Many of my coworkers have done it... I've had people ask me to do it... so far I have
avoided it...
Should I write a book?
The question I have asked myself is why would I?
To get money
To get fame
To educate people
To get advancement
Money: From everyone I know that has written a book they are a loose
loose situation. They consume an amazing amount of time and you never make any significant
money beyond your initial advance. Even the most popular books will only make you
a trivial amount, and the reality is that most books loose money.
Fame: The glory of having everyone know you... hmm... I guess if
your book is seen as the definitive reference you can gain some fame, but again, most
books sit on a shelf, rarely do you get any real fame. Oh, and if the book sucks (since
I'm not a professional author, we can make this assumption) they you can negative
fame for being a self-promoting know-nothing.
Education: The pure goal of educating customers - giving them a quality
resource that can make them more productive. A worthy goal.
Advancement: Working with customers, educating them, and getting
some amount of fame can help with career advancement. It will give you an entry into
the conference circuit, which can also help. Spending your free cycles on a for-profit
book can actually hurt you though - basically if you had all this free time why weren't
you working on the product? We'll call advancement a wash.
OK, so we have:
Money: -1
Fame: -1
Education: 1
Advancement: 0
Total == -1
Combined with my lack of writing skills means... I'm still not going to write a book...
Writing is also a great way to learn something, paradoxically. Not that you need to be instructed in, say, XAML, but nothing quite clarifies things or helps you see the user perspective like having to write about it for someone else. As for writing skills and your supposed lack thereof, 1) you underestimate yourself and 2) want to get better at something? Practice. :-)
mike | http://www.mikepope.com/blog/
01/21/2004 1:21 AM
His chart is absolutely correct though. The people that end up writing books apply a 2 or 3 to education. They appreciate teaching others enough that it outweighs all of the other negatives of pushing a book out there.
Every time I write a new book, I hate it. I dislike the book because I know stuff that should be in the book that isn't because I don't have the time or pages to write it.
I still write books because I don't have the power to change things in my position. I don't work directly on the teams that are making the decisions and breathing life into the APIs. Chris has the unique opportunity to work directly with the API and educate users by providing them with an excellent base to program from. I think that is more rewarding than it would be to write a book about it.
Heh, I think we could apply this same thinking to "why weblog?"
By the way, I know a few people who +have+ made money off of books. But, it's a binary thing and most don't make money. (One guy I was talking to today made more than a million off of his Windows series of books).
There's one more factor I would add to this, but the score you would assign to it is going to vary a lot from one person to another. It is: the fun of explaining things!
This may sounds similar to your reason (3), but it isn't quite the same thing - it's arguably a rather less worthy goal than educating for the sake of educating. Some people find the activity of producing a good explanation intrinsically satisfying. I love it when I nail an explanation. I prefer to do this face to face, because you get to see the change in someone's expression when they get it (and you get find out whether you did explain it well - feedback often comes too late with writing), but I'm happy to use any medium available to me.
So I teach, speak at conferences, write books, write the odd magazine article, write copiously on various mailing lists (and equally verbosely in private email) and, more recently, I finally got around to starting a blog. I would be fibbing if I claimed that I was doing all these things entirely because of an altruistic desire to educate others... The truth is that I really enjoy it!
So that would be:
5. Writing for the sheer joy of writing: +10
So even though my first book is selling pretty slowly, and my second book only slightly better, I'm in the process of writing a third, for no better reason than that my publisher provided me with the opportunity. And I don't expect to make minimum wage on this one either! (It'll be on Avalon, as it happens. So I guess I should really be trying to discourage you from writing one - just buy mine when I'm done. ;-) )
To be the nit-picky editor-type guy with the red pen and the condescending glare, you might want to look up the definitions of "lose" and "loose." A book will generally never "loose" money, unless you're using bills as bookmarks. I think there's a law of nature that you can never talk about writing without making some kind of language error in the process.
As for writing a book, I'd say go for it. You're in a rather unique position from which to expound upon all that is Avalon and better communicate the why's of the architecture to folks outside your daily sphere of influence. I'd be very interested to read about why you chose to do one thing over another, or why certain things are they way they are.
