Foojay Podcast #67: Writing a book and fame and fortune!

Transcript

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[0:00] Writing a book does it make you rich and famous let’s find out welcome to the FJ podcast all your news about OpenJDK let me share a personal story about 5 years ago I started experimenting with Java on a Raspberry Pi and blogged a few articles about it but the more I experimented the more I wrote down and eventually I had written a book I worked on it for 6 months in a row every evening and a lot of weekends but the moment I received the box with my auor copies was an incredible feeling holding a paper book with a your name on it is a very special moment fast forward to now the Thousand Paper copies are sold out I have the last 10 copies in case you still want one but as I self-publish the ebook it’s still for sale on lean pup and I keep updating it that’s one of the first big differences between publishing a paper book and an ebook as an author I got about €2 per paper book from the publisher and lean pup pays 80% royalties don’t forget that I have to pay taxes on what I earn so if you do the math you’ll understand that the book didn’t make me Rich but yes it helped me in my career and it was one of the

[1:18] Reasons I became a Java Champion so we can argue about the becoming famous but that’s only my story I invited several guests to share their knowledge about book book writing Marian Varga is finishing a book and tells about the process of publishing a book with the publisher whim the blower wrote A Few books and has a lot of experience with self-publishing Len EP is the co-founder of lean pup so he can tell us a lot about ebooks and we start with Trisha G who wrote a lot of books hello I’m Trisha G I am a published author I am also I’m a lead developer Advocate at gradal but I’ve also written as you can see in the background I co-wrote head first Java Third Edition co-edited 97 things every Java programmer should know co-wrote getting to know intelligy idea editions one and two and I also I’d almost forgotten ages ago published a collection of my blogs on lean poop what’s your motivation for writing I would like to say is to have a side income stream of you know nice passive income the thing is I mean it is a passive income but it’s it’s a lot of time and not a lot of money that

[2:40] Comes in it’s just one of those things isn’t it you want to have your name on a book really it’s it’s just it’s it’s almost a vanity thing really it’s it’s cool it’s nice to tell your friends and family it is helpful for the career as well though people do take you seriously when you’re like I wrote a book they think that’s really impressive and it is because it takes a lot of time but it’s not quite as lucrative as you might think it might be yeah so you answered immediately my next question did you become rich from the books it’s it’s a nonzero amount of money head first Java makes the most amount of money and yet my percent of royalties on that is the smallest because I am a co-author on the Third Edition so I get like percentage wise I get very small percentage but head first Java is probably the bestselling Java book like ever so that’s actually one of the reasons I wanted to be involved with that because it sells a lot of copies so that does pretty well 97 things does okay and the intellig idea books do better than 97 things because again my percentage is a bit higher on that

[3:52] Because we publish through we self-publish but it doesn’t sell as many copies because we self-publish so the A’s an interesting balance you have to get between like using Publishers where you get a smaller percentage but higher distribution versus being self-published where you can take a larger percentage but you have to do more of the work in terms of marketing is that the biggest difference between so you have experience with boats you have done publishing through publisher you’ve done publishing through lepup self publishing flow biggest difference is it marketing that if you use a publisher they have a white reach I mean it’s everything isn’t it so it depends a little bit so at least I can compare head first JV and 97 things those are two quite different books well I was using the same publisher they’re both with O’Reilly and the same person who was the publisher at O’Reilly who helped us as well but the process is a little bit different because head first Java is very specific and when you’re writing head first Java you do a lot of it yourselves because everything’s done with in design and if

[5:00] You’ve seen the head first books it’s all like how it’s drawn and laid out and so as an author you actually have a lot more control over how the pages of the book look than you would with something else with 97 things which is a more classic book you don’t really have to worry about a lot of things in fact we were editors so we collected other people’s stories kevlin and I both had three of our own essays in there but then the rest of our job as editors was to go out find people who are going to write something gather that do a certain amount of editing of that and perhaps go backwards and forwards with the individual writers to kind of get them to tell their story better and then the Publishers take care of everything else they like put everything together they do an index they worry about like how what size the book is going to be and all of those sorts of things they do all of that the only thing you really have to worry about is you get a chance to look at the page breaks and make sure that code doesn’t break weirdly over the pages but really there’s not very much more to do there

[6:03] And they also they set up certain amounts of like we’re talking about publicity and stuff like that they set up certain things in terms of promoting the book with podcasts and things although O’Reilly don’t do a lot of that I spoke to Ken cousin who published through was it Manning or Pearson I think it was Manning oh no pragmatic programmer and they do more in terms of finding opportunities for you to promote your book and things like that but like O’Reilly has the O’Reilly learning platform so if your book is on the O’Reilly learning platform then they you don’t have to promote it it’s just there and lots of these organizations already have access to that and then you get royalties of people who read it on the O’Reilly learning platform so yeah so it kind of depends like when you’re doing self-publishing you have to do so much more yourself so we did not even though Helen my co-author is a licensed index person or certified indexer we didn’t do an index for getting to know intellig idea because indexing is a lot of work and Publishers can do that what else we had to get the

[7:12] Front cover design sorted you know find a graphic designer for that kind of thing we had to decide on the size of the book so we have we with getting to know intell idea we published it first through leanpub purely as a as an electronic book and in the end I realized that I didn’t feel like I’d done it until I had a physical copy of the book so we use KDP to publish on Amazon and the KDP thing is different again so lean Pub you can decide on the size because you publish it to a PDF so you have certain control over that but like when you publish a physical book even when you self-publish you got more to worry about you got way more to worry about in terms of sizing like we had to go backwards and forwards to the designer on how the image wraps over the front cover and things like page breaks when we went from we’ve got a hard copy and a soft copy of getting to know intellig idea and in and KDP doesn’t offer the same physical size for soft copy and for paperback and hard copy so it takes about three weeks to like go through and find out where all the page break should

