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Well done. That's a respectable number of sales for your first year! The economics of self publishing is interesting. When I think back on my first book I coun
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Well done. That's a respectable number of sales for your first year!
The economics of self publishing is interesting. When I think back on
my first book I count at least 5 years research that enabled me to be
able to write it, 3 years writing it and then many years selling the
thing around industry. By a pessimistic account I was about £500k
down :) Like you, the first year I sold about 500. Unlike online
fulfilment today, I spent that time stuffing envelopes, staring at a
slowly shrinking pile of boxes in the corner of my study, printing
labels, with occasional trips to the post-office. It was actually
work, and many times I thought 'this is crazy'. It doubled for two
more years until dealing with the orders actually became too much
(while doing a "real job").
On the other hand, it got me a string of well paying jobs, established
me as the go-to consultant in a niche, invitations to talk and teach
all around the world, and basically transformed my career. So putting
a "net profit" number to it seems unfathomable. Each book you write,
if researched from scratch, is kinda equivalent to a PhD.
What happened next is that I sold the title, from my own publishing
company to a large publisher (MIT). Publishers don't take many risks
these days, but they will buy a book that already has reasonable
number of sales as a going concern. The advantage is that all
mechanics and business is suddenly off your hands. Without an advance
to pay back you then have a modest income stream and time to write the
next book.
Another effect of being a semi-professional writer, as a side gig, is
that other people want to pay you to edit, typeset, and review
works. Learning LaTeX and various markups and text processing tools
has been a huge gift. That can be quite fun if you're in a vibrant
field that genuinely interests you. And you don't have to be
associated with academia or a big-name institution for that to
work. In fact I'd say that academics these days never have time for
writing and that most other successful authors I know are independent.
I hope your book takes off even more, but right now I think you can
count 600 sales in the first year as a definite success!
- smilespray 4y agoI just bought your sound design book. Looks very interesting!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- reitzensteinm 4y agoOh hey, I own that book! It felt to me like SICP for sound. I'm curious what kind of projects it led to you consulting for?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago> It felt to me like SICP for sound. As a lisper at heart (amateur Racketeer) who had SICP as my grad text that's the nicest complement imaginable. Thank you so much. > I'm curious what kind of projects it led to you consulting for? Creative media, games, interactive sound software mostly.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago> In fact I'd say that academics these days never have time for writing and that most other successful authors I know are independent. That’s a weird thing to say, academic careers revolve around writing. On the other hand, their output isn’t in book form nor aimed at more general audiences. They do author some books sometimes, but maybe more like textbooks. There is a lot of “write what will sell” thought that goes into being a successful author, academics are less immune to that (they still have to do research that will sell to funding agencies and write papers that they can “sell” to peer reviewers). I was asked to write book (for commercial selling) awhile ago and during exploration found the process a bit off putting (ultimately decided I didn’t really have anything to contribute). I began to look at a lot of books on the shelve in the programming section in a very different mode cynical light afterwards, a lot of books were equivalent to clickbait (timely on hot topics, but of very low quality and not contributing much to the field). There are still gems, but a reader has to be very discerning these days and not buy on title alone. I enjoy academic papers more, but even in a highly rated conference proceedings, you have to watch out for academic clickbait.
- behnamoh 4y ago> I enjoy academic papers more, but even in a highly rated conference proceedings, you have to watch out for academic clickbait. Many ML papers are actually clickbait. If not, they're mostly suffering from robustness checks. See the ML section here: https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-not-to-read-scientific-papers-3ae5f26b1b7f https://medium.com/@parttimeben/how-not-to-read-scientific-p...
- nonrandomstring 4y ago> academic clickbait. I like that term, it's quite astute. Yes, there's definitely topics that have no longevity like "Y2K survival guide" or things tied to specific hardware. But it's hard to tell. Occam and the Transputer seemed like the future once... and who knows... we studied it at university under "concurrency and parallelism" in the 80s, but then I never heard of it again until last week, it just came to mind because I saw an article about doing it with Raspberry-Pis. Likely a dozen books on "Living in the Metaverse" are being funded right now, and will be doorstops and firelighters in no time. Btw, I say academics don't have time to write because they're overwhelmed with pointless admin.
- strzibny 4y agoThanks a lot and for sharing your inspiring story :)
- jimbokun 4y ago> Each book you write, if researched from scratch, is kinda equivalent to a PhD. That's an interesting perspective. A PhD Thesis is basically a book length manifestation of original work. Which should apply to any book worth publishing, too.