Hey Habr!
It is difficult to overestimate the success of the book ""which came out in Russian translation and is invariably reprinted with us under the name""
Not so long ago, the author posted an honest and detailed post on his blog about how work on this book was given to him, how much it allowed him to earn, and how, apart from money, the benefits of authorial work are measured. The publication is required reading for anyone who has ever thought of becoming a literary superstar by our author, but has not yet decided whether to take on such an ambitious project.
We read with pleasure!
Recently sold copies of my book High Load Applications. Last year, my book was the second-best-selling book in the entire O'Reilly catalog, behind only AurΓ©lien Geron on machine learning. Undoubtedly, machine learning is a very hot topic, so the second place in this case suits me quite well.
I didn't expect the book to be such a success; I expected it to be somewhat niche, so I set myself the goal of selling 10 copies before the book became obsolete. Having exceeded this bar ten times, I decided to look back and remember how it was. The post was not intended to be overly narcissistic; I set as my goal to tell what the business component of writing is.
Is such a project justified from a financial point of view?
Most books make very little money for either the author or the publisher, but sometimes a book like Harry Potter comes along. If you are going to write a book, I strongly recommend that you assume that your future royalties will be close to zero. It's the same as if you gather a musical group with your friends and hope that the glory of rock stars awaits you. It is difficult to predict in advance what will become a hit and what will fail. Maybe this applies to technical books less than fiction and music, but I suspect that even among technical books there are very few hits, and most are sold in very modest numbers.
With that said, I'm happy to report that, in retrospect, my book turned out to be a financially rewarding project. The graph below shows the royalties I have received since the book went on sale:
Total royalty
Distribution of royalties in monthly terms
For the first 2Β½ years, the book was in an βearly releaseβ state (drafts): I was still working on it, and we released it in unedited form, chapter by chapter as it was ready, only in ebook format. Then, in March 2017, the official publication of the book took place, and the printed edition went on sale. Since then, sales have fluctuated month to month, but overall have remained surprisingly stable. At some point, I began to expect that the market was about to saturate (that is, most of those who wanted to buy a book would get it), but so far this, apparently, has not happened: moreover, at the end of 2018, sales increased noticeably (why - I do not know). The x-axis ends in July 2020 as it takes a couple of months after the sale for the royalties to reach my account.
According to the contract, I receive 25% of the publisher's proceeds from e-book sales, online access and licensing, as well as 10% of printed book sales and 5% of royalties from translations. This is a percentage of the wholesale price paid by retailers/distributors to the publisher, i.e. it does not take into account the retail markup. The figures in this section are the royalties paid to me after the retailer and publisher took their share, but before taxes.
Since inception, total sales have been (in USD):
- Printed book: 68 copies, royalty $763 ($161/cop.)
- E-book: 33 copies, royalty $420 ($169/cop.)
- Online access from O'Reilly website: royalty $110 (I don't know how many times the book has been read through this channel)
- Translations: 5 copies, royalty $896 ($8/cop.)
- Other Licensing: Royalties $34
- Total: 108 copies, royalty $079
A lot of money, but how much time I invested in it! I believe I spent about 2,5 full-time years working on the book and related research - over the course of 4 years. From this period, I spent a whole year (2014-2015) working on the book, without any income, and the rest of the time I managed to combine the preparation of the book with part-time work.
Now, in retrospect, it is clear that these 2,5 years were well spent, since the income that this job brought me is on the same order as the salary of a programmer from Silicon Valley, which I could have received if I had not left from LinkedIn in 2014 to work on a book. But of course I couldn't have foreseen this! Royalties could very well be 10 times less, and such a prospect would be much less attractive from a financial point of view.
Not royalty uniform
Part of the success of my book may be due to the amount of effort I put into promoting it. Since the book was in early release, I have given nearly 50 talks at major conferences, plus I have many more "invited" talks at companies and universities. In each of these speeches, I was at least casually promoting my book. I acted like a rock musician going on tour with the presentation of a new album, and, I suspect, it was thanks to these performances that the book became widely known. A couple of posts on my blog were also very popular, and they probably also attracted the attention of potential readers to the book. I'm much less of a lecturer these days, so I guess word of mouth (social media; readers recommend the book to colleagues) spreads the word about the book.
By combining lectures and book promotion, he managed to become recognizable in the community and earn a good reputation in this area. I receive many more invitations to speak at different conferences than I can realistically accept. Speaking in and of itself is not a source of income (at good industry conferences, speakers usually get paid travel and lodging, but talks themselves are rarely paid), but such a reputation is useful as an advertisement - you are approached as a consultant.
