Writing a Technical Book (experiences and advice)
voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/technical-wr...Posted Jul 15, 2009, 2:43 PM UTC
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voidspace.org.uk
This is a pretty excellent resource and my own experience is similar to the writers. The section on the contract details is quite good. It looks like he went with the wrong publisher.
My advice would be to find an author who you respect (in the same field) and ask them about their experiences with their publisher. I did this and had a great experience.
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This guy's advice is terrible.
Never write a technical book for the money.
You cannot extrapolate this specific failure to all technical books. The best technical books earn the author six figures as OCaml for Scientists has done for me. Hence I am trying to replicate the success with another technical book.
Less people will read my work than if I had put it on the web. Some of my articles are read by tens of thousands of people in a year. Even the less popular ones are read by thousands. I'll consider myself lucky if the book is read by ten thousand people in total.
Number of readers is irrelevant, particularly in the context of technical books where there is more value in having a profound effect on a small number of people (e.g. bioinformaticians).
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There is no reason to buy any of your books. Most of it is false information anyway and marketed with spamming, sock puppets and astroturfing.
Check this out: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/media_center/2009/july/july14b_09.html
In the US a company had caught with astroturfing and had to pay $300000 as penalty.
Harrop, be careful with your US marketing.
Also interesting how you added ?reddit to your links to help your crappy software to list how many clicks to your advertisements on Reddit you got:
http: // www.ffconsultancy.com / products / fsharp_for_technical_computing / ?reddit
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Do you really think that stalking me on Reddit, posting libellous accusations whilst hiding behind anonymity is the moral high ground?
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yeah, let's talk about your libellous postings. When will you stop them?
Harrop, you will never more sell any book to the FP community by spreading lies.
Also, stop stalking the FP community.
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yeah, let's talk about your libellous postings. When will you stop them?
What libellous postings?
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Don't do it for the money.
That's the best advice you're going to get.
Another bit of advice: Just publish online, by yourself. You won't have to put up with publisher bullshit (MS Word templates? Seriously?) and it'll give you just as much credibility as publishing with some 3rd rate house. (Of course, if you can strike a decent deal with O'Reilly the situation is different.)
O'Reilly's standard contract is 10% of the wholesale price, an uncalculable amount of electronic versions, either Word or DocBook XML, 90 days until royalty payments, and mysterious royalty chargebacks. Their production process has never worked smoothly for me. They make you do most of the marketing (Hey, want to write an article promoting your book, for free?).
At least they don't make you write the index. Their illustrators are good too.
Good advice. Alternatively: publish online and offer print versions through a print-on-demand service.
Why when there are plenty of small publishing houses that will handle editing, formatting, and promoting for you? Just concentrate on the content and let them handle the grunt work.
-- This has been an unpaid advertisement for InfoQ, which publishes books on .NET, Java, Ruby, Agile, and Architecture. If you are interesting in writing on any of these topics please contact me at [email protected] (I really need the commission, Visual Studio is expensive).
Because authors want 100% of the money they earned instead of 10%?
We offer 70%. Anyone offering you 10 is a rip-off artist.
I would go one step further and say: don't do it, period.
Instead, publish it online, in a format that can be easily indexed by search engines, which hyperlinks related topics, etc.
If you must, put some ads around it and you'll probably make about as much as from the book.
This kind of purpose is basically what the internet was invented for.
My experience with "Dive Into Python" does not support that conclusion. I ran Adsense ads on diveintopython.org for 27 months and made a grand total of $1559.30. (I had to stop when Google hired me.) By contrast, Apress paid me a $6000 advance to finish writing it and prep it for print, and they've since paid me an additional ~$4000 in royalties after the book earned out.
YMMV.
Edited to add: the original linked article is excellent, and all aspiring authors should read it.