It is difficult to overestimate the success of the book " Designing Data-Intensive Applications ", which was published in Russian translation and is invariably reprinted here under the title " Highly loaded applications "
Not so long ago, the author posted on his blog an honest and detailed post about how he was given the work on this book, how much she allowed to earn, and how, apart from money, is measured the benefit of copyright work. This publication is a must-read for anyone who has ever thought of becoming a
We read with pleasure!
The first hundred thousand copies of my book, High Load Applications, were recently sold . Last year, my book was the second best selling book in the entire O'Reilly catalog, behind only Aurelien Geron's book on machine learning. Machine learning is undoubtedly a very hot topic, so the second place in this case suits me quite well.
I didn't expect the book to be so successful; I expected it to be somewhat niche, so I set a goal for myself to sell 10,000 copies before the book was out of date. Having exceeded this bar ten times, I decided to look back and remember how it was. The fast was not planned to be overly narcissistic; I set out to tell you what the business aspect of writing is.
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Most books make very little money for both the author and the publisher, but sometimes a book like Harry Potter appears. If you are going to write a book, I highly recommend assuming that your future royalties will be close to zero. It’s the same as if you gather a musical group with friends and hope that the glory of rock stars awaits you. It's difficult to predict in advance what will hit and what will fail. Maybe this concerns technical books to a lesser extent than fiction and music, but I suspect that even among technical books there are very few hits, and most are sold in very modest circulations.
With that said, I'm happy to report that in retrospect, my book has proven to be a financially profitable project. This graph shows the royalties I've received since the book went on sale:
For the first 2½ years, the book was in “early release” (drafts): I was still working on it, and we were implementing it in unedited form, chapter by chapter when ready, only in ebook format. Then, in March 2017, the book was officially published and the print edition went on sale. Since then, sales have fluctuated month-on-month, but have remained remarkably stable overall. At some point, I began to expect that the market was about to become saturated (that is, most of those who wanted to buy the book will get it), but so far this, apparently, has not happened: moreover, at the end of 2018 sales have grown noticeably (I don't know why). The x axis ends in July 2020 as it takes a couple of months after the sale until the deductions are credited to my account.
According to the contract, I receive 25% of the publisher's revenue from e-book sales, online access and licensing, as well as 10% from printed book sales and 5% from translation royalties. This is a percentage of the wholesale price paid by retailers / distributors to the publisher, that is, it does not include retail markup. The numbers in this section are royalties paid to me after the retailer and publisher took their share, but before taxes.
From the outset, total sales were (in USD):
- Printed Book: 68,763 copies, royalties $ 161,549 ($ 2.35 / copy)
- E-book: 33,420 copies, royalties $ 169,350 ($ 5.07 / copy)
- Online access on the O'Reilly website: royalties $ 110,069 (I don't know how many times the book was read through this channel)
- Translations: 5,896 copies, royalties $ 8,278 ($ 1.40 / copy)
- : $34 600
- : 108 079 , $477 916
Lots of money, but how much time did I put into it! I believe that I spent about 2.5 years of full-time full time working on the book and related research - over 4 years. From this period, I spent a whole year (2014-2015) working on the book, without any income, and the rest of the time I managed to combine the preparation of the book with part-time work.
Now, in retrospect, it is clear that these 2.5 years were not wasted, since the income that this job brought me is of the same order as the salary of a programmer from Silicon Valley, which I could have received if I had not left from LinkedIn in 2014 to work on a book. But of course I couldn't have foreseen it! The royalties could well be 10 times less, and such a prospect would be much less attractive from a financial point of view.
Not royalty alone
Part of the success of my book can be attributed to the fact that I spent a lot of effort to promote it. Since the book was in early release, I have read almost 50 talks at major conferences, plus I have many more “invited” talks at companies and universities. In each of these speeches, I advertised my book at least in passing. I was acting like a rock musician going on tour with the presentation of a new album, and I suspect it was thanks to these performances that the book became widely known. A couple of posts on my blog turned out to be quite popular, they probably also attracted the attention of potential readers to the book. At the present time, I give much less lectures, therefore, I believe that information about the book is distributed mainly through word of mouth (in social networks; readers recommend the book to colleagues).
By combining lectures and book promotion, he has managed to become recognizable in the community and build himself a good reputation in this area. I receive many more invitations to speak at various conferences than I can really accept. By themselves, such speeches are not a source of income (at good industry conferences, speakers are usually paid for travel and accommodation, but the speeches themselves are rarely paid), however, such a reputation is useful as an advertisement - they turn to you as a consultant.
