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Writing a software book and making over $100k
- fomine3 6y agoImportant: Write in English. (or maybe Chinese?)
- vladmihalcea 6y agoI'm the book author, so if you have any questions, let me know.
- matthewhartmans 6y agoCongrats on your book launch!
- vladmihalcea 6y agoThanks. I pre-launched it in November 2015 and launched the final version in October 2016. By 2019, I had managed to sell over 5000 copies and make over 100k. I'm thinking of releasing a second edition in 2021 or 2022.
- matthewhartmans 6y agoThat’s incredible man!! All the best for your second book!
- vladmihalcea 6y agoThanks
- paul_f 6y agoIf everything in the book was also in your blog posts, didn't that dampen sales of the book? This is my fear, if I give it away, no one will buy it.
- barry-cotter 6y agoPackaging, convenience, lack of redundancy and logical structure are worth a lot if your time is valuable. ConversionXL sell video courses for $600 each that have ~the same content as their endless series of blog posts. But the video course has a beginning, middle and end. It’s a polished finished product. The blog posts are raw material. Plenty of academics do similar things when writing books. There’s vanishingly little in any of Bryan Caplan’s that didn’t appear on his blog first but the books are far superior at conveying a theory, rather than more or less disconnected facts.
- vladmihalcea 6y agoExactly.
- YetAnotherMatt 6y agoI would assume that his blog posts are what convinced quite a few people to actually buy the book. That said, I'm not too familiar with the book sales industry. I am familiar with consulting. Initially I thought that giving all special knowledge away for free would be the worst thing I could possibly do. Boy was I wrong. Nowadays I give presentations detailing step by step exactly what people need to do in order to achieve some outcome, with as goal that they could do it 100% by themselves if they want to. My theory is that this leads to more sales due to me becoming more visible + it builds large amounts of trust + the best possible clients are going to be very busy + the best possible clients are aware that they could implement all my advice by themselves, but if having me on board as well increases odds of success by as little as 10% (or increases the total impact by as little as 10%), it is still going to be a win to have me on board as well.
- vladmihalcea 6y agoThat's true. My blog is thd front-end to every product or service that I'm selling. It's a very useful marketing tool.
- jjk166 6y agoIf you are good at something and the customer doesn't really understand the process then you can make it look easy, and no one wants to spend a lot of money to pay someone to do something easy. But if the customer knows what it actually takes to solve the problem, the real value of having someone else do it is much more evident. Even if you feel like what you do is easy, there are people out there who consider it indistinguishable from magic. The uninformed are impressed by the magic, the informed are impressed by the magician.
- mac01021 6y agoThanks! Under what circumstances would you expect someone to discover your book (they can't buy it if they don't know about it). If I want to learn a particular software tool (Kafka, Kubernetes, git). I might go to Amazon or Google and search the name of tool, possibly with "book" appended. If I want to learn how to do functional programming, I'll search for "functional programming book" or something like that. What's a search term that I'd be likely to use that would lead me to your book? Or is there one?
- vladmihalcea 6y agoThat's where my blog, https://vladmihalcea.com/blog/ https://vladmihalcea.com/blog/ or my StackOverflow answer, https://stackoverflow.com/users/1025118/vlad-mihalcea https://stackoverflow.com/users/1025118/vlad-mihalcea come into play. Most of my readers get to know me from these resources prior to knowing about my book.
- hohenheim 6y agoYou mentioned publishers leave you with 10% of the sales. I can't wrap my head around that, how is that possible and acceptable by authors?
- ChrisLomont 6y agoContent is easy to get for publishers, and they have to often invest significant time and money to get the book to market. They often take a risk on printing X copies, and they don't sell, the publisher eats the cost. You can say to just print on demand, but that is costlier per book. They often have to provide editors to clean up the book, do marketing through their channels, and promote the book. Most authors don't do all this guy did. Most simply write the text and leave it there. Publishers do everything else this guy did to move the book. (I've written parts of several books, and have received small royalty checks for well over a decade)
- samastur 6y agoWe both seem to have direct experience of working with a publisher, but I think you are overstating the effort of most publishers these days. Too many books, even from reputable publishers, are of fairly low quality, which as a reader bothers me even more than stuff like this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/markos/49564386913/in/dateposted/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/markos/49564386913/in/datepost... Also, I don't see why them taking on a risk of printing upfront should be offloaded on the author through smaller fee.
