Have you ever dreamed of becoming a freelancer and supporting yourself by writing technical books? Or, have you at least wondered how much money you can make by publishing a technical book? Today, I will take you to explore this topic in depth and uncover the mystery of making technical books profitable.
First, let's start with a real case. This is a book I co-published with a friend at the end of 2016. The title is quite long and full of technical jargon. Although we had some concerns about the title at first, thinking it might be too crowded and cheesy, the end result turned out to be surprisingly good. The editor of this book, Mr. Zhang Chunyu, not only helped us polish the title, but also made our publishing dream a reality.
As new authors, our expectations for this book were not high. After all, we know that in the publishing world, newcomers often struggle to gain widespread attention for their work. Happily, however, the book was printed five times in two years, with a total print run of 8,200. For a newcomer, this is undoubtedly an amazing result.
So, how much benefit has this book brought us? According to the contract, we have no royalties, only royalties, which are 8% of the selling price. After a series of complex calculations, including deducting personal income tax, the final income shared by each of us was approximately RMB 41,000. This number may not be as high as you think, but please remember that this is the result of the two of us investing a lot of energy and hard work in more than half a year.
Of course, the process of writing a book is not easy. We need to do a series of work such as proofreading, writing code, and making sample websites. Moreover, the payment cycle is also quite long, extending with the time of reprinting. So if you're hoping to make a ton of money quickly by writing a book, I might be disappointed. In most cases, writing a book is more of a means to enhance personal influence and brand image than a steady source of income.
So, how did I start writing books? In fact, this is all a coincidence. In the first half of 2016, I wrote an article about iPad on Zhihu, which unexpectedly received a lot of attention and praise. It was this article that brought me to the attention of editor Zhang Chunyu and invited me to write a book about Wi-Fi, React and Redux. Although I was worried about my technical level at the time, I finally decided to accept the challenge and invited my good friend Yang Hanxing to collaborate.
After half a year of hard work, we finally completed the writing and editing of this book. However, with the rapid development of front-end technology, some API usage in the book has become outdated, which makes us have to face a cruel reality: the vitality of a technical book is often inversely proportional to the closeness of the framework or tool it relies on. If a book relies too much on a particular framework or tool, its longevity may be greatly reduced.
Despite this, our book still received a 7-point rating on Douban Reading, which is a very satisfactory result for us. At the same time, we also realized that if you want to publish a successful technical book, you might as well write some high-quality technical articles on Zhihu or other technical platforms to attract the attention of book editors. In addition, we can proactively contact them to demonstrate our writing skills and professionalism.
Of course, the domestic technical book market is not prosperous. Compared with foreign countries, our publishing industry may not be mature enough in some aspects. For example, there are certain gaps in the quality of readers, their willingness to consume, and pricing strategies. However, that doesn’t mean we should give up on our dream of writing a book. Instead, we should work harder to improve our writing and technical abilities to create higher quality works.
Overall, supporting yourself by publishing technical books can be a challenging task. But if you really love writing and technical sharing, then you might as well give yourself a chance to try and persist. Maybe one day in the future, you will find that you have achieved unexpected success in this field.
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