Besides, there's always an online errata and subsequent publishings for all the little mistakes that slip through.. ;)
I think there is another reason to write a book. A book is a brainchild - a creation. The desire to create is something that is innate in every human being, but programmers and architects in particular are very much in-tune with this primal desire. At times we get butterflies in our stomachs when we discover a new possibility or a warm smile overtakes our faces when we've created something that pleases us. To create is divine. Now, if you can create a work that makes you smile when you look at it - not because it's perfect or likely to win a prize - but because it imparts knowledge and shares an elegant way of solving a problem or clearly elucidates a difficult topic then you should by all means write something. You are also in a wonderful position to really write something worthwhile for Windows developers. You are not only an accomplished architect in your own right, but you have the good fortune of knowing many of the great minds in our industry. I, for one, would run out and buy a collaborative work from the creme de la creme of the blogspace...
It's hard to imagine authors don't make money on tech books. They are so expensive you'd think they were all millionaires. Someone has to be making a lot of money on these.
Ray Jezek | http://blogs.geekdojo.net/jez
01/21/2004 1:23 PM
I agree mostly with Chris' analysis, though I came to a different conclusion. You can count on a book taking anywhere from 200 to 400 (or more) hours. That's 5 to 10 weeks of work full-time, and that's if you're reasonably good at writing and you know most of the details.
The money isn't great. Most royalties are in the range of 10-15% of the wholesale price (on tech books). So, if you have a $40 book and you sell 5000 copies, your royalties would be $10,000 at 10%.
If it took you 400 hours, that's $25/hour. Okay money, though if it takes you 1000 hours, it drops to only $10/hour.
For most people, finding that kind of time outside of work is pretty difficult.
Eric Gunnerson
01/22/2004 3:54 AM
Lots of people have asked me about the process and the economics of writing so here are my observations after five years.
Money. Books are not really about making money. It is entirely possible that you will write a God book like Don's Essential COM, David Flanagan's Java In A Nutshell, or Pro ASP 3.0 which keep selling and selling but many don't. Still, it isn't all a lose lose situation. At the very least, we keep our advance for the book if it utterly bombs. Usually, this is around $5000. Regular joes like ourselves get royalties off the net profit of a book, usually starting around 10% and going up the more books we sell. The book market has been a dog since 2000 but is coming on strong this year as companies and developers are finding their way back into funding development. And that includes buying books.
Chris has a nice bargaining chip though to get more up front and more royalties because he is essentially, the face of Avalon. Slightly less pretty than Andie MacDowell as the face of Revlon though. He is already counted as the go-to guy for this technology. That's why his blog is in the Top 100 visited in 2003. That means he can barter because he knows and the publishers know that his name will sell books or at least generate a lot of interest in them, much like Don's does. The best deal I heard of was a $10k advance and 17% royalty for a Linux book. It won't make you richer than God, but it's a start.
Fame \ Advancement. Books aren't about fame, but you can certainly raise your profile with a few good books. Case in point: Alex Homer and Dave Sussman are probably regarded as the perennially great authors on ASP and ASP.NET. But they write and speak a few times a year and that's it.
Somehow, I think Chris' blog, and his presentations at MSDN and PDC with Don have taken you up beyond where a book would go. On the other hand, neither or those two will make you any cash. A book does.
Education. If you're going to write a book, it should be for the write (sic) reasons and in this industry, one of the best ones is because you know your subject really well and you want to share that experience and those tips and tricks you find you use every day. If you like, it's giving something back to the community, because it has supported you. Beyond those four ideas that Chris mentions, there are other less monetary rewards too. There's the undoubted pleasure of seeing the whole thing in print on your doorstep fresh from the printer, seeing people buy it in Borders and once in a while, even complimenting you on it. You actually teach yourself more about the code as well - if you can't explain to yourself what you're doing, how will you manage it for others? While you're writing it, there are the click moments, when you know you've got something written down just right (and that editor better not change it or else!!), when you finish a section or a chapter or a really cool piece of code.
If you're looking at writing a book purely as a financial exercise I would say stop right now unless you can negotiate a really good deal. Books always take more time than you ever expect and only on very rare occasions do you ever get done everything that you want to include. As Douglas Adams said, "I love the sound of deadlines as they whoosh past." Do it because you want to.
Personally, if Chris wanted to write a book but didn't have the time, I'd help ghostwrite it.
For those querying the profitability of books. Firstly royalties are generally a percentage of NET, not gross. That's why we aren't all rolling in money. The publsher gets most of it.
