Writing a book. Does it make you rich and famous? (#67)

Let me share a personal story. I started experimenting with Java on a Raspberry Pi about five years ago 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 six months in a row, every evening and a lot of weekends. But the moment I received the box with my author copies was an incredible feeling. Holding a paper book with your name is a special moment.

Fast forward to now. The 1000 paper copies are sold out. I have the last 10 copies in case you still want one ;-) But as I self-published the ebook, it's still for sale on Leanpub, and I keep updating it. That's one of the first significant differences between publishing a paper book and an ebook…. As an author, I got about 2 euros per paper book from the publisher, and LeanPub 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 was one of the 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 writing:

Marián Varga is finishing a book and tells about publishing a book with a publisher.

Wim Deblauwe wrote a few books and has much experience with self-publishing.

Len Epp is the co-founder of Leanpub, so he can tell us a lot about ebooks.

And we start with Trisha Gee, who wrote a lot of books!

Guests
   Trisha Gee
      https://www.linkedin.com/in/trishagee/
      https://jvm.social/@trisha_gee 
      https://bsky.app/profile/trishagee.bsky.social
      https://x.com/trisha_gee 
   Len Epp
      https://www.linkedin.com/in/lenepp/
      https://bsky.app/profile/lenepp.bsky.social
      https://x.com/lenepp
   Wim Deblauwe
      https://www.linkedin.com/in/wimdeblauwe/ 
      https://bsky.app/profile/wimdeblauwe.com  
      https://www.youtube.com/@WimDeblauwe  
      https://www.wimdeblauwe.com/ 
      https://www.widit.be/  
   Marián Varga
      https://www.dastalvi.com/book/ 
      https://www.linkedin.com/in/mari%C3%A1n-varga-4869a042/ 
      https://mastodon.social/@mrvarga 

Links

   Book by Frank
      https://webtechie.be/books/ 
      https://leanpub.com/gettingstartedwithjavaontheraspberrypi/ 
   Books and links by Trisha Gee
      https://trishagee.com/books/
      https://trishagee.com/2022/12/12/tools-and-processes-for-collaborating-on-a-book-remotely/
      https://trishagee.com/2022/12/01/writing-a-book-is-hard/
      https://medium.com/97-things
      https://youtu.be/RzaNJzz5jW8
      https://learning.oreilly.com/search/?q=trisha%20gee&rows=100&language=en&language=es
   Books by Wim Deblauwe
      https://www.infoq.com/minibooks/spring-boot-api-backend-version2/  
      https://www.wimdeblauwe.com/books/modern-frontends-with-htmx  
      https://www.wimdeblauwe.com/books/taming-thymeleaf/  
   Book by Marián Varga
      https://www.dastalvi.com/book/  
      https://bsky.app/profile/love2integrate.com 
   Leanpub
      https://www.youtube.com/leanpub 
      https://twitter.com/leanpub
      https://mastodon.social/@leanpub
      https://www.instagram.com/leanpub
      https://bsky.app/profile/leanpub.bsky.social 
   Lulu
      https://www.lulu.com/  

Content

00:00 Introduction of the topic and guests

01:53 Books by Trisha Gee
02:24 Trisha's motivation for writing books
04:13 Difference between publisher and self-publishing
09:53 Publishers are looking for authors and course creators
12:55 How long do you work on a book?
17:35 Can we expect a new book by Trisha?
21:00 Automating the writing process

24:50 Len Epp about Leanpub and how it started
27:18 On Leanpub, you can publish a book-in-progress
27:51 Different publishing processes with Leanpub
30:20 You can use LeanPub to generate your book, but you don't need to sell it on Leanpub
32:57 80% of the selling price goes to the author
40:09 How to market your book
45:35 Let an expert handle the payments...

50:55 Books by Wim Deblauwe
51:45 Wim's motivation for writing books
53:15 Earning back the time spent on the writing
54:37 How to sell paper books on Lulu
57:19 Tools used to write a book
58:34 Wim's author-plans for the future
59:42 How the books influenced Wim's career

01:00:02 Marián Varga about the topic of his book
01:03:07 Current status of the book
01:04:03 The book is a teamwork with a publisher
01:07:06 Organizing the work between multiple authors
01:09:17 Time worked on the book
01:10:40 Feedback from the community for the content
01:12:13 What Marián wants to achieve with the book

01:14:38 Conclusion