[8:19] Be because I’m using asky doctor and it doesn’t automatically page break the way you want it to and I had to do that for both the paperback and the hardback and it was exhausting so you have the writing process which gets simpler if you go through a publisher but if you self-publish you indeed need to handle a lot more but you can also learn a lot more so you learn about marketing you learn about the publishing process so it depends a bit yeah it’s software it depends a bit of which part you want to take correct correct and I go backwards and forwards with the intellig idea book h and I are both developers at heart and when we want to sell more of it we are tempted to change it make it better improve it and that’s not what you have to do you just have to keep marketing it and it can be really exhausting to just kind of be on social media every three minutes going don’t forget to buy my book you know and it makes you a very tiresome person to follow on social media so we every now and again because when you publish through lean Pub you retain the right

[9:29] For the book so you can then take that book to a publisher and say can you publish this it’s doing pretty well but like we’d really not like to have to do the marketing anymore and so every now and again I think maybe it would be easier if we just used a publisher for this so that we could get it we really would love it to be on the O’Reilly platform for example and we would love for someone else to keep tweeting about it every three minutes instead of us and I know indeed from experience so Publishers have a backlog of IDs of books they want to publish and in most cases they don’t have a writer an author yet so they are actively looking for author so people who are interested to write a book they can actually ask Publishers which authors are you looking for yeah and it’s very challenging right now because I mean for some time the publishing industry has been changing with ebooks and so forth and when you add into the fact that things like in the Java world versions are moving much much faster than they used to there’s a lot of challenges around physical paper books for this kind of

[10:33] Thing head first Java for example I started talking to a about working on the third edition of that more than 10 years ago roundabout when Java 8 first came out and so we wanted to do a Java eight version of it and then after Java n came out and all the versions started coming out every six months like we were like what are we going to do like we can’t release a new head first book every six months this is crazy so there’s there’s various things which impact that and now of course with AI Publishers are really trying to figure out what’s the right approach to help get developers the information they need so O’Reilly for example seem to be experimenting with using AI on their learning platform so they’re you still pay your subscription for the learning platform and then they have their own AI which will allow you to learn off the books on there that kind of thing but obviously it’s it’s a worrying time to some extent for Publishers because if other a I are using the Publishers material and our as authors our material to provide the information for free which is you know

[11:39] Let’s argue about how legal that is H there’s a lot of challenges around asking someone to pay $50 for a physical book when you know you could be asking one of the AI platforms like just tell me what I need to know about intellig ID so yes so anyway to try and answer your question as far as I’m aware Publishers do usually have a list of things they really want to cover like for example a lot of Publishers do want way more material on AI right now for example or maybe probably things like loom in Java I would expect there’s there’s a certain appetite for some written stuff about what’s new in concurrency in Java but right now there’s also a lot of like oh I’m not really sure what we’re doing strategically as a company because there’s a lot of kind of a lot of big changes happening in the in how we absorb information there is one more caveat to that though and I’ve mentioned it a few times now because it seems to be particularly applicable to O’Reilly O’Reilly has a learning platform and they not only have books on there they also have training courses so if perhaps doing a book is an intimidating thing to

[12:44] Do but recording and training course is a bit less intimidating a lot of these Publishers really do want you to record training sessions that they can publish on various learning platforms a very difficult question another one how much work is it to write a book oh God months half a year years or like you said you started on a book 10 years ago on the ID updating head first Java took us 10 years now it didn’t take us 10 years of like working 40 hours a week on it we were having a one-hour meeting once a week for a year or two and while we were trying to figure out what we were going to do about Java 8 and how we were going to pitch it and then I got pregnant and then like and then I got pregnant again and you know and then Java 9 came out after when my second child was due so then we really had to we were really like I’m not really sure what we’re going to do about Java eight Java nine and everything kind of tailed off so then I got on re onboarded after they started trying to update it I don’t know I can’t remember the timelines but it was probably about eight years after we

[13:55] First started having the conversation so and then at that Point things got very real and at that point I was writing every day but that was at the end of 2021 and I was already halfway through writing the intellig idea book and I’m like I can’t write head first Java and intellig idea and have a day job at the same time it’s not possible I was already spending nearly a day a week on the intellig idea book so I actually I took a sabatical to finish both those books so head first Java in terms of the writing and I did four chapters one two of them were almost completely new and two of them were just like rewrites or updates and that took me from September to February so that was a lot of time and that’s writing getting technical reviews getting feedback from Bert who’s the other one of the other authors and getting technical reviews from the two reviewers as well and kind of going backwards and forwards that took yeah three four months something like that and then getting to know andell I did took us two years but which is crazy because we picked the topic

[15:08] Because it was something we knew like I have a lot of information in my head and Helen is an excellent writer and she kind of and I she did a good job of kind of helping to structure the content so it makes sense to a lot of new big beginner Learners and even existing users and I’d already been through the process of writing a couple of books so I kind of knew what we needed to have in the book and it’s still it took us two years and one of those years was six months of me working on it fulltime it was just it was a long long process part of that was getting the structure right and reworking things we probably reworked it three times and I think here a publisher probably would have helped because a publisher would have been like you know what in order to fit into the way that we do books you’re going to do this you’re going to do this and we would have had some of those conversations much earlier and had less rework some of it was because like a couple of sections needed to be redone after they changed the UI for various things because took us so long to write the book and then

[16:15] The thing which took about two months was screenshots because the book is very intentionally tutorial driven and very graphical and I started the screenshots in July and I think I finished them in like September I think not a lot of authors write on their book during their job it’s really a sight job for most of them and I can’t do that because I have two kids under the age of 10 it’s just not possible to do that yeah I wrote one book and my wife says she throws me out of the house if I start doing it again because for the exact same reason yeah it takes so much time towards the end so most of the time I was working like the 9: till 500 I was doing it like I said I had to take a sabatical because I didn’t really have time in my day job to do it towards the end when I was just like I need to get this book out because it’s absolutely killing me then I did I worked a few weekends maybe like four or five weekends and you know I had to get I had to call in favors for child obviously my husband could look after the kids but also like he has stuff to do too at the weekend so like the kids are staying at their next

