I'm a generalist, and while I enjoy working with new technologies I no longer get a kick out of knowing every itty bitty detail inside out. I've worked in several industries in engineering roles (compiler design, geographic information systems, fabless semiconductor device production and testing).

I think writing a technical book could be very enjoyable for me. I'm good at explaining technical stuff, or so I'm told.

But I have absolutely no idea with the profile above what I could possibly write a book about that adds to the state of the art. "Wafer Database Schema Design For Dummies"?

I am also good at explaining stuff, wrote a book on Go, made it open source because I haven't contributed anything to the FOSS community :)

0 income. Not the best business plan eh?

You could probably keep it open-source but charge for the print copy and pay-what-you-want for the PDF.

That is a good idea, how do I the pay-what-you-want thing?

currently the book is on github and gitbooks, so I doubt if anyone would pay for the pdf :-)

There's a free version of Gumroad and you can sell things with a pay what you want scheme: https://help.gumroad.com/11164-Payments/pay-what-you-want-pr...

The premium version of Gumroad is $10 per month, and reduces the cut they take.

There's leanpub too, though I don't know if you can upload an already made pdf. Worth checking out though.

leanpub allows you to get the data from github, my book is already on github, 950+ stars

Oh that's great to know, thanks.

I've bought PDFs where I already had all the information just to support the author. The hard part is letting the people who know about your book already know that they can buy a hard copy/support your work.

Well, all I can do is put upthe leanpub link to the book on the github page

I think learnpub does this. Minimum price and suggested price.

Thanks :)

Started making a book on leanpub.

https://leanpub.com/antitextbookGo/

This is awesome!

Do you mean my book? Or the fact that one can self publish books? :)

The tech books written by authors who know nothing but English and "learning a lot while writing" is exactly what ruined the book business. No one needs this kind of crap.

Books ought to be written by experts and talents. Just think of the likes of SICP, OnLisp, AIMA or PAIP compared to some Java for Dummies crap.

I wouldn't even start about fiction and guys like Nabokov, Wilde or Orwell.

I'm intrigued now. What does Nabokov have to do with this discussion?

Talent.

Is there an actual request for new books? I feel like most of the topics are already covered so the only thing would be jumping on new technologies and the risk is that the writing would be sub-optimal. I am extremely ignorant in matter of books to be honest. What is the average knowledge level of someone that can write a decent book? Would it be better to have more knowledge or be a better writer?

My experience is that all/most of the programming books are based on trivial examples and solving dull problems, which is perfectly fine when you know nothing and you are just starting the programming adventure, but when you are getting your second or third language and you want something more serious, then all the 50-150 loc examples are just... not enough. So I'd love to see more books when you are given something in the range of 10k< loc and the examples and tasks being more complicated. Traditional publishing did not allow that, because you could not provide long code base. But today there are no such limits.

Especially GUI guides are ratcher simplistic, you don't want to draw just triangles and squares on the screen. There are no really good resources for Direct3D or OpenGL, WGL, SDL etc. It's like learning architecture by looking at bricks and not at finished buildings. This is also the reason why people recommend working on open-source projects, because this is where the real thing happens. But I would say it's an intimidating experience. There should be something in the middle.

(And it would be nice if there was a mentoring site where you could pick a language, pick your level, and be mached either with a person/team to work on something together or with a mentor who could just guide you twice a month. Say, you pay 100 bucks for registration, the website owner gets $10, and the mentor $90. Even if you get just a couple of "students" it's still a safier bet than much more risky SaaS/e-book business. And how to start it - make a web site about one language that is your stronges and focus on that. If you get others interested in mentoring, check their stack and then expand the offering. If you have 10 deals a month, there will be 100 passive bucks more to your name. Has anyone tried that? And to get the initial traction combine it with some publishing, blog, some language-specific, industry-informed (not necessary programing related, but project-management, team integration, tasks division, feedback, code reviewing) problems that would prove your expertise.

PS: One difficult project you could explore is business process modelling - there are a couple of different notation standards, such as BPMN. The project would be to create one program (like Bizagi) in which you can design processes but in different notations, smoothly (that's the most difficult) convert between them, and then integrate with industry class software such as Appian, IBM BPM, Amodit, SharePoint, Alfresco etc. It's a million dollar project, but f* hard to solve.

In 2001 (before e-books were a viable business) I wrote a C++ book that throughout the book we wrote a full usable library (games) and 2-3 full games. It isn't hard, thing is, most tech authors I've talked with shouldn't really be writing books. They get the deals not on technical merits of writing full scale applications, but by a few blog posts on how to use X to do Y but little understanding on how to teach/write.

An exception (maybe not all books, but the few I've read) are the In Action series from manning. They tend to write a full fledged application slowly throughout the book with clear and simple writing.

Also, if you want/can, shoot me an email at brunomtsousa (at) that_google_email_domain.com I've worked with some BPM solutions and thinking/designing a solution I think could be cool for SMEs. Not easy to find folks that know much about the topic and would love to exchange thoughts!

> I know a lot of people that wrote books and got something out of it.

did they self-publish or went with some known publisher? what kind of money can you make on ebooks?

> did they self-publish or went with some known publisher?

My former boss self-published a book on Leanpub. For the "known publisher", I'm a little acquainted with the author of "Docker High Performance" (Packt).

For the leanpub one, it was organically easy to get the word out through local meetups and clients. Packt reached out to the "Docker High Performance" guy, he reviewed a few books for them then they emailed him.

> What kind money can you make on ebooks?

For the people I mentioned, I can't say. But if you do get a good book out with a good following you can hit Nathan Barry's numbers:

- http://nathanbarry.com/app-design-stats/

- http://nathanbarry.com/designing-web-applications-2nd-editio...

Self-pub, through Leanpub and eventually Kindle, Createspace, and iBooks, I'm up to around 100-200 sales/month (ASP ~$10, net ~$7), mostly by keeping my book updated with the latest version of the software I write about (so my book is the only one that's constantly relevant, unlike the ones from the major publishers). I spend maybe 2-4 hours/month updating the book, running tests and fixing things.