- ChrisLomont 6y agoWhen either party takes on more risk in a deal they want compensation. This is perfectly understandable. If an author wants access to the distribution network of a certain publisher, they must pay. Ever wonder why the biggest authors don’t simply run their own publishing houses? They understand the value provided. And they rarely if ever reach 50% in royalties (I’ve never heard it, in many decades of following professional writing). What I do find is authors generally have no idea of the value provided. In which case they’re welcome to self publish. But self-publishing rarely results in great sales either. Both avenues have pros and cons. That said, I’d likely still choose a publisher, since my time is also important, and I’d prefer not having to be average in a dozen skills when I can invest effort at being much better at a few.
- distalx 6y agoThanks for sharing your process. it is very insightful. How did you found out that JAVA is your niche? edit: This might sound vague, I'm curious because I'm trying to figure out my own niche.
- vladmihalcea 6y agoI've been using Java since 2005 so it's the ecosystem I know best. When I started my blog, I tried various topics, but the Java Persistence and Hibernate got the most traffic. Since I liked the topic, I decided to write a book about high-performance data access with Java.
- hn_check 6y agoJust as a bit of cynicism, when people talk about how well they did in a field, or all the money they made, most of the time they are lying and doing the fake-it-till-you-make-it tactic. HN is famous for a few of these guys making their reputation on exactly this ruse. And yes, this will be auto-dead. Whatever.
- justsomeuser 6y agoWhat program did you use to actually write your book? Word/Pages? What did you use for the blog?
- vladmihalcea 6y agoI wrote the book in MarkDown using IntelliJ IDEA. The book is stored on GitHub and LeanPub fetches the files and renders it. My blog is running on WordPress.com. I'm using a Business plan so I can better customize the website. https://vladmihalcea.com/wordpress-business-plan/ https://vladmihalcea.com/wordpress-business-plan/
- kranner 6y agoThanks, this is inspirational. Glad to see writing about "a niche in a niche" as you put it in one of your tweets can do so well for an individual author (provided they do it as intelligently as you did).
- vladmihalcea 6y agoI didn't expect much when I started. However, traffic grew over time, and I got to learn more about marketing, so in the end, it turned out to be a good investment.
- swyx 6y agofor those interested in other examples I studied a bunch of them and compiled them into this list for my own book launch https://github.com/sw-yx/launch-cheatsheet https://github.com/sw-yx/launch-cheatsheet I'll be adding this one naturally
- symplee 6y agoVery cool resource. Have you thought about adding the scale of the author's following and/or social media presence? For example, this story's author has 21,000 followers on Twitter, and a successful blog. Another example is 200k in sales https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502770 where the self-publishing author admitted that practically all sales were due to 35,000 Twitter followers. Have you come across an example of a successful book launch where an (unknown) author didn't already have a large following?
- ThePhysicist 6y agoAs another point one could add "Write about a reasonably popular subject and write for beginners". From my own experience of analyzing popular content and people that have successfully built a large follower base (in tech) it seems that almost all of them produce content about subjects that a lot of people are interested in (e.g. Javascript, CSS, web development, basic Unix/Linux functionality) and target mostly beginners.
- pc86 6y agoOnce you find someone willing to put in the level of work required (probably 80% of people simply will not work hard enough to finish), the most common mistake is targeting the advanced/experts in their field. That's great to flesh out your following, but if your goal is revenue, beginners are going to be the key to driving that. That doesn't necessarily mean actual beginners - you can write about microservices architecture for mid-level and advanced software developers, but target those who aren't familiar with microservices. They're beginners in that respect. You'll have 10x the revenue from a "Microservices 101" type product as you will from a product of similar length and quality talking about all the different ways to structure your messaging topics, for example.
- xchaotic 6y agoI consider this a success story similar to an NBA star making it. So if 100k is very successful in terms of computer book revenues, then I’d say money should not be the main motivation to do it, as there’s better, more reliable ways to earn money in the software industry - working for any SP500 company will easily get you the same amount of money in less than a year, more or less guaranteed. I know it’s not either or situation, just that it proves that money should not be main motivator for writing a book.