[17:27] Door neighbors and at their aunts and you know it’s would not have been practical for me to work in evenings and weekends with kids it’s not possible but still would you do it again yes I’m actually doing it a little bit again now this is why I keep talking about the oy learning platform as well so people keep ask keep asking me for training courses based on the intellig idea book because that’s what people really want whether they want in-person training courses or like a video course it lends itself very well to that kind of way of learning so I thought well this is easy like this is a theme which will occur you know what you’ve written books this will be easy no it’s not easy this will be easy I already have a book I have the tutorials what I’m going to do is I’m going to step through the tutorials create a script I’m going to record them on video and then so I already have somewhere where I’m going to publish and sell those those training courses and then as I was doing it I was realizing that what kind of worked in the book in terms of having stuff which works for beginners and professional developers

[18:33] More or less the balance is kind of okay in the book in a tutorial or a training course you can’t really do that because you need to be much more directed you have to be like either you don’t know anything I’m going to tell you everything or you know all of these things so I’m not going to worry about any of those things so as I was creating the training course I it very quickly became clear to me it needs to be two different training courses one is Introduction to intellig idea for people who’ve never used it before and might not even have programmed before and the other is something like productivity with intelligent idea for professional developers and based on more or less the same stuff and based on the book but these will be two different training courses so that means that I need to spend and I have a day job now so now I’m kind of spending Saturday mornings Sunday afternoons outlining what the training course looks like I’ve finished the outline for the first one now I’m going to have to start recording the video for it which is going to take time like even though the material is

[19:34] There it’s it’s like right in the book and it’s worse than writing the book because I can’t just turn up in my pajamas and write at five o’clock in the morning which I did used to do you know and you can’t do that when you’re recording a video and then off the back of all of this I thought this is what it’s like to be in the brain of an author I thought maybe we did the book wrong which we probably didn’t but maybe we did the book wrong and if not wrong then certainly this introductory course could now I’ve got a very strong structure with a lot of I’ve actually written out a lot of the stuff I’m going to read on the teleprompter this is basically another book so I am hoping to probably launch it as another book later like this is like intellig idea for beginners yeah but the thing that scared me and it was just this morning I was looking at it going I don’t want to do all the screenshots again it’s just really painful can AI not automatically do that for you I mean I think there are tools that might be able to do that so and also you can use things like because I have to drive the UI I need to be able

[20:43] To use a plugin which can kind of Drive the UI and then like take screenshots but if I can do that then it’ll make it a lot easier to also update them for as the UI evolves and so a third edition could have you know the same screenshots but just a more automated process to get them but it’s pay painful I published my book through lepup so I used the mara the markdown format that they provide did you do the same thing was it really a technical way of writing when we first picked leanpub we went through like I said this will be now this is 21 so this is like four years ago now I went through a process of looking at the different ways that lanp had to publish the book and so I looked that you could upload a PDF yourself you could use the I don’t think they were using Marco at the time I think they were using another version of markdown or you could use asky do and so we started in markdown and we didn’t I was going to say we didn’t like it we write markdown all the time for blog posts but for the book we wanted a much more granular level of control over what things looked like we wanted to be able

[21:51] To do stuff with the headings and various things like that so we ended up using asky Doc and we used a process which Josh long told us about in order to build the book and things like that it got a bit long and complicated which we simplified in the end but the whole point was we wanted to be able to write an intellig idea we wanted to be able to use code with me so that we could pair on it needed to be some sort of you know markdown markup language and I think if Mara had been there when we first looked at it I think maybe we might have used that we spent quite a lot of time troubleshooting build scripts and running SE and things like that we were using GitHub actions to automatically run the build we wanted to make sure there were no syntax errors in the written code we also had code samples which were running in GitHub too and we were using a process that Josh had created to allow us to pull the code samples from other repos so that we knew all the repos were compiling and that our readers could get the code from different repos was surprisingly Technical and I found myself

[22:59] Debugging the build process because at one point I mean GitHub just kept running out of free time and free space and free because we using a free tier and I found myself debugging the build process because it was taking 20 minutes to build the book and I’m like I can’t wait 20 minutes to find out if I’ve put you know something in the wrong place and it turned out you know I needed to know a lot more about how to use git to do versioning and stuff like that but it was really cool and then I went for my job interview at gradal which was happening at the end of my sabatical I could talk about you know troubleshooting long build processes and how frustrating it is for a developer’s productivity when you don’t understand the build process it takes a long time you’re waiting for feedback and it turned out to be really helpful from a professional point of view and that’s yeah probably one of the most the biggest advantages of writing a book you learn a lot beside the topic that you’re actually writing about so you become publisher yourself you understand how the

[24:00] Process work and yeah if it’s a technical book you also do a lot of code examples so you’re diving into code writing examples and that’s also another great way to learn from this yeah absolutely I mean I probably wrote more code when I was writing the book I certainly wrote more code when I was writing the book than I write now I writee a lot more code and I did a lot more that’s where I learn about GI help actions and CI pipelines and yes and then on top of that like you say the marketing the I’m now using Amazon ads to try and drive traffic to my Amazon page and so I’m learning about keyword targeting and SEO and all these things and that you have to ask yourself the question do you want to learn about all of these things or will you pay someone else to do that for you probably the most known self-publishing platform for ebooks is the canadian-based lean pup my book is on there and many many others I talked to one of the co-founders Len EP and started with the question what is lean pup exactly we’re a self-publishing platform that is a combination of a sort of platform for

[25:08] Writing books and a platform for publishing and selling them we have authors from all around the world and one of the great pleasures of my sort of job is I get to talk to authors like Frank for our podcast and now I get to talk to him on his podcast about about other authors and lean pup how long does it exist how did it start so lean pup was founded by Peter Armstrong in 2010 it was basically he wrote a computer programming book with a conventional programming book publisher and he had a very good experience with a lot of elements of it but and I’m just sort of telling the cartoon kind of you know sort of shortcut version here but basically his book got finished he finished writing it went into the publishing pipeline which can take months and then it finally got out on the bookshelves literally and one week later something in the programming language changed and his whole book was obsolete and you couldn’t run anything basically is this sort of short version of it and so he you know undaunted as you need to be to sort of be both a programmer

