I’m a big Medium fan and subscriber. There’s a lot of great writing there. I recently came across this article, The Economics of Writing a Technical Book, and read it with great interest. Having written three books of my own, I thought I’d write a bit about my experience with self-publishing a technical book.
Suffice it to say that my experience has been very different than the author of the Medium article. The TL;DR summary: I made a lot more money than they did, with a lot less hassle.
I’ll talk merely about my first book, Coding in Delphi. It has been my best selling book, and thus my most profitable.
Before I decided to write my own book, I had written chapters for three other Delphi books. (Well, actually, two editions of the Delphi Developers Guide and one Kylix book, but never mind…). I found the process of working with a publisher arduous, slow, and unprofitable. Granted this was a while ago, but there were complicated Word templates, editors that really weren’t technical at all, and long timelines to get feedback. All in all, it wasn’t the greatest experience. I was paid a flat fee for the chapters, and in retrospect, it wasn’t much. Now before my friends Steve Teixeira and Xavier Pacheco get upset with my for being ungrateful, let me say that I am very grateful for the opportunity and honored to be entrusted with topics in books written by such august luminaries. Same goes for Eric Whipple and Rick Ross.
I’ve always liked writing and have blogged for many years, and so about five years ago, I decided that I wanted to write a book. My wife was very encouraging, as were a few Delphi friends that I shared the idea with. I did some investigations and decided to go for it.
First, I wrote an outline. Then I started writing. First I started with MS Word, but soon found that doing things like formatting code was a lot of work. Then I tried Scrivener, but despite being very cool, it was not easy to format code either. I tried writing the book using a WordPress template that would let select people comment online, but that proved cumbersome and non-helpful.
Finally, I discovered LeanPub, and all my problems were solved. LeanPub uses MarkDown, which is easy to use, allows you to very easily format code, and which they turn into PDF, MOBI and ePUB formats with the click of a button. They are also very, very writer friendly, with authors taking home 90% of the price of the book. (That is significantly more than authors get who go with traditional publishing houses.) They sell and promote the book on their website. There’s precious little for an author to do other than write the book and push a button. You can keep the book on DropBox or GitHub. They also allowed you to create and use –for free — a physical publisher ready PDF file which you can take to a print-on-demand company. They pay on the first of the month via PayPal. All in all, it was almost too good to be true. I can’t recommend LeanPub enough.
Though I didn’t have professional editors, I did have a collection of very kind and generous Delphi community members who read the book, made great suggestions, and generally made the book better. I had a friend, Diane Moser, a professional proof-reader, to go over the book with a fine tooth comb. (Diane’s services are highly recommended). I think the copy itself ended up as good as any “professionally” published book.
Once I completed the book and published it on LeanPub, I then settled on CreateSpace to publish the hard copy. CreateSpace is owned by Amazon, and if you publish with them, your book can easily be listed on and sold via Amazon. The process of starting with your print-ready PDF and ending up having your book for sale on Amazon is pathetically simple and took at most a week. Amazon prints the books on demand and carries no inventory. That means that they can pass more of a royalty on to authors. I confess I don’t know exactly what my Amazon royalty is, but it is above 50% of total sales. I believe I have sold more physical books than soft-copy books overall.
I’m not comfortable talking specific numbers, but suffice it to say that I have made at least an order of magnitude more than the authors of the book described in the Medium article with a much smaller target market. It has vastly exceeded my expectations. Interestingly, the majority of my sales are in US dollars, which I find surprising. Amazon also pays me in British Pounds and Euros. I would have guessed that I’d make most of my money in Euros, but such is not the case.
Couple of Final Thoughts:
- Writing a book is a lot of work. It took me a year of Saturday and Sunday mornings at my local Burger King to get it all done. It was a grind. I’d get up and be at Burger King by 0630, and usually stay there writing until noon.
- Publishing the book was a breeze by comparison. The hardest part of actually publishing the book was figuring out the cover for the hard-copy. Everything else was super easy.
- If you are thinking about writing a book, I strongly encourage you to do it. My goal when I started was to have one person buy my book. It has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.
- By the way, if you write a book and don’t want the hassle of publishing it, my wife and I will do it for you for very favorable terms.
- We did spring for 100 ISBN numbers. They were expensive, but have proven to be a wise investment.
- What I didn’t have: A prestigious publishing house like O’Reilly backing me, marketing my book, and doing all those things that big publishers can do (and also take a big royalty cut to do).
- What I did have: I am reasonably well known in the Delphi community. I have lots of friends who helped make my books better. And I had a market that was, at the time, pretty empty. (I’m happy to say that this has changed, and there are actually quite a few Delphi books out there now.)
In summary, I have to believe that the days of technical book publishing houses are limited. It is simply too easy and too profitable to self-publish a book on your own. As I said, if you don’t want to do it all yourself, we can definitely help. 🙂 I can easily foresee a day when you can get any book at a bookstore, as they’ll simply print any book you want on demand right there in the store. After reading the Medium article, I am even happier that I didn’t pursue the traditional publishing route.