vladmihalcea

My blog has just turned 12.

To celebrate the anniversary, I wrote a blog post that captures the history behind my blog and the amazing things that blogging has enabled for my career.

I've been using Hibernate for 17 years and never had any performance issue with it.

Want to know my secret? It's very simple. I just read the manual in 2004.

After using it successfully for so long, I wrote a best-seller about how to get the most out of it:

https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Java-Persistence-Vla...

And, just because afterward I even worked on Hibernate to add all sorts of performance improvements to it, it doesn't mean I don't love SQL. In fact, I happen to run a High-Performance SQL training too:

https://vladmihalcea.com/trainings/high-performance-sql/

Your comment is based on a very common misconception that Hibernate aims to replace SQL. If that were true, then why do you think Hibernate has been offering the createSQLQuery (a.k.a. createNativeQuery) since 2002?

When you use a publisher, you only have to write the book, and the publisher will take care of editing, printing, distribution, marketing, advertising, etc.

When you self-publish a book, you need to do way more than just writing the book. You have to do all the things the publisher would have done for you.

By self-publishing, you can get 80 or 90% royalties, instead of 10%, which I think it's worth. It might not be worth for everybody, but, considering how much time I put into writing the book, I wouldn't be happy getting just 10% profit.

I wrote the book in MarkDown using IntelliJ IDEA. The book is stored on GitHub and LeanPub fetches the files and renders it.

My blog is running on WordPress.com. I'm using a Business plan so I can better customize the website.

https://vladmihalcea.com/wordpress-business-plan/

They told me that it will help me get a better job. At the time I was working for Red Hat on the Hibernate project.

I said that I doubt they could help me find a better job considering that my book is mostly about Java Persistence and Hibernate :D

I'm using Grammarly to correct my spelling mistakes. It also provides tips about phrasing.

I've been using Java since 2005 so it's the ecosystem I know best. When I started my blog, I tried various topics, but the Java Persistence and Hibernate got the most traffic.

Since I liked the topic, I decided to write a book about high-performance data access with Java.

I was approached by two "real" publishers asking me whether I want to publish my book with them.

I had declined both of them as they only offered 10% royalty rates.

I didn't have to pay for editing. I did everything myself: writing, diagrams, proofreading, marketing.

In fact, I decided to self-publish it after reading this article from Antonio Goncalves about his Java EE 7 book:

https://antoniogoncalves.org/2014/09/16/the-uncensored-java-...

I did't make 100k in one year. It took several years to get to this amount, but it didn't stop there either.

I manged to get some training engagements because someone in the company read the book and liked it.

So, it can surely help you sell other services. However, this Twitter thread aimed to point out that a book can also make good money, not just be an exposure mechanism.

> If you're independently minded and want to break out of that world, stories like the OP's are nice to see.

I was approached by recruiters asking me if I wanted to work for Google in Zurich. I had to decline them.

I'm happier being a solo-entrepreneur. The best part is that I get to learn a lot of stuff about running a business, which was impossible when I was a employee.

> Which I'm (maybe wrongly) going to assume the author doesn't.

I'm not living in the US. I live in Romania. In Europe, salaries are not as high as the ones in California. But then, even in the US, the Silicon Valley salaries are much higher than in other states.

The great thing about selling products is that there is no upper boundary to how much money you can make. So, over time, you can end up making 250k $ from a single book.

The advantage of passive income is that you can use your time to create new products, which, in turn, can generate more income. It's not easy, but it's not impossible either.

> I’d say money should not be the main motivation to do it

It depends on how you approach this investment. For me, a book is like any other product I make. It takes a certain amount of resources to produce and launch it, and it should generate at least as much revenue as I would have made if I had chosen to do consulting instead.

However, selling products can scale better than consulting. So, over time, you could end up making more money from a certain product (e.g., book, video course) than if you were employed or doing consulting.

The book made more than 100k as it's still selling pretty well. In fact, the sales have increased over time, even if the book is now 5 years old.

I keep on updating it and will release a second edition soon.

The marketing effort is not just for the book. It also helps me sell:

- video courses

- on-site training

- online training and workshops

- find consulting opportunities

- subscription licenses for a software product I created, Hypersistence Optimizer, https://vladmihalcea.com/hypersistence-optimizer/

I didn't expect much when I started. However, traffic grew over time, and I got to learn more about marketing, so in the end, it turned out to be a good investment.

Exactly.

That's true. My blog is thd front-end to every product or service that I'm selling. It's a very useful marketing tool.

No, that's not an issue at all. I have hundreds of articles on my blog that are also covered in the book:

https://vladmihalcea.com/tutorials/hibernate/

But reading the book is easier than browsing the articles because the book has a certain structure while the articles focus on a single topic only.

That's where my blog, https://vladmihalcea.com/blog/ or my StackOverflow answer, https://stackoverflow.com/users/1025118/vlad-mihalcea come into play.

Most of my readers get to know me from these resources prior to knowing about my book.

Thanks

Thanks. I pre-launched it in November 2015 and launched the final version in October 2016. By 2019, I had managed to sell over 5000 copies and make over 100k. I'm thinking of releasing a second edition in 2021 or 2022.

I'm the book author, so if you have any questions, let me know.

Most ORM-related problems are related to lack of knowledge of how the tool works.

However, if you understand how databases work, how to tune the driver and how to get the ORM tool to generate the same queries you'd otherwise write yourself, then you are fine.

For more details, check out these [14 High-Performance Persistence Tips](https://vladmihalcea.com/14-high-performance-java-persistenc...).