[26:06] And an author he carried on and did another book but this one he sort of published it secretly for early buyers and had a kind of like secret Community Forum where you could get updates to the ebook version of it as he wrote them and so that was a very interesting process and along the way he and Scott Patton colleague of his they sort of created limb and thought like you know what we should do is we should make it easier for people to write books about things like technology and programming languages things that can change basically and that’s a really interesting thing like you know magazines used to take care of that but now that we had sort of web publishing and stuff like that you could actually do you could marry the concept of books to the concept of things that cover topics that change and the first Le the sort first sort of official kind of lean Pub book book was when we were a sort of blog tobook type of service that was one way we started out you can see the connection between technology blogging and creating a book there and the first one was startup lessons

[27:09] Lessons Learned by an author named Eric ree who went on to write a very famous book called The Lean Startup so that’s more or less the kind of origin story of lean pup okay and indeed I like your idea that you can already publish a book on for instance lean pup which is not finished yet if you let your readers know that it’s not finished yet you can already start selling it and get feedback I did exactly the same so my book was already available on lean pup as soon as I had a few chapters of the 12 I think I scheduled which is a great way that you already get some feedback or people looking for this kind of book am I on the right track with the things I’m writing so lean pup helps you to do that and what I used is I wrote my book in marua which is your version of markdown mark down for books yeah markdown for books I published my files on GitHub and let lean pup get those files and generate the ebook and the PDF is that the most used Approach at leanpub no actually it’s not although it is our recommended approach so if you know if you know how to use git and GitHub we definitely recommend using

[28:21] That writing mode on leub if you’re writing a book it I mean it unlocks all the incredible value that comes from the world’s best you know sort of version versioning system that there is for writing text which is what computer programs are and all kinds of collaborative opportunities and things like that like we’ve had programmers who’ve never met each other write a bestselling book you know just taking shifts in different time zones but like you know doing GitHub pull requests and stuff like that so that’s the GitHub writing mode is our recommended writing mode for programmers and people who know how to do it but our most popular writing mode is our browser writing mode where you just write in the web browser so it’s still plain text it’s still in marua which is are marked down for books kind of syntax the two reasons that would that’s our most popular I would venture to say are a it’s free and so you do have to pay a little bit to use the GitHub writing mode because there’s just you know complexity of using third party services and things like that but so the browser mode

[29:14] Is free but it’s also right in your browser so you don’t have to know how to use GitHub in order to write that way you can just sort of you know click a plus sign to create a new chapter hit the pound sign to you know create a new chapter heading and just get typing away and then all of the other features that you use in leub to publish your book to publish a new version to contact readers about a new version setting the pricing things like that all happens in the browser anyway so you’re already in the browser so that’s the that’s the most popular one because believe it or not most people don’t know how to program and for them you know learning learning how to write in plain text in itself it’s funny I mean our internal joke or the joke in the wider bookwriting world I guess is like everybody knows how to use Microsoft word but they’re afraid of plain text and one of those is actually Mar more far more scary than the other yeah indeed yeah and I as a technical writer and a software developer I do love that yeah writing a book is actually yeah writing code markdown

[30:15] Format and just using it what you said is so everyone can use lean pup for free so you can generate from your sources or from what you do online as a p PF so you don’t have to sell you the book that you generate with leanpub on leanpub isn’t that a bit against your own shop that you’re promoting your tool as it’s the best tool to write a book and then go whever you want to sell it so what you can do is you can sign up for an account on leanpub you can write a whole book on leanpub you can use all the sort of like book writing features that we have you can click a button and produce a PDF at an UB from that you can even click a button and produce a print ready PDF output format document that you need for going on sites like Amazon KDP and Lulu to create print books you can do all that for free we do have paid now so with respect to the business interest we do have paid accounts so like that’s the sort of free version then there’s the standard version which you have to pay a little bit for there’s a pro version which you have to pay a little bit more for we have monthly and annual and then

[31:19] Lifetime plans for that so there is there’s a certain number of people certain proportion of people who sign up for the free thing and they go up to the paid tier for a little while if they need some sort some of those paid services for example Google analytics you know that’s if you’ve got your book published on lean Pub you might want to pay for that but the basic idea from a sort of self-interested view is that if you’re writing your book on lean Pub and you’re publishing it elsewhere all you have to do is go click that publish button and your book is up on our website and you’re making 80% royalties on every sale and that is basically going to be higher than anywhere else that you’re publishing your book to probably quite a bit higher like on Amazon it varies from I think like 35 to 70% or something like that book self-publishing platforms I think we’re the I mean someone will hear this and they’ll go Google it for two seconds and find an alternative but like we’re basically the only one that does higher than 70% or so as a self-publishing you know dedicated sort

[32:20] Of book website there are of course the super pro kind of content creators who go on gum Road and things like that and they might you know they might never pay us a dime but if they’re using lean Pub for their book publishing and writing things you know we’re a part of their we’re part of their content creation world and that’s very important to us and we’re happy to provide them with a service for free that they can use to go make money elsewhere we learned something from every author that uses lean Pub anyway you know they if they have a problem they can contact us and we can improve our service so everything’s everything’s good for us if people use our site even if they don’t pay us or don’t publish on our bookstore yeah I think you said the magical word about lean pup is the 80% so if I sell a book on lean pup I get 80% of the royalties which is huge Believe It or Not There are controversies in the book publishing world particularly around you know what books cost how much the publisher gets there’s very much less controversy about how much the author gets than

