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18%

Seems low but I'm not familiar with the for profit publication industry.

Wickham is one of the leads in providing data visualization/graphics for R. He authored ggplot2, one of the better plotting libraries available in R.

With data analysis/science trends of use in Python (especially with IPython/Jupyter/JupyterHub and an R kernel available) ggplot2 has some real competition now (poltly, matplotlib, etc.).

There's still heavy entrenchment in R due to the amount of useful libraries in CRAN and previous work but I predict much new work is and will continue migrating to Python as newer professionals enter the domain.

18% is way more than usual. Royalties for printed tech books are usually 10-15%. Which is bad anyway.

We got 6% from Springer for a textbook (6% total split between the authors, not per-author) [1].

However we were first-time authors, and also insisted that we be allowed to leave the "author version" PDFs online as open access [2]. So it's possible the lack of a fully exclusive contract made our royalties lower.

[1] https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319427140

[2] http://pcgbook.com/

Seems like a pretty bad deal? Anyone with experience in this industry care to comment?

18% of net is within range for fiction novels, but I wouldn't be surprised if a work like this was completely different.

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