What is a fair, market-rate deal for a first-time technical author writing about a popular subject?
You're going to be shocked and dismayed by the offer they give you. Let's get that out of the way now. This is the model: they'll tell you to not do it for the money, in exactly those words, prior to explaining to you terms which imply that they're not doing it for ~92.5% of the money.
You will likely be offered something akin to a $5k advance and a 8% royalty rate on paperback sales with, perhaps, a modestly higher royalty rate on e-book sales. The advance is guaranteed contingent on milestones. The royalties first "earn out" the advance and then start getting actually paid to you. (i.e. You have to sell $5k/0.08 = $62,500 of books on those terms prior to receiving any additional money.)
Most tech authors do not earn out advances. You should expect to receive just the advance and then occasional minor payments ($1k to $2k) for foreign rights if the book turns out to be so popular that e.g. it gets translated into e.g. Japanese.
If you want to make money in writing books, it is very possible. You'll want to start collecting email addresses, start publishing more things which get more people interested in trading you their email address, publish the book yourself, and sell via your own site/email list. For bonus points, sell packages (book, book + videos, book + videos + code samples) and price much, much higher than you're comfortable with ($49/$99/$249 is popular and works well).
There exist numerous people on HN who have successful businesses doing the second model. Understand that the second model is far more akin to running a business than it is to writing books. This is true of writing books generally, but it is more obviously true when you don't have a publisher to blame for your marketing/sales outcomes.
I asked someone who does this. Somewhat transcribed comments:
Expect $0 to $3k from a really shitty publisher who is probably just going to waste your time, or a serious publisher who believes you'll waste the publisher's time, or both.
$3k to $6k from a publisher who has some clue, but the topic is extremely niche. ("Pentesting South African Wifi Networks with Monads")
$6k to $12k from a publisher with some clue for a book that will sell fairly well to a big niche developer audience - something like a developer guide to Android or iOS.
$12k to $25k for super-popular consumer tech books for mainstream topics like macOS, iOS, and so on.
Royalty rates are 8% to 12%, maybe 15% for someone with a track record. (8% and $5k is standard for mid-list unproven fiction. Tech rates can be higher.)
Watch out for comedy royalty rates on ebooks. (15% on a downloadable file? 50% or GTFO.)
True: advances don't usually earn out. And if you write more than one book the unrecouped advances get added together, so you will never, ever, earn out, unless a book becomes an unexpected best-seller.
Which it won't, because publishers do not promote books. There's a sell-in period aimed at store buyers before publication to get the book on physical shelves, but otherwise publishers do somewhere between exactly zero and almost zero marketing and promotion.
Bottom line: writing books on its own is largely a waste of time, unless you want to research a topic and get paid to learn it and don't mind producing a book to pay for the payment.
Writing books as shop windows for other tutorial content and/or consultancy can work very well.
People who know what they're talking about, can write to a deadline and make sense, and are willing to accept pocket money are incredibly rare. Publishers often trawl for new writers, and if they find someone who is all of the above and not too easy to flatter they may be willing to push the advance higher than usual to close the deal.
If you are going into a book contract, familiarize yourself with cross-accounting or basket accounting clauses, and get them stricken from the contract. (This is the clause where you need to earn out all the books before getting royalties for any of them.)
In general familiarize yourself with book contracts, and understand the pitfalls. Or consult a literary lawyer.
Source: I'm the author of multiple tech books over more than a decade and several novels.
The basic shape of the contract is the same. The publishers I have worked for are both fans of plain language and relatively short contracts, which helps. (Tech publisher is Pearson, fwiw, and they have been wonderful to work with over the years.)
The differences in how I write are pretty epic. For a tech book I'll work out a very detailed outline (down to subheadings within each chapter) in advance, and need larger slabs of time to write to maintain my train of thought. For novels I tend to work from a much lighter-weight outline (major plot points, not chapter by chapter) but spend a bunch of time in advance thinking through the characters and world-building.
> because publishers do not promote books. There's a sell-in period aimed at store buyers before publication to get the book on physical shelves, but otherwise publishers do somewhere between exactly zero and almost zero marketing and promotion.
I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Why is it that publishers don't promote books?
Had an experience that gels with this. Advance of $1k per chapter (I wrote 3 chapters of an 8-10 chapter book) then without the publisher pushing it aggressively, royalties beyond that were minimal. The content did not date too badly so much as the presentation of it did.