I did quite a bit of consulting (and today I regularly reject such requests from different companies, since I focus on my research), but I suspect that in the current situation it would not be difficult for me to create a profitable consulting and training business - to contact companies and help them to solve data infrastructure problems. You are recognized as a reputable specialist and expert in the industry, and companies are willing to pay good money to consult such experts.
I've paid so much attention to the financial viability of copyright work because I find books to be an extremely useful educational resource (more on this below). I want as many people as possible to write their books, which means that such work should be a self-sufficient activity.
I was able to spend a lot of time on research searches related to the book, because I could afford to live a whole year without a paycheck, and many such pleasure is not available. If people could get decent pay for the preparation of educational materials, then there would be more and more good literature of this kind.
The book is an accessible educational resource
Not only can a book be of great financial benefit; this kind of work has many other advantages.
The book is universally accessible: Almost anyone, all over the world, can afford to buy a book. It is incomparably cheaper than a university course or corporate training; you don't have to travel to another city to use the book. People living in rural areas or in developing countries can read books with the same reward as those living in global technology centers. You can simply flip through the book or study it from cover to cover, whatever you like. You don't even need an Internet connection to read the book. Of course, in some ways the book is inferior to university education, for example, it does not give individual feedback, does not allow establishing professional contacts, socializing. But as a medium of knowledge transfer, the book is almost undeniably effective.
There are, of course, many other online resources: Wikipedia, blogs, videos, Stack Overflow, API documentation, research articles, etc. They are good as a reference for answering specific questions (for example, "what are the parameters of the function foo?"), But, in fact, such information is piecewise, and these fragments are difficult to structure for a complete education. On the other hand, a well-written book provides a neat and thoughtful curriculum and narrative that is especially valuable when trying to conceptualize a complex topic for the first time.
The book scales immeasurably better than live sessions. Even if, for the rest of my career, I lectured in the largest amphitheater of my university, I would not have covered 100,000 people. The gap is even wider for private and small group lessons. But the book allows you to reach such a wide audience without much difficulty.
Provide More Use Than Receive
When you write a book, you are doing more value than you receive . To confirm this, I will try to roughly assess the benefits that my book brought.
Let's say that out of 100,000 people who have already bought my book, two-thirds are going to read it, but have not yet got their hands on it. Further, suppose that a third of those who have already read it were able to apply some of the ideas outlined in the book, and the rest read it purely for fun.
So let's take a conservative estimate: 10% of those who bought the book were able to benefit from it.
What could be such a benefit? In the case of my book, this benefit lies mainly in making the right architectural decisions when creating data warehouses. If you do this work properly, you can create even cooler systems, and if you make a mistake, then you can get out of the mess you have driven yourself into for years.
This metric is difficult to quantify, but let's assume that a reader who applied ideas from my book was able to avoid a bad decision that would take a real man-month to fix . Consequently, 10,000 readers who applied this knowledge freed up about 10,000 person-months or 833 person-years, which they managed to spend on things that were much more useful than extricating themselves from the mess.
If I spent 2.5 years working on a book, which saved other people a total of 833 years of time, then I got more than 300 times the return on my work. Assuming the average salary for a programmer is $ 100k per year, the value provided by the book is $ 80m. Readers spent roughly $ 4m buying these 100,000 books, so the value added is 20 times higher than the value acquired. Moreover, I will note once again that these are very cautious assessments.
The book brings far more than just the benefits discussed above. For example, many readers confessed to me that, thanks to my book, they successfully passed an interview, found a dream job, and provided financial security for their family. I don't know how to measure this value, but I think it is colossal.
conclusions
Writing a technical book is not easy, but a good technical book is:
- valuable (helps people do their jobs better),
- scales (a huge number of people can benefit from the book),
- accessible (to almost everyone) and
- economically feasible (you can make good money on this).
It would be interesting to compare this work with open source development - another type of activity that is very useful, but hardly monetized . I don't have a clear opinion on this yet.
It should be noted that writing a book is really difficult, at least if you want to do it well. For me, it was comparable in complexity to developing and selling a startup , and in the process of working I went through more than one existential crisis. I cannot say that this process had a beneficial effect on my mental health. Therefore, I am in no hurry to get down to the next book: the scars from the first are still too fresh. But the scars are slowly fading and I hope (perhaps a little naively) that the next time things will go easier.
In the end, I think writing a technical book is worthwhile. The feeling that you have helped a lot of people is very inspiring. Also, such work gives significant personal growth. Also, there is no better way to learn something than by explaining it to others.