Tech books will not make you rich
Posted 2008-03-01 06:14 AMI have always wondered how much money authors of text books bring in for their efforts. According to Peter Cooper, author of Beginning Ruby from Apress, the answer is not much.
I will leave the details up to the site but apparently the money he has been bringing in is not enough to live on for even the best quarter, but perhaps a nice bump to regular income.
Ruby is popular and Apress is a great publisher. I buy books from Apress often. This book is probably a good seller compared to the more relatively unknown niche areas of development. Peter’s insights are enough to turn me off to the idea of ever writing a tech book.
I am not sure why anyone would even go through the effort. Perhaps boasting about literally writing the book on Ruby might be good for consulting prospects but that seems to be a lot of effort for little return. But then, so is college and at least he actually got paid for the book.
Much thanks to Peter for sharing this.
John Fuller
Green Onion, thanks for the information. There is so much about this industry that I had known absolutely nothing about.
Green Onion
A comment from a published author and former associate of a literary agency focused on technical books:
Many, probably most books do not earn back their advance (the $ paid to the author at the start of the project). They have to earn back that initial investment in order to generate royalties for the author. Book contracts commonly contain complex gotchas (returns, book club sales, various rights assignments etc.) that reduce the $ the author could earn. An agent can help negotiate out the gotchas; however, the agent is paid with a percentage of revenues from the advance and royalties (if any), likely forever, even if the agent performs no services after the book contract is signed. And because bookselling is a consignment business, books purchased by retailers but not sold are returned for credit, further eating into possible profits. E-book hardware and software platforms have to be strengthened to make them alternatives to this system.