- scarface74 6y agoI’ll go a step further. I agree going through all of the trouble writing and promoting a book for only a $100K seems like a lot of work. Especially when you consider the risk adjusted return. Anyone that smart could make more than that - guaranteed just by consulting. I’m most familiar with the Apple related ecosystem, but there you see people with a following making a money via optional subscriptions (Accidental Tech Podcast,Upgrade), subscription only podcasts (Dithering by John Gruber and Ben Thompson), or daily newsletters (Ben Thompson). If he is not doing just for the money, then go for it. Another example is John Siracusa of ATP. He wrote large reviews of each version of OS X for the first 10 years that literally took months, did much more than his contract required and admitted that if he actually accounted for every hour he worked on it, it paid much less than minimum wage. One more mention is Horace Deidu. He got his start as an analyst, started podcasting and now hosts paid workshops and conferences.
- vladmihalcea 6y agoThe book made more than 100k as it's still selling pretty well. In fact, the sales have increased over time, even if the book is now 5 years old. I keep on updating it and will release a second edition soon. The marketing effort is not just for the book. It also helps me sell: - video courses - on-site training - online training and workshops - find consulting opportunities - subscription licenses for a software product I created, Hypersistence Optimizer, https://vladmihalcea.com/hypersistence-optimizer/ https://vladmihalcea.com/hypersistence-optimizer/
- dcsilver 6y agoI've bought a handful of software and technology books from O'Reilly and had mixed experiences. One of them - The Art of SEO, feels like a treasure trove of wisdom and experience. Another that I won't name, but is about a popular programming language, feels more or less like like a print copy of the online documentation that's available for free, with very little value-add. Shop with care, and if you're going to write, write with purpose and real value.
- mk000v 6y agoWow! Amazing
- ngcc_hk 6y agoSeems to be genuine. In fact for 1 year whilst $100k is quite a lot but as he said, he may be able to get that in consultancy. But I guess the satisfaction (if successful) would be very different.
- vladmihalcea 6y agoI did't make 100k in one year. It took several years to get to this amount, but it didn't stop there either.
- jashmenn 6y agoThese numbers are possible and repeatable. I've made over $100k on software books at least 7 separate times [1]. If you're going to try to do this, the key idea is to build an audience e.g. an email list. You need to budget 50% of your time to writing the book and 50% of your time to blogging/promoting the content. There's basically three key aspects to making $100k on a programming book: 1. Market - is the topic broad enough to sell $100k in copies? Weak market: Build an Adblocker with Clojure on Arduino Strong market: Complete Guide to D3 2. Offering + guarantee - what does the student get when they buy? Weak offering: my 200-page pdf Strong offering: my 400+page pdf/epub/mobi, 2 hours of video intro, invite to community chat, interviews with experts, support, questions answered by the author, quizzes, and worksheets 3. Promotion Effort Weak promotion: posting 3 times to medium Strong promotion: writing remarkable content, posting weekly, creating downloadable resources, collecting emails - launching to an email list of 10k-100k+ When you hear someone say, "you can't make money in programming books" run their strategy through the filter above. It's no wonder most folks don't make much money, because doing it right is hard. It can take months to build an email list of 10k, but that's how the game works. [shameless self plug] If you're thinking about creating a programming book or a course, this is what I do and I'd love to chat. See here: https://www.newline.co/write-with-us https://www.newline.co/write-with-us [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17015117
- siscia 6y agoHow wide need to be the market? It is useful to focus on a single technology or it can be as wide as a general topic?
- jashmenn 6y agoPeople want to learn what you do at work. Real projects, real code, with usable output. Blog posts tend to teach in an idealized, shallow way - because it's easier to write about and easier to teach. If you, instead, put in the work to show every step, every detail, and every hack that sort of quality is extremely valuable to beginners. So I could say, go look at the Stack Overflow developer survey, or State of X 2020 survey, or Google Trends -- and that will help, for sure. But the most valuable thing you can do is show someone what you /actually/ do at work.
- k__ 6y agoI made over $10k with my first book. Which took me about 3-4 months to write. So I approve.