2/3rds of his overall royalty returns, which is a pretty darn good result!
Of course, Kleppmann and Resig are writing about very different eras in terms of publishing, but I can't help but wonder if Resig would have a different experience if he was able to publish an equally relevant work in 2015 vs 2008.
"My contract with the publisher specifies that I get 25% of publisher revenue from ebooks, online access, and licensing, 10% of revenue from print sales, and 5% of revenue from translations."
Imagine a world where the creators actually are the primary financial beneficiaries and the pipes/infrastructure (aka Publishers) are compensated appropriately for their value. Without creators, Publishers cannot exist.
The quantity of risk they take on is generally lower in non-fiction and has been going down dramatically over the past few decades. The publisher/author financial model was built for a world where:
- The publisher had to use expensive presses to print and bind hundreds of books at a time.
- The publisher had to maintain relationships with thousands of independent bookstores and ship boxes of books to them using relatively primitive logistics and shipping channels.
- Data on consumer demand and sales was hard to get and slow to update.
- Typesetting a book required expensive hardware, specialized skills, and tons of labor.
- Consumers had little information when choosing what books to buy, so a publisher's "brand" was an important and valuable signal for quality.
None of this is true any more. Authors are expected to produce near copy-ready manuscripts. Desktop publishing makes typesetting dramatically easier. Books can be printed on demand one at a time near the location where it is sold. Shipping today is highly optimized. Bookstores have consolidated into a small number of mega-chains, and most people are simply buying from Amazon today anyway. Consumers have access to reviews and lots of other data to make informed choices so couldn't care less what publisher logo is on the back of the book.
The fact that royalty rates have not changed to accommodate all of this is simply because authors are mostly unaware of this and let them get away with it.
I wrote a book[0] (published yesterday!) and, so far, sales are about 3:1 digital to print+digital. For me the biggest sales figures so far occurred when early access (MEAP) was launched.
[0] https://www.manning.com/books/knative-in-action
For those of you who speak Polish (or are willing to go with Google Translate) here's the link:
https://jakoszczedzacpieniadze.pl/ile-zarobila-ksiazka-finan...
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=pl&tl=en&u=htt...
[1] https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematic...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydsutR72lsg
Direct links (if your browser/workflow supports it) to the transcript of that lecture: https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematic... or (though it doesn't matter for this lecture) https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/cs1193.pdf...
Takeaways (as of 1987):
- “it takes around a thousand hours of labour to write a book […] All in all, our talented specialist or so-so generalist can expect to net maybe $8000 over his book’s lifetime of perhaps five years.”
- “you need to aim for ten thousand domestic sales; say two thousand a year for five years. That’s 5–10% of the entire market in a topic like compilers or operating systems. There’s nothing off-the-wall about this, provided you find the right niche: Let yours be the hardest book on the subject, or the easiest.”
- If you drive a hard bargain with your publisher, increase your royalties, and sales: “your efforts can net you as much as […] say $100 per hour”.
(I imagine some of these numbers will no longer be accurate as of 2021, and even the nature of the publishing industry has changed in perhaps substantial ways…)
When a customer orders a book, you make 60% of the profit, minus the cost to print the book. The cost to print the book varies. My books run 30-40k words and cost between $3-4 to print. I sell the books between $11 and $14, so I make a few bucks from each book. It isn't a lot if you consider the price of the book, but it's better than traditional publishers by a LOT, and I don't have to print any books ahead of time. My upfront costs are just getting the books written and the covers made. Then I pay for ads on Amazon as a continuing cost. And I get complete insight into how well my books are selling on a day-by-day basis.
I miss out on things a traditional publisher can do, like marketing and real in depth book design, but from what I understand they don't do much marketing unless you're someone famous anyway. I also don't get an advance.
I do keyword research before creating a book, and I've looked at technical books, and he's right, they just don't sell very well. Maybe they used to, before stack overflow, but they're just not worth the investment. If you're thinking of writing one, do it only as a resume builder, or to build a community around something you love.
I've heard the same about marketing and that was my impression when I was interacting with O'Reilly and Apress several years ago. For technical books today, they expect the author to bring the audience.
> I also don't get an advance.
Sure, but that's just a small loan. If you're in the economic bracket of a typical HN reader, you don't need this.
So what's the point to go with them? We all can save it as a pdf and upload to Gumroad,or even send it to Amazon to print. I appreciate books on JAVA or Docker don't sell in millions but I'd at least expect the publisher to try to put my book on the shelves..
Good question. :)
It depends a lot on what the author wants to get out of it and what they want to do themselves. Going with a traditional publisher gives you:
* The prestige of your book coming out of a well-known publisher. If your goal is mostly to boost your resume or public speaking fees, then having an O'Reilly animal on the cover of your book can be very valuable.
* They provide developmental editors, line editors, copy editors, illustrators, and typesetters for you. If you don't want to do that yourself or find freelancers, that saves you from the headache.
* Likewise, they deal with the administrivia and legal stuff around distribution, translations, ISBN numbers, licensing, etc. I imagine they might provide some legal cover for you if you, say, defame someone in your text or use a copyright image.
* Your editor will create a timetable and some urgency for you to get the book done. That can be really helpful for people who have trouble summoning the discipline and structure to complete a book.
All of that stuff is valuable. The question is whether it's valuable enough for them to take the lion's share of the profit that the book generates.
There are other people who focus on "low content" books like journals, log books, and children's activity books. They tend to more often do seasonal books.
I have done one "topical" book, about a new term that is trending on google over the last year, but it basically gets no sales. My mistake for not following the formula.