[33:19] There should be but that’s exactly what you’re describing here you know you go into the a conventional bookstore in the past and you pay €40 for a book and if the author’s getting €2 from that author had a good deal in the past 38 of your Euros are going elsewhere in the conventional situation and obviously ebooks you know cost less to produce and distribute than than print books do which is one of the reasons that ebooks typically pay authors a higher kind of royalty rate than than print books do but you know mentioning the other thing the other great thing I mean you know the fact that you can update your book anytime the fact that someone can like I mean it’s pretty magical in the world books right that you can publish a book and someone can like email you and be like there’s a typo on page 72 and you’re like oh thanks and you can go like if you’re using something like leanpub you can go fix it in your fix it on GitHub you know and type the publish button on leanpub and within like a minute everyone around the world can download the updated version of that book with

[34:18] The typo corrected because somebody sitting on a beach in Thailand noticed it and decided to send you an email so that’s amazing and yeah with respect going back to the pricing thing too I mean the these connections between authors and readers that are enabled by the higher royalty rate actually are very interesting at least to me so on lean Pub when you pay you choose what to pay and we show a pricing slider so it starts at a suggested price you can slide it left to the minimum price that the author set and then you can slide it right if you want to pay more and support the author more but underneath that we show I mean we might be the only site in the world that does this again please Google it and find the Alternatives but we show an author earn slider as well no one else does that because if you saw if you went into a book shop and you were like pay 40 EUR the author will get two EUR you’re not going to show that author earns €2 from your purchase because you’re going to be starting asking all kinds of questions about where else does the money go but since Lea pays 80%

[35:14] Royalties like we had people as soon as we did that and that was like 10 years ago at least people started paying funny prices and we’re like why are they doing that oh it’s cuz they’re dragging the author earns slider and they’re like yeah I think the author I want to give the author $10 for this book I want to give the author $20 for this book and then what the actual price was you know $12 or $24 or something like that and yeah so people people decide how much they want the author to get for the book and believe it or not there are people who will get a book for free if it’s got a minimum price of free and come back and pay for another copy later if they’re like oh boy this is a really good book the author actually deserves deserves some money for this or they they’ll buy a second copy for a higher price as a kind of tip yeah and now I understand why I indeed got some funny sales prices on my book so probably someone aimed for € 15 or something like that for the yeah yeah yeah how much do you earn on writing a book when I started writing book I was contacted by a publisher so that’s where

[36:13] The ID grew he said you won’t become rich from writing a book that was the first thing he said to me you do it for your reputation to learn more yourself but actually yeah of course you spend a lot of work on writing a book so you hope to earn a bit is writing a technical book a good ide just looking at it financially I would venture to say typically yes it is a good idea financially because a it’s it’s true like it don’t write a book if you’re if you need to make money from it don’t don’t do that un unless you already have a huge kind of following and even if you do I mean this was in the news last year but like you know I won’t name the person but like are the two people there were two very famous pop stars who came up with books not too long ago that made like $60,000 and these are people who don’t just have name recognition and millions of fans around the world they’ve got like publishing company with all the interests in the world in doing it and people just didn’t buy their books so it doesn’t matter who you are you know don’t don’t write a book if you need if

[37:22] You need to make money from it if you need to make money you might want to do directly from sales of something you might want to do something else but things have changed a lot in the last few years partly because of ebooks and self-publishing and self-publishing becoming a lot more conventional thing to do you know it used to be seen as like oh that was the you couldn’t get a real publisher so you self-published those days are kind of there’s still some 10% of people who feel that way but those days are basically behind us everybody knows the idea of like producing something that people want to cons consume to use the sort of you know not the most nicest term in the world but like you know if you make a video that people want to watch and it’s 10 seconds long they’re going to like it and they’re you know you’re going to maybe be able to make money from that if you write a book that people want to watch or want to watch want to read they can you know you’ve got a global audience now that you can do that from writing a book will hone your thinking about whatever you’re

[38:18] Writing about writing a book will prove to other people that you know what you’re talking about so any and wherever you are in your career if you write a book it’s probably going to be good for you that way if you’re a consultant having a book out there is like a calling card things like that but the thing is you can make anywhere from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars writing and Publishing even a technical book I mean you know some of our most popular books you wouldn’t you wouldn’t like in terms of money earned you wouldn’t know it by looking at them but like these are the kinds of if you write the kind of book that there’s people out there with a budget who need it and you have any facility whatsoever at reaching them you actually can make a kind of decent a decent amount of money from a lean well from a self-published book nowadays but yes your P I mean you know if your publisher is paying you $2 on or two EUR on $40 sales they’re definitely correct that you’re not going to be making a lot of money if they said $36 or if they said $32 of A40 sale the math

[39:24] Changes a lot and when you think about all the other benefits that you get you know if you if you can write a book and you can make if you think about it if you write a book that’s worth $20 and you can sell 5,000 copies you know you’ve made 80 grand on lean Pub and making 80 grand with a book in the past would have been very very difficult and now if you can reach if you can reach with a $10 book or $20 book if you can reach I’m doing my math in my head but if you can reach like a few thousand people you can actually justify it to your family which might be the most important sort of investor group you need to convince of your project one argument Pro Publishers traditional Publishers is the marketing they say they do the marketing they promote your book I know from experience that’s a bit exaggerated because it’s still hard to sell technical books they’re no longer in the shops so you have to find an audience that’s one thing you do also with lean pup with u with newsletters and stuff like that and discount codes what are good ways to Market a

[40:41] Book a technical book how do you let the world know that you have written a book as hard as writing a book is as timec consuming it is and as hard as it is I should say to write a good one at the end of all that you’ve still got to go out there and get eyeballs and wallets basically and that’s that’s a that’s a different whatever you wrote about your book about almost certainly that’s a different skill from what it took to write your book and every author faces this the if you’re self-publishing a book the marketing that you need to do isn’t all that much different from the marketing you need to do if you get published by a conventional publisher nowadays or even going back 10 years it’s been a long time I mean you know Twitter SLX has been around since like 200 I don’t know 9 or seven or something like that and like when that kind of platform took off you know authors even even well-known authors would walk into Publishers offices and the Publishers would be like what are you going to do to market the book and they’re like what do you know at a certain point what do I need you for