Secondly it's quite easy for a book to lose money. Consider a $5000 advance. The publisher has to pay reviewers, staff to edit, index, proof, etc, layout the book, have it printed and distributed. That's a lot of up front costs. If the book doesn't sell in enough quantities then that money simply isn't recouped. Sales figures often skew this. Advance sales are often good, but stores buy on a sale or return basis. If books don't sell they just ship them back to the publisher and ask for a refund. Money is held back from royalties to cover returns.
The advance is intended to give the author enough money to live on while writing - it rarely is, even in the fiction world (apart from the JK Rowling's of this world). The advance is just that - an advance on royalties. Thus you don't get additional royalties until enough books have sold to cover the advance. Many books don't earn out the advance (even fiction books).
Oh, and this isn't a defence for publishers and pricing, or a sympathy call.
Don't do things for Money and Fame--they are fleeting. Do things for good, wholesome reasons. In fact, if you throw Money and Fame out of your little evaluation, you come out at +1. Get cracking on that book!
Curt | amotif.com
01/30/2004 9:32 AM
My $0.02
Personally, I haven't made a ton of money on my books. Part of that is intentional because the material I've written isn't of a general nature (like CIL ;) ), so I know they won't be big sellers. Part of it could be that I just don't write well! But right now, the book market is not great, and I rarely buy a computer book myself (the only time I do is if it a high-quality book on a topic that I need a lot of information on that I can't find on the Internet). I'd love to continue writing books in the future as I really do enjoy writing, but my concerns are that they don't pay off in the end financially as much as I would like.
The key to writing books (or, really, just writing in general) is that you love it. If the financial awards end up being that you can build your dream house, so much the better ;)
To write a book?
Many of my coworkers have done it... I've had people ask me to do it... so far I have avoided it...
Should I write a book?
The question I have asked myself is why would I?
Money: From everyone I know that has written a book they are a loose loose situation. They consume an amazing amount of time and you never make any significant money beyond your initial advance. Even the most popular books will only make you a trivial amount, and the reality is that most books loose money.
Fame: The glory of having everyone know you... hmm... I guess if your book is seen as the definitive reference you can gain some fame, but again, most books sit on a shelf, rarely do you get any real fame. Oh, and if the book sucks (since I'm not a professional author, we can make this assumption) they you can negative fame for being a self-promoting know-nothing.
Education: The pure goal of educating customers - giving them a quality resource that can make them more productive. A worthy goal.
Advancement: Working with customers, educating them, and getting some amount of fame can help with career advancement. It will give you an entry into the conference circuit, which can also help. Spending your free cycles on a for-profit book can actually hurt you though - basically if you had all this free time why weren't you working on the product? We'll call advancement a wash.
OK, so we have:
Combined with my lack of writing skills means... I'm still not going to write a book...
11:17 PM | #Software
01/21/2004 12:55 AM
Writing is also a great way to learn something, paradoxically. Not that you need to be instructed in, say, XAML, but nothing quite clarifies things or helps you see the user perspective like having to write about it for someone else. As for writing skills and your supposed lack thereof, 1) you underestimate yourself and 2) want to get better at something? Practice. :-)mike | http://www.mikepope.com/blog/
01/21/2004 1:21 AM
His chart is absolutely correct though. The people that end up writing books apply a 2 or 3 to education. They appreciate teaching others enough that it outweighs all of the other negatives of pushing a book out there.Every time I write a new book, I hate it. I dislike the book because I know stuff that should be in the book that isn't because I don't have the time or pages to write it.
I still write books because I don't have the power to change things in my position. I don't work directly on the teams that are making the decisions and breathing life into the APIs. Chris has the unique opportunity to work directly with the API and educate users by providing them with an excellent base to program from. I think that is more rewarding than it would be to write a book about it.
Justin Rogers | http://weblogs.asp.net/justin_rogers | JustinAT NOSPAMGames4dotnet dot com
01/21/2004 2:06 AM
Heh, I think we could apply this same thinking to "why weblog?"By the way, I know a few people who +have+ made money off of books. But, it's a binary thing and most don't make money. (One guy I was talking to today made more than a million off of his Windows series of books).