Deadlines were brutal, especially incorporating edits and requests to expand/etc. That was a brain-melting experience. Sourcing and providing screenshots was particularly annoying.
Be prepared for it to be tougher than you expect and (as Patrick said) not to earn anything after the advance. Just when you feel like you're done, they'll come back with edits that double your workload.
Before long in my writing experience, I had "THINK ABOUT THE MONEY" taped to the top of my monitor. It was the only way I got through it. Interesting to do it once, but I'm not sure that I'd do it again for a publisher.
> There exist numerous people on HN who have successful businesses doing the second model. Understand that the second model is far more akin to running a business than it is to writing books.
I've done this twice now (links in profile if anyone is interested). It is very much a business for me. The first book led to an ongoing consulting gig with a wonderful client, along with a smattering of additional clients over the last few years. The first book has also earned north of $50k since publication, of which I've been able to keep 97% minus minor costs like hosting.
I have not published with a traditional publisher. O'Reilly approached me about publishing something like MMP as a traditional book, but they weren't interested in conciseness nor were they willing to pay anything close to what I was making self-publishing so it never went anywhere.
There is also a ... "business model" ... for technical books which goes like this. Get someone with a PhD to write a book on something. Around the world there are about 300 libraries of record which are legally required to hold a copy of everything published. So you can sell them a book that nobody wants for $200 each. That is $60,000 of sales guaranteed, with minimal requirements for copy editing and other forms of quality control. Rinse and repeat for as long as the supply of stage-struck PhDs holds out.
When I published a book in the UK, we had to send six copies to the UK copyright libraries. They certainly didn't pay for them. So I'm not convinced by this scam.
And Australia. I love that I'm listed as an author in the State Library of Queensland, but we even had to pay for postage to get the book there (and elsewhere).
Regarding your first part, I must mention that The Pragmatic Programmers are the exception to this rule. They offer 50% of royalties which adds up fast.
I'd be shocked if anyone got a 4 figure advance. I got a few hundred dollars for an XML book in the height of the XML times. Ultimately the book never got finished but everyone I know who has written a tech book (unless it's a huge seller) says expect nothing more than lunch money from it, plus the employment opportunities.
My book (my first and only) <https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/d-cookbook> got $3000 advance, plus an on-time completion bonus, and now, two years later, continues to pay me ~$200 royalty checks in excess of the advance every quarter...
That's not a large sum of money, considering that it took about 6 months of nights and weekends it took to write the book, but it isn't nothing either.
It would probably be a good idea for HN to recognize <URL> and "URL", since those are specifically mentioned in RFC 3986 as common ways to delimit URLs in text.
My source tells me that low five figure advances happen regularly for the right topics, and four figures aren't unusual at all.
In fact she's just received mid four figures for about two weeks of repurposing - i.e. cutting and pasting - content that was already written and needed some reformatting and light editing.
This isn't common, but it does happen.
A few hundred dollars is more of an insult/negotiating wipe out than a real advance.
I got a $5K advance on an AWS book that never even came out because they cancelled the contract after they paid the advance (a bunch of similar books came out in one month and they just didn't want to bother competing, especially since our book would be two to three months behind).
You're going to be shocked and dismayed by the offer they give you. Let's get that out of the way now. This is the model: they'll tell you to not do it for the money, in exactly those words, prior to explaining to you terms which imply that they're not doing it for ~92.5% of the money.
You will likely be offered something akin to a $5k advance and a 8% royalty rate on paperback sales with, perhaps, a modestly higher royalty rate on e-book sales. The advance is guaranteed contingent on milestones. The royalties first "earn out" the advance and then start getting actually paid to you. (i.e. You have to sell $5k/0.08 = $62,500 of books on those terms prior to receiving any additional money.)
Most tech authors do not earn out advances. You should expect to receive just the advance and then occasional minor payments ($1k to $2k) for foreign rights if the book turns out to be so popular that e.g. it gets translated into e.g. Japanese.
If you want to make money in writing books, it is very possible. You'll want to start collecting email addresses, start publishing more things which get more people interested in trading you their email address, publish the book yourself, and sell via your own site/email list. For bonus points, sell packages (book, book + videos, book + videos + code samples) and price much, much higher than you're comfortable with ($49/$99/$249 is popular and works well).
There exist numerous people on HN who have successful businesses doing the second model. Understand that the second model is far more akin to running a business than it is to writing books. This is true of writing books generally, but it is more obviously true when you don't have a publisher to blame for your marketing/sales outcomes.