5 ms·
Very, very few authors make enough off of their books to live on. They write a book, make a few hundred or a few thousand off of it, the book goes out of print,
by skookumchuck 7y ago
Very, very few authors make enough off of their books to live on. They write a book, make a few hundred or a few thousand off of it, the book goes out of print, they're forgotten.
At least re-release it for free after the first two or three years. Then, it serves as an advertisement for your skills or the next book you write.
- ghaff 7y ago>Then, it serves as an advertisement for your skills or the next book you write. That assumes the book still serves as a good advertisement. Whether it's just because your writing skills have improved or because, for non-fiction, things have changed and your book is very out of date, you may not really want people to judge you by it. I eventually pulled a book I wrote about 6 years ago because so much had fundamentally changed in the technologies and market dynamics I had written about at the time. (You can actually still get it for free from my website in PDF but it's not really something that would be useful for anyone outside of providing a dated historical snapshot.)
- pfranz 7y agoWhile it can confuse things to have out of date documentation out there. I often get stuck with setups using out of date software. Maybe it's 1% of 1% of users, but finding good references for out of date stuff is so nice.
- sitkack 7y agoI totally agree. When maintaining ancient software, I usually have to end up hunting for the source of the dependencies just to regenerate the documentation. Time is not linear.