The Economics of Writing a Technical Book
My experience is that the self-publishing business is a _business_ that generates money from publishing and marketing books. If you decide to self-publish and self-market, all you are doing is skipping the publishing step of recruiting an author, and substituting the step of writing one or more books yourself.<p>The key insight here is that it is a business, and the actual writing of the book is incidental to the success of the business. I repeat, incidental. The main drivers of the publishing business is marketing to acquire more customers, and finding ways to build additional revenue streams to generate value from each customer.<p>If you don&#x27;t care to know what LTVs and conversion rates are, you will not be happy running a publishing business regardless of who wrote the book(s) you are publishing.<p>The other road forward is to have a publishing hobby. Some hobbies make token amounts of money. I know two brothers who buy collectible corvettes, fix them up, drive them for exactly one Summer, and then sell them.<p>The money they make seems like a nice side-business, until you listen to them tote up the hours and expenses and tax implications. They would make way more money selling almost anything else part-time. And that is my personal experience with my own writing hobby.<p>The money sounds nice until you actually look at it as a business, and then you start asking why I am on  Hacker News writing this comment when I should be curating my email list. The &quot;problem,&quot; of course, is that writing is my hobby, not curating email lists.<p>So I believe you need to decide whether you have a business or a hobby. If it&#x27;s a business, then you have to put 80% of your work into the activities that produce 80% of the revenue. And that is <i>not</i> writing, in my experience or observation.<p>Whereas with a hobby, you put 80% of your work into the activities that produce 80% of the happy juice in your brain. If writing does that for you, you can write and make a little something on the side that will pay for some discretionary lifestyle purchases. In my own case, that&#x27;s things like a 1950s-era Rietveld Crate Chair.<p>Blatant Endorsement:<p>FYI, I publish with LeanPub <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;leanpub.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;leanpub.com</a>, because it generates the maximum revenue for the small scale of my writing hobby, and its &quot;lean&quot; approach helps me maximize my contact with my readers as part of the writing process. Since writing is my hobby, that&#x27;s a win for me.<p>They also help people with a writing business in some amazing ways, like their tools for creating courses, which helps generate more revenue from existing content, and the ways they help you build a mailing list so you can develop other revenue streams from your existing readers. If you want to build a business, they help you build your business.