This past week I was contacted by a publisher to write a technical book on an open source technology. Since writing a book is on my list of lifetime goals, I decided to send him an outline along with the typical new writer questions. These questions included:
- What are the expectations of me?
- What are the expectations of the book?
- How many copies did the last version of the book sell? (this was a upgrade book)
- What is the timeline for the project?
- …etc
Unfortunately, I never got a response to my questions so I’m assuming either my outline sucked or the editor didn’t want to answer my questions. Since my pride wants me to believe the latter 
, I started doing some research