Robert Scoble | http://scoble.weblogs.com | robertscobleAT NOSPAMhotmail dot com
01/21/2004 4:44 AM
There's one more factor I would add to this, but the score you would assign to it is going to vary a lot from one person to another. It is: the fun of explaining things!This may sounds similar to your reason (3), but it isn't quite the same thing - it's arguably a rather less worthy goal than educating for the sake of educating. Some people find the activity of producing a good explanation intrinsically satisfying. I love it when I nail an explanation. I prefer to do this face to face, because you get to see the change in someone's expression when they get it (and you get find out whether you did explain it well - feedback often comes too late with writing), but I'm happy to use any medium available to me.
So I teach, speak at conferences, write books, write the odd magazine article, write copiously on various mailing lists (and equally verbosely in private email) and, more recently, I finally got around to starting a blog. I would be fibbing if I claimed that I was doing all these things entirely because of an altruistic desire to educate others... The truth is that I really enjoy it!
So that would be:
5. Writing for the sheer joy of writing: +10
So even though my first book is selling pretty slowly, and my second book only slightly better, I'm in the process of writing a third, for no better reason than that my publisher provided me with the opportunity. And I don't expect to make minimum wage on this one either! (It'll be on Avalon, as it happens. So I guess I should really be trying to discourage you from writing one - just buy mine when I'm done. ;-) )
Ian Griffiths | http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/ | igriffithsAT NOSPAMdevelop dot com
01/21/2004 5:58 AM
To be the nit-picky editor-type guy with the red pen and the condescending glare, you might want to look up the definitions of "lose" and "loose." A book will generally never "loose" money, unless you're using bills as bookmarks. I think there's a law of nature that you can never talk about writing without making some kind of language error in the process.As for writing a book, I'd say go for it. You're in a rather unique position from which to expound upon all that is Avalon and better communicate the why's of the architecture to folks outside your daily sphere of influence. I'd be very interested to read about why you chose to do one thing over another, or why certain things are they way they are.
Besides, there's always an online errata and subsequent publishings for all the little mistakes that slip through.. ;)
Ben Lowery | http://www.blowery.org/ | wanna-be-editorAT NOSPAMblowery dot org
01/21/2004 6:02 AM
I think there is another reason to write a book. A book is a brainchild - a creation. The desire to create is something that is innate in every human being, but programmers and architects in particular are very much in-tune with this primal desire. At times we get butterflies in our stomachs when we discover a new possibility or a warm smile overtakes our faces when we've created something that pleases us. To create is divine. Now, if you can create a work that makes you smile when you look at it - not because it's perfect or likely to win a prize - but because it imparts knowledge and shares an elegant way of solving a problem or clearly elucidates a difficult topic then you should by all means write something. You are also in a wonderful position to really write something worthwhile for Windows developers. You are not only an accomplished architect in your own right, but you have the good fortune of knowing many of the great minds in our industry. I, for one, would run out and buy a collaborative work from the creme de la creme of the blogspace...Christian Romney | www.xml-blog.com | lechonsazoAT NOSPAMhotmail dot com
01/21/2004 7:44 AM
It's hard to imagine authors don't make money on tech books. They are so expensive you'd think they were all millionaires. Someone has to be making a lot of money on these.Ray Jezek | http://blogs.geekdojo.net/jez
01/21/2004 1:23 PM
I agree mostly with Chris' analysis, though I came to a different conclusion. You can count on a book taking anywhere from 200 to 400 (or more) hours. That's 5 to 10 weeks of work full-time, and that's if you're reasonably good at writing and you know most of the details.The money isn't great. Most royalties are in the range of 10-15% of the wholesale price (on tech books). So, if you have a $40 book and you sell 5000 copies, your royalties would be $10,000 at 10%.
If it took you 400 hours, that's $25/hour. Okay money, though if it takes you 1000 hours, it drops to only $10/hour.
For most people, finding that kind of time outside of work is pretty difficult.
Eric Gunnerson
01/22/2004 3:54 AM
Lots of people have asked me about the process and the economics of writing so here are my observations after five years.Money. Books are not really about making money. It is entirely possible that you will write a God book like Don's Essential COM, David Flanagan's Java In A Nutshell, or Pro ASP 3.0 which keep selling and selling but many don't. Still, it isn't all a lose lose situation. At the very least, we keep our advance for the book if it utterly bombs. Usually, this is around $5000. Regular joes like ourselves get royalties off the net profit of a book, usually starting around 10% and going up the more books we sell. The book market has been a dog since 2000 but is coming on strong this year as companies and developers are finding their way back into funding development. And that includes buying books.
