michael_nielsen

If authors could make 10x-100x what they do from books, that might be possible. Author income surveys vary quite a bit, but even among people published by major publishers, very very few exceed more than a few $10k per year of work on a book.

Ebooks/etc for technical authors have a much healthier curve, although for the amount of risk/business savvy ventured doesn’t earn a huge premium over software engineering. (Can be done from anywhere though, which many friends take advantage of.)

My impression is that meat-and-potatoes execution on the playbook, and it is a playbook, gets about one $40k launch for a book which took 6 to 16 weeks to write.

As nearly as I can tell, the issue is one of quality. In most areas, a good book will take a 1-5 years of fulltime work to write. My guess is that for @Austen's original wish to be fulfilled requires on the high end of that, usually 3+ years.

Of course, the books you're talking about can be very useful, & written quite quickly. But they're not the Wright Bros bio...

I have a hypothesis that the future of writing is self publishing. If you can eliminate the 80-90% a publisher captures it’s relatively easy to sell enough copies to make, say, $100k/book. (I self published my book and made more than 99% of authors)

You offered "3,000+ Tech PR contacts!" with your book. Where did you source these contacts? Did they allow their contact to be used in the book, or was this a public aggregation? Do you think that played a big role in selling your book at $100 a pop?