{"id":8275,"date":"2020-09-29T10:23:47","date_gmt":"2020-09-29T16:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8275"},"modified":"2020-09-29T10:23:47","modified_gmt":"2020-09-29T16:23:47","slug":"writing-a-book-is-it-worth-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8275","title":{"rendered":"Writing a book: is it worth it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martin Kleppmann<\/a>:<\/p>\n

My Book, <\/span>Designing Data-Intensive Applications<\/a>, recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O\u2019Reilly\u2019s entire catalogue, second only to <\/span>Aur\u00e9lien G\u00e9ron\u2019s machine learning book<\/a>. Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming second to it! ?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

To me, the success of this book was totally unexpected: while I was writing it, I thought that it was going to be a bit niche, and I set myself the goal of selling 10,000 copies over the lifetime of the book. Having passed that goal tenfold, this seems like a good opportunity to look back and reflect on the process. I don\u2019t want to make this post too self-congratulatory, but rather I will try to share some insights into the business of book-writing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Is it financially worth it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/h2>\n

\n

Most books make very little money for both authors and publishers, but then occasionally something like <\/span>Harry Potter<\/em> <\/span>comes along. If you are considering writing a book, I strongly recommend that you estimate the value of your future royalties to be close to zero. Like starting a band with friends and hoping to become rock stars, it\u2019s difficult to predict in advance what will be a hit and what will flop. Maybe this applies less to technical books than to fiction and music, but I suspect that even with technical books, there are a small number of hits, and most books sell quite modest numbers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

That said, in my case, I am happy to report that writing this book has in retrospect turned out to be a financially sound decision. These graphs show the royalties I have been paid since the book first went on sale:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin Kleppmann: My Book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O\u2019Reilly\u2019s entire catalogue, second only to Aur\u00e9lien G\u00e9ron\u2019s machine learning book. Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming second to it! ? To me, the success of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8275"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8276,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8275\/revisions\/8276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}