3 ms·
the technical book writing no longer makes financial sense to me these days, unless you wrote them to become well known domain expert and possibly get more lead
by synergy20 4y ago
the technical book writing no longer makes financial sense to me these days, unless you wrote them to become well known domain expert and possibly get more leads for future profit, and you don't care about how much you can make directly from the books sale.
I think a viable approach is:
1. publish your book in e-format, it will be pirated but only those who paid will get continuous update such as new contents added, errata fixes etc easily and regularly.
2. offer a print-on-demand service for those who prefers to have a printed version.
3. offer a pay-me-later link to those who read it without pay(e.g. pirated version), later realize your writing indeed helped them so much to the point they want to "tip" you for a sense of rightness.
- randomcatuser 4y agoThis reminds me of serialized novels (new content every month?). Maybe that'll be the way, in the future!
- sealeck 4y agoThat's effectively a substack rather than a book though, and incentivises unfortunate habits (only providing morsels of information in each installment to encourage people to buy more, and dragging the book out).
- walterbell 4y agoA proven approach is Michael Hartl's (@mhartl) Rails tutorial, which has grossed multiple six figures with the entire content free to read online, plus upgrades for DRM-free PDF, videos and print. That's well more than 10X the average return on technical books.