[41:46] The number one thing is to write a book you can’t you can’t sell a book that you haven’t written so that’s that sounds silly but like actually it’s true have some content out that you’re trying to sell give it an expressive title is the conventional kind of wisdom as well explore the titles of other books in your area that are currently kind of selling well make the title searchable is important that might sound obvious but it’s actually kind of tricky the other thing is that you want to if you’re if you’re on a platform like lean Pub have things at your disposal like coupon sales for example so on lean Pub you can create discount coupon links so what you can do is then you can go on social media and you can be like hey for the next 24 hours 10% off my book or 50% off my book or something like that so once you’ve got your book written once it’s been published once it’s got a good title and either way a good cover to you know give people confidence that it’s good having setting your price at a level where you’ll be able to set it at a discount and make money that

[42:57] Something to keep in mind that like the headline number you might not actually expect to sell a lot at that amount but if you can tell people 50% off with this discount sale or something like that that’s a really tried andrue way way of selling books and getting attention another really important thing if you’re writing a technical book is to try and sell it at conferences basically you want to be you don’t want to be spamming people you don’t want to come across as as as sleazy or anything like that if you written a really good technical book and you’re talking at a technical conference you’re not sleazy don’t worry there’s no way you are at that point and but using the for example what you could do is you can offer the book at a discount to the conference organizers and say like I want to give everybody at the conference 50% off my book or something like that here like for free I’m not going to charge you the conference to give this swag away so you can do things like that having this is sort of like I speak from experience hard to succeed

[43:59] At but if you have a popular YouTube channel using that like breaking down your book into different chapters or even different like 30 second short segments and just getting Comfort comfortable being in front of your computer or whatever device and doing short segments and Publishing like if you if you’ve written the book you can probably break it down into like a couple 100 short little 30second videos and if you just publish one a day you know for a year or something like that kind of thing can really help get you attention because people might not buy it on the 10th video they might not buy it on the 20th but they might buy it on the hundredth kind of thing so write the book number one publish it have a good title have a good cover and set the price at a level that you can offer people discounts and try try selling it to conferences you can also try this is a little bit trickier but like you can try make sure that you make a kind of team addition so like buy 10 copies for your team kind of thing which is also something that you can do on lean

[45:06] Pub sort of set up multi multi copy discount packages kind of thing so those are the most important things to do yeah definitely and then just remember that like you’re going to have to do the marketing it’s no fun to hear that but you are going to have to do it yourself and that also highlights the point that writing a book is actually not only writing it’s indeed you become a marketeer you become someone responsible for handling the payments it’s also a good thing that the service like clean pup handles all the invoicing stuff because selling across the world involves a lot of different tax systems and refundings and so please search for a service that handles all these kind of things because I driven my accountant crazy with a few Amazon sales I’ve done across different countries and each having a different tax system so I know that is also a very big pain point so yeah that’s just I could talk about that forever too that’s a that’s a big debate in the self-publishing world should you use a platform like like lean Pub or Amazon KDP or something like that

[46:16] Or should you just build your own website and it’s like I can tell you from experience you know you might want to handle people asking for refunds and you might might not you might want to handle all the customer support for your product and you might not if if you want to be in the world of customer support and payments handling you know I am but you might not want to be if what you really want to do is focus on publishing your book and building an audience for it and for yourself yeah I think like services like lemon squeezy and polar sh can handle that kind of stuff if you’re selling digital Goods but indeed they solve the same problem that you don’t become responsible for invoices and calculating the tax per country and handling refunding so indeed that’s a very big if you’re already suffering from writing the book and marketing the book you don’t want to suffer from all these other things yeah and that’s that’s that’s the value that platforms like lean Pub and other ones provide right you know if somebody runs into a problem with their

[47:26] Lean Pub purchase just we’ve got you know over 1,200 articles published in our help center for them to search for example you know like we turn every customer interaction into basically a public facing help document you know just that’s just a pick one example of what we do out of The Ether and like you know that that’s not that’s very that is very hard to get right because you’ve got people from all around the world with all kinds of interests and all kinds of states of mind encountering the same problem and like figuring out how to let them either not encounter the problem in the first place or how to solve it themselves if they do is an art unto itself and unless you want to get into it I enjoy it but unless you want to get into it yourself yeah you’re probably better off with respect to time just letting letting a platform take care of that for you okay one final question imagine I do want to become rich from writing a book you have a ton of different categories on lean pup so I guess technical is probably not the most selling category of them what other category could I pick to write a book

[48:30] About so actually the bestselling books on lean Pub are technical Books Okay this is partly because historically lean Pub was I say I’m the non-technical kind of co-founder lean Pub was built by programmers so it was hard for ordinary people to use which is the kind of one of the sort of like you know sort of you know be a little bit self-critical reasons that programmers are write the bestselling books on Lea but it’s also because they can be updated and programmers are accustomed to like if they can if they can contact the author or something like that and get something fixed in their programming book they can like hit their goal that they need to get something done by tomorrow more easily so our model is just very suited to that kind of user but if you don’t want to write a programming book the next best thing to do is basically it’s sort of like business books are basically our second bestselling category I would say things about you know like obviously sort of coming down from the sort of like or coming up whichever direction you want to go from

[49:34] Programming to Agile and scrum and you know all those kinds of Frameworks and things like that you might have heard of but yeah business books are very popular on lean Pub and one of the reasons is that the audience for them is people who you know have it in their mind that like if I can read this book this can help me at what I’m what I’m doing and help me make more money and help me satisfy the needs of my customers better like genuinely improve things for me and other people in the business context so those kinds of books are the second bestselling books on leub the another reason too is that since leub is a self-publishing platform we attract independent-minded people this might be people who’ve you know gone with conventional Publishers before or like you know worked for you know big companies or something like that but often a lot of lean Pub authors are people who are like you know what I’m going to go my own way and they become independent Consultants and then having books out on your topic your business kind of topic and expertise is like I said like it’s a