I've done quite a bit of consulting (and today I routinely turn down such requests from various companies as my main focus is on my research), but I suspect that in the current situation it would not be difficult for me to create a profitable consulting and training business - to contact companies and help them to solve data infrastructure problems. You are recognized as an authoritative specialist and expert in the industry, and companies are willing to pay good money for the advice of such experts.
I have paid so much attention to the financial viability of authorship because I consider books to be an extremely useful educational resource (more on this below). I want as many people as possible to write their books, which means that such work should be a self-sufficient activity.
I was able to spend a lot of time doing research related to the book, because I could afford to live a whole year without a salary, and for many this pleasure is not available. If people could for the preparation of educational materials, there would be more and more good literature of this kind.
The book is an accessible educational resource
The book not only can bring considerable financial benefits; this work has many other advantages.
The book is versatile accessibility: almost anyone, all over the world, can afford to buy a book. It is incomparably cheaper than a university course or corporate training; to use the book, you do not have to go to another city. People living in rural areas or in developing countries can read books with the same return as residents of global technology centers. You can simply flip through the book or read it from cover to cover, as you like. You don't even need an internet connection to read the book. Of course, in some ways the book is inferior to university education, for example, it does not give individual feedback, does not allow you to establish professional contacts, socialize. But as a means of conveying knowledge, the book is almost undeniably effective.
Of course, there are many other online resources: Wikipedia, blogs, videos, Stack Overflow, API documentation, research articles, etc. They are good as reference material for answering specific questions (eg, "what are the parameters of foo?"), but in fact, such information is piecewise, and these pieces are difficult to structure for a meaningful education. On the other hand, a well-written book provides a carefully crafted and thoughtful curriculum, as well as a narrative that is especially valuable when trying to make sense of a complex topic for the first time.
A book scales immeasurably better than live classes. Even if I lectured in the largest amphitheater of my university for the rest of my career, I would not reach 100 people. In the case of individual lessons and lessons in small groups, this gap is even wider. But the book allows you to reach such a wide audience without much difficulty.
Benefit more than receive
When you write a book . To confirm this, I will try to roughly estimate the benefit that my book has brought.
Let's say that out of 100 people who have already bought my book, two-thirds are going to read it, but they haven't got their hands on it yet. Let us further assume that a third of those who have already read it were able to apply some of the ideas presented in the book, while the rest read it purely for the sake of interest.
So let's take a conservative estimate: 10% of those who bought a book were able to benefit from it.
What could be such a benefit? In the case of my book, this benefit is mainly in making the right architectural decisions when creating data warehouses. If you do this job well, you can create even better systems, and if you make a mistake, you can extricate yourself from the mess that you have driven yourself into for years.
This indicator is difficult to quantify, but let's assume that the reader, who applied the ideas from my book, was able to avoid a wrong decision, which would require . Consequently, 10 readers who applied this knowledge freed up approximately 000 man-months or 10 man-years, which could be spent on things much more useful than clearing out the mess.
If I spent 2,5 years working on a book, which saved other people a total of 833 years of time, then I got more than 300 times the return on my work. Assuming the average programmer salary is $100k per year, the value provided by the book is $80m. Readers spent approximately $4m buying these 100 books, so the benefit is 000 times greater than the value gained. And, once again, I note that these are very cautious estimates.
The book does more than just the things mentioned above. For example, many readers have confessed to me that, thanks to my book, they successfully passed interviews, landed their dream jobs, and provided financial security for their families. I don't know how to measure that value, but I think it's colossal.
Conclusions
Writing a technical book is not easy, but a good technical book is:
- Valuable (helps people do their jobs better)
- scalable (a huge number of people can benefit from the book),
- available (almost everyone) and
- economically feasible (you can make good money on this).
It would be interesting to compare this work with open source development, another activity that brings great benefits, but . I don't have a clear opinion on this yet.
It should be noted that writing a book is really difficult, at least if you want to do it well. For me, it was comparable in complexity to the development and sale , and in the process of work, I experienced more than one existential crisis. I cannot say that this process has had a beneficial effect on my mental health. So I'm in no hurry to start the next book: the scars from the first are still too fresh. But the scars are slowly fading and I hope (perhaps a little naively) that things will be easier next time.
Bottom line, I think that writing a technical book is a worthwhile endeavor. The feeling that you have helped a lot of people is very inspiring. It also provides significant personal growth. Also, there is no better way to learn something than by explaining it to others.
Source: habr.com