Hacker News Reader

Comment by treehau5 | Hacker News Reader

Hey Tom, I just want to say, I have your book, and I find it wonderful.

Was really sad to hear this: "You don’t really make any money by writing a book, but O’Reilly did send me a nice hat"

How poorly does O'Reilly pay their authors? A book the size of most of their tomes, and at the prices they charge, should be a 5-figure advance in any other part of the industry.

This is true, but it's important to bear in mind that a relatively high-prestige publisher like O'Reilly can make or break someone's reputation as a high-price consultant. O'Reilly realizes this, and pays their authors relatively poorly.

If you want to make significant money as a tech book author, I'm guessing you have to do what Brennan Dunn does, and self-publish your book and market it yourself. I'm guessing that after you've published an O'Reilly book, you could make a pretty nice sum if you do this on your next book.

FWIW I got a $6000 advance for the book. I earn a 10% royalty on sales which varies a lot but is around a couple hundred bucks a month on average. So not bad, but since it took me a year to write I don't think it's ever going to recoup minimum wage for that period.

No complaints though! O'Reilly is a brilliant publisher and I never had any expectation of making money from it. It was just a thrill to be able to get the bloody thing off my chest at last.

Curious about this too. I wonder if he means that you don't really make any money compared to the opportunity cost of all the hours you spend on it, or if you really don't make any money in an absolute sense. Unfortunately, I suspect it's actually the latter due to the relatively tiny size of the target market for such books.

From other tech book authors it seems it's the former; they work many hours for a year and then they make 20k or that kind of minimum wage money

That's right. I wrote some computer books some years back, and the royalties were somewhere around 10% of the wholesale cost of the book. So a book with a $40 shelf price might have a $20 wholesale price... and with only about 6000 copies as a typical print run, I didn't make much at all.

And also bear in mind that an advance is just that: it comes off the royalties, so you may not end up making any money for quite a while.

That's a good point. With a run like that, the advance may be all you ever see.

Thank you very much! It's so gratifying to hear that you got something out of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com