[50:33] Really great it’s the modern day calling card basically like here’s here’s a here’s a copy of my book whether it’s an actual physical copy that you give someone at a conference or after a meeting send to somebody or you know give them a link to in an email like here’s a free get a free copy of my book here those those are the second best in terms of both reach and income whim the blower has has over 25 years of experience with Java development and he wrote several books Let’s see what we can learn from his book Adventures the very first book I wrote was a mini book for infoq that was about spring Boot and rest apis practical guide to building rest API with spring boot it’s called and then that was published through infoq and not self-published and then I wrote a book which I did myself the whole time was taming time Leaf so about spring Boot and time leaf and then I did a third book about HDMX modern fronts with HDMX that’s uses spring boot timely and then the addition of HDMX what is the main goal for you of writing a book is it learning yourself sharing what you’ve learned

[51:51] Evolving your career all of the above well I was already writing a Blog for a long time with the main goal of sharing knowledge and remembering what I did before and doing these kind of things and then it was possible through infoq to start with the book and it was a mini book so it had to be around 100 pages and I was thinking like yeah maybe I can do that 100 pages that should be fine and that worked out quite nicely which was nice get some some really nice feedback on that and then I did a lot of projects with Tim leave at the time and I wanted to consolidate all the knowledge I had instead of like going back to Old projects like how did I do that exactly again and share that knowledge and out of my notes I had yeah the book grew and then in the end I published it on leanpub because I knew from other developers that had published like that and I want to try that and I was hoping to like sell 50 maybe and but yeah it were it was a bit bigger than than can you say that you earn back the time that you spent on writing the book with the

[53:19] Earnings of the book I know that’s a very hard question but that’s a very hard question but we maybe it’s about Break Even I guess also with the thing is with which I really like about lean pup and I think as an author when you publish on lean pup you should also take that into consideration is the expectation that you keep your book up to date I think that’s one of the strengths of lean pup people buy the book once and they get all the updates in the future as well and I think in our profession things change so rapidly you canot like I did write a book I don’t know how many years ago now three or four years maybe and then yeah not updated anymore because it gets out of date so quickly and people that would buy my book now like the first version of taming time Le they would be lost because yeah nothing would work out of the box anymore so I make it like an owner case or how do you say it to make sure everything stays up to date with the latest Boot and time yeah so actually people who buy the ebook actually buy some kind of subscription to get the latest version yeah yeah yeah maybe maybe like that so

[54:36] You published your books on lepup ebooks but I’ve seen that on your website that you also published them now as a paperbook through Lulu what’s your experience what with Lulu what do they actually offer as a service to self-publishing authors like you yeah so here you can I can show you this is my book and this is the other book so it’s really cool to have it like physically that’s that’s very nice but what Lulu does is basically you upload the interior PDF and then the cover PDF they have a very easy to use website that’s that’s quite convenient then you need to order one copy and then you approve the copy and then you can put the link on your website and people order and they print when it’s ordered so people order on lulu.com and they will receive the book they pay and then I get some royalties out of that you can set the prices for you can set it in Euro and US dollar you can set different prices there that’s quite nice what you also can do but that’s a bit more difficult is you can publish on Amazon as well through Lulu but I have to say that worked fine

[55:57] Like a few years ago I did it with taming time Leaf but now if I want to publish updates I it’s very difficult because there are a lot of rules now that you have to follow they are a bit unclear and I already tried two times to publish to Amazon and it just each time I get a different error and then you have to republish and in the end I didn’t do it anymore and just put it on my website and directly sell through Lulu and the PDF that you use for Lulu is generated on lean pup correct well I’m not using the lean pup markdown system although probably if you’re starting to write a book now it’s probably the easiest but I’m using idok and the OS doctor tool chain and I generate like my ebook out of it and I also generate the print version which is quite nice with ID do like in the eBook The Links are re links you can click on the PDF if you tell it I want to generate a paper book then it will create footnotes out of that so that’s and also the format is different like the ebook is A4 format and this is small is like okay yeah yeah book so asky doctor brings that

[57:13] That’s really convenient as a developer is it easy to get started with writing I think it could be easier and I also had had to find my way a bit now I have a fairly good system especially with ID do where you can insert Snippets from the actual code so what I do is I have for each chapter I have directories in my git repo where I also have my book contents but I also have like each project at each phase because taming time Le is like building a project from start to finish and then in each stage I have directories and I can include from that directory for that chapter that directory from that chapter so that’s convenient while you’re writing it’s a bit less convenient if you upgrade to a new spring boot version because you have to like update the same program like 10 15 20 times because of all the subdirectories each have the full project in different states maybe things could have could be a bit easier but once I you have the setup with I use the intellig Ido plugin as well that really helps a lot you have spell checking there you have the git div so using git is really I don’t think I could have written the

[58:28] Book If I had to use word or anything especially not keeping up to date and all these things I know that there’s a lot of time that you need to spend on a book and writing a book would you do it again or are you doing it again already well I now have three books already that’s already quite a lot my intention is to focus more on YouTube to kind of promote the things I’m telling in the book to wider audience but for now I don’t have any any ID yet for a book so I’m not saying I would never write a book again but there has to be like the need or the ID with HDMX it was just such a nice technology and I wanted to show people yeah you can build really very nice things with HDMX and for me there it was more like also for myself to learn more about HDMX and what I learned I wrote down in the book M and now I it’s also a nice combination with the taming time leave which is more aim to beginners and then the htx more to Advanced people and people can switch from one book to another it’s it’s nice combo there did the book in some way or the books in some way influence your career did you

[59:47] Get new jobs other jobs because of it jobs not so much but I did get to speak at spring iio and Devo and I strongly believe without the books that probably would not have happened Marian Varga has more experience with Java development than writing books as he is finishing his first book it will be published soon and he is working with a publisher so he is the ideal guest to tell us about how to write a book for a publisher with multiple authors I together with other authors are writing a book mastering restful web services with Java it is about implementing web services or apis with Java and Integrations and apis is an important aspect of software development that is often times doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves so with this book I want to help other other professionals to do these things better we try to go into details on very different aspects of API design and implementation including testing performance evolution of apis versioning maintenance and so on so when I started working in software engineering I also always paid attention to apis to