Chris has a nice bargaining chip though to get more up front and more royalties because he is essentially, the face of Avalon. Slightly less pretty than Andie MacDowell as the face of Revlon though. He is already counted as the go-to guy for this technology. That's why his blog is in the Top 100 visited in 2003. That means he can barter because he knows and the publishers know that his name will sell books or at least generate a lot of interest in them, much like Don's does. The best deal I heard of was a $10k advance and 17% royalty for a Linux book. It won't make you richer than God, but it's a start.
Fame \ Advancement. Books aren't about fame, but you can certainly raise your profile with a few good books. Case in point: Alex Homer and Dave Sussman are probably regarded as the perennially great authors on ASP and ASP.NET. But they write and speak a few times a year and that's it.
Somehow, I think Chris' blog, and his presentations at MSDN and PDC with Don have taken you up beyond where a book would go. On the other hand, neither or those two will make you any cash. A book does.
Education. If you're going to write a book, it should be for the write (sic) reasons and in this industry, one of the best ones is because you know your subject really well and you want to share that experience and those tips and tricks you find you use every day. If you like, it's giving something back to the community, because it has supported you.
Beyond those four ideas that Chris mentions, there are other less monetary rewards too. There's the undoubted pleasure of seeing the whole thing in print on your doorstep fresh from the printer, seeing people buy it in Borders and once in a while, even complimenting you on it. You actually teach yourself more about the code as well - if you can't explain to yourself what you're doing, how will you manage it for others? While you're writing it, there are the click moments, when you know you've got something written down just right (and that editor better not change it or else!!), when you finish a section or a chapter or a really cool piece of code.
If you're looking at writing a book purely as a financial exercise I would say stop right now unless you can negotiate a really good deal. Books always take more time than you ever expect and only on very rare occasions do you ever get done everything that you want to include. As Douglas Adams said, "I love the sound of deadlines as they whoosh past." Do it because you want to.
Personally, if Chris wanted to write a book but didn't have the time, I'd help ghostwrite it.
Dan Maharry | http://www.hmobius.com/notes/ | danmAT NOSPAMhmobius dot com
01/22/2004 6:45 AM
For those querying the profitability of books. Firstly royalties are generally a percentage of NET, not gross. That's why we aren't all rolling in money. The publsher gets most of it.Secondly it's quite easy for a book to lose money. Consider a $5000 advance. The publisher has to pay reviewers, staff to edit, index, proof, etc, layout the book, have it printed and distributed. That's a lot of up front costs. If the book doesn't sell in enough quantities then that money simply isn't recouped. Sales figures often skew this. Advance sales are often good, but stores buy on a sale or return basis. If books don't sell they just ship them back to the publisher and ask for a refund. Money is held back from royalties to cover returns.
The advance is intended to give the author enough money to live on while writing - it rarely is, even in the fiction world (apart from the JK Rowling's of this world). The advance is just that - an advance on royalties. Thus you don't get additional royalties until enough books have sold to cover the advance. Many books don't earn out the advance (even fiction books).
Oh, and this isn't a defence for publishers and pricing, or a sympathy call.
Dave Sussman | http://daveandal.net/ | davidsAT NOSPAMipona dot com
01/22/2004 10:46 AM
And it's "lose lose" not "loose loose" which I would imagine to mean something entirely different. :)Rick Eames | mailto:rickeameAT NOSPAMmicrosoft dot com | rickeameAT NOSPAMmicrosoft dot com
01/27/2004 2:40 PM
Don't do things for Money and Fame--they are fleeting. Do things for good, wholesome reasons. In fact, if you throw Money and Fame out of your little evaluation, you come out at +1. Get cracking on that book!Curt | amotif.com
01/30/2004 9:32 AM
My $0.02Personally, I haven't made a ton of money on my books. Part of that is intentional because the material I've written isn't of a general nature (like CIL ;) ), so I know they won't be big sellers. Part of it could be that I just don't write well! But right now, the book market is not great, and I rarely buy a computer book myself (the only time I do is if it a high-quality book on a topic that I need a lot of information on that I can't find on the Internet). I'd love to continue writing books in the future as I really do enjoy writing, but my concerns are that they don't pay off in the end financially as much as I would like.
The key to writing books (or, really, just writing in general) is that you love it. If the financial awards end up being that you can build your dream house, so much the better ;)
Jason Bock | http://www.jasonbock.net | jasonAT NOSPAMjasonbock dot net