Just speaking from my own experience, if you execute very well on audience building and marketing you can do much better than this. I have released 2 books and 2 courses for developers and together they have done close to $4m USD in revenue.

I wrote in detail about the process of writing, marketing, and releasing my first book here:

https://adamwathan.me/the-book-launch-that-let-me-quit-my-jo...

And was interviewed on IndieHackers to talk about the most recent one here:

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/098-adam-wathan-of-refa...

If the work is a good match for your skills and personality it’s a really great way to make a fantastic living.

Hi Adam, I'm a fan of your writing, but your experience in riding and monetizing Tailwind's explosive growth is obviously a massive outlier.

Hey thank you! 3 of 4 of my educational products actually predate Tailwind — I was a millionaire from that business before even releasing Tailwind v0.1.0. Refactoring UI came after but we had built a huge audience for that well before Tailwind as well.

I’m an outlier for sure but $20k is low. If you do a great job at everything that goes into running a business like this you can definitely do much better than that. Josh Comeau did an incredible job building his audience and reputation before releasing his CSS course a few months ago for example and he has done over $500k if I remember right.

You make a good point in here. Being a financially successful author isn't just about being a successful writer - it's being a successful business person.

This.

Writing is half the battle—it is a significant hurdle and not everyone can write a great technical book.

But the other half (and I struggle with this mightily) is sales/marketing (and the whole 'business' side). Making it look pretty, getting people to know it exists, promoting it.

Many of the best technical writers I know are not great at the latter, and for them, self-publishing might not be the best approach.

This may not be the forum for saying this, but in case you need encouragement, I always follow your links when they make it to the front page of HN, and I’m always happy when I see your name in the comments. I’m a sample size of one, but I suspect you’re on a good trajectory in term of notoriety. If you struggle with self branding and promotion, you still seem to be doing something right.

Thanks for sharing this, but when I read stories like it, and look at the content sold, the concept is completely foreign to me.

I would prefer to read reference content from the vendors themselves and not third-parties, so I don’t understand what draws people to this sort of content I the first place.

That is, I couldn’t create any of this, because I would never buy it myself.

Your story is nonetheless very interesting.

I don’t think anyone can argue with the results, but arguing with reproducible results is a bit more difficult.

Just to add some contrast to this $20k figure and Watham's comments about the upside, I've published several small books that get very good reviews but haven't sold a lot of copies. I self published on Amazon as an eBook and then Print on Demand. My profits have totaled less than $1,000 in a couple years. My problems are likely that I don't have an audience built and Amazon rank is terrible until you have sales.

If you're not in it _just_ for the money though, go for it. It's extremely satisfying.

My most popular book is actual a book about how I self published. Publish Your Ebook by Joel Dare.

It seems like a lot of communities are built up with the explicit intention of being in it just for the money. There seems to be a lot of hype generation and releasing for-profit educational materials alongside eachother.

In my opinion, there is a strange marketing game around web frameworks and web frontend development especially.

The best advice I got was to focus on the topic way more than on the actual content. Great quality content about a topic that is super niche won't make much revenue compared to an average book that reaches a wide market.

That's not to say that you should write average books. It's more that people usually underestimate the amount of time it takes to come up with a good idea. And then they keep investing time into a bad idea due to sunk cost fallacy.

Book sales follow a power law distribution, so "typical" is somewhat deceptive. Sales follow a power law because we typically buy books that have been recommended to us by others.

Rust in Action (https://www.manning.com/books/rust-in-action) is only one data point, but USD20k sounds very low over the lifetime of the book, especially when you consider translation rights and other channels like Safari.

Great books outlast the author. Nobody is going to put up a Wikipedia page saying how much money I had in my bank account when I died.

Not that you should necessarily care how you get remembered as you're dead anyway, but I think it's worth it to share knowledge and give to the community if you think you have a contribution worth making. I'm certainly glad other past giants wrote instructional material even if it didn't make them rich.

True, super valid point but a technical programming book would not be a great way to be remembered after you died. The technology/library/stack/language you're writing about will probably die before you do or otherwise mutate beyond your book being useful.

I doubt that I would see "Here lies Fred, he wrote the greatest book on Fortran ever written" on a tombstone.

Or "Justine, her book on JQuery changed the world" in an obituary.

For a "heritage" book the topic would need to be longer lasting.

Hrm. If I got 10K USD a month programming(?) (I think you left out a word) I'd retire in a couple years.

Isn't this a normal salary for highly skilled software engineers in the US?