[1:01:40] Integrations how to put some modules together basically to combine things that maybe originally weren’t planned to be together but if you connect them you can get some additional value you can create some synergies so that has always fascinated me and after all these years of my career and experience I started realizing it’s not enough just to code and solve technical problems many times it’s much more important important to be able to communicate and to work with people actually and one part of that is sharing what you know or share share your thoughts sh because developers they usually solve a lot of problems and they spend a lot of time thinking about those problems but it is also important to share what those thoughts not just the result and code that’s why you decided to write book so you want to share your knowledge and your experience and what you’ve learned how far are we in writing this book is it something you’re is nearly finished well it is very close to be finished our book has 12 chapters and 11 of them are already written

[1:03:26] One is still being written and maybe around three others are in a review process so there are some pending improvements changes and some ping pong between us and the reviewers MH so I am pretty optimistic about it being finished but that also depends on the whole process how fast goes because there are many people involved so it’s not just about me so you decided to do to not self-publish but go through a publisher and you have different authors that means that you have a whole team of authors reviewers than the publisher who will make a book out of it and really sell a physical book why did you prefer to not self-publish I guess being with different authors is one of them I like to write but I don’t don’t have experience with all the other stuff that’s connected like the layout of the book marketing distribution and all all these other stuff and also when you’re writing a book you’re putting a lot of effort in it you want to make sure sure that there are people who will read it and that’s that’s again even even the title of the

[1:05:04] Book or the main topic of the book is something that is very hard to choose and in this respect I think it’s it’s good that I heard about this opportunity that publishing company is interested in publishing book it wasn’t exactly specified but there was some base idea of what it should be about and it as it was about apis and Java it was very much aligned with my experience so I thought okay now is it’s it’s it’s the it’s a great opportunity to try writing a book and still to have the support of people who are experienced in the process and who can ensure that it really happens and that there will be some people who will be able to read the book to be clear so you can’t just start writing a book you have a good idea you just start writing and then you search for a publisher but indeed some of these Publishers have a list of these are potential IDs we know that there is a demand for this subject and they search for authors for this IDs and that’s probably what happened with you that they came up with we are looking for authors for to fill in this Gap in our

[1:06:46] List of books correct well yes and it’s important to be able to communicate and to have some people you talk with I got into a group of people who were trying to share their knowledge how does this practically go so you’re working with different authors on the same topic your different chapters are you all working on different word files or how does this process go and how do you deliver then your book or your chapters to the publisher our project is not very different from a typical software project actually because our book is like a source code of a an application and it is divided into chapters which are like some modules and yeah as we are multiple authors we decided to split the chapters it’s not even because we are five authors and 12 chapters so there was like two and a half chapter per author so it’s not there are no like hard lines but there some chapters have like some main owner mhm but at the same time we assigned two more o of the co-authors who were like the main reviewers for the chapter they were especially the ones who are the

[1:08:28] Authors of the following chapter so that there is some like consistency and flow of the whole book of course we are free to review any chapter of the book and me personally I did contribute to Al also chapters that I wasn’t assign signed or that I wasn’t like the main reviewer reviewer of but if I saw that there was something that I could add to the chapter then I wrote some some section that explained something that I thought was important so you’ve written a few of these chapters for this book can you did you keep track of how many time you’ve spent on it exact L when I was writing the chapters that I was responsible for the amount of time was much higher comparing to the other time when I was maybe just checking what the other authors wrote or when I was just addressing the reviews review comments from the reviewers so in this peak period I spent 15 hours per per per week on the book which was quite a lot because of course I have a fulltime job so it was a little bit more work than usual but it was like maybe for to Total that was for maybe one

[1:10:18] Month and then it was the intensity of work was lower so when I was creating the content that I was fully responsible for then it was like maybe like a third of a full-time job so you’re writing working on this book yeah that’s something you do by yourself on your own on your computer where do you get feedback of what should be in the book I created now it’s is a mailing list but it can evolve into something more interactive in the future but basically I have this web page called love to integrate.com with two written as a digit and there I ask some people to register if they’re interested in the topics of integration and apis and for those who register I send regular U mailing newsletter so to say where I share what’s going on with our book how it’s progressing sharing some some excerpts from the book and also interesting ideas from the integration and generally connection area that because not everything can be in the book of course we had to somehow put some boundaries to the scope what is your main goal of

[1:12:16] Contributing to this book is it just sharing your knowledge do you want to advance your career maybe even with it what is the main goal for yourself of contrib buting to this book I do like to share knowledge but it’s also connected to the career because that’s what I learned over time that after you reach senior software engineer level actually adding more to your technical skills doesn’t grow you so much and it is much more efficient or effective to add more to the skills and experience in the people stuff in communicating and sharing maybe also realizing what your focus is so that you don’t chase everything because it’s not possible to go into every detail in every area so that’s that’s also and currently I am working as a freelance developer and as such I switch project and I look for new customers and for that it’s also very important to have something public that you can let people refer to show that you have some impact so that’s like connected that’s like natural development of the career for

[1:14:11] Me that I not only deliver stuff that I am directly paid for but I also do something extra to be part of a community and to produce some some stuff some content that’s useful to the broader Community I think it’s clear by now that writing a book will probably not make you rich but it will definitely help you in your career if you want to move on and start writing then pick the right tools luckily as a developer you can use a lot of your existing git and code documentation writing skills and produce a goodlook book by yourself if you want to self-publish reserve enough time and make sure your family supports your ID to become an author thanks to my guests for sharing their experience thank you for listening please subscribe to the Foojay podcast in your app or on YouTube keep an eye on Foojay for future articles and podcasts about development and everything related to the Java world see you give me a food give me a j give me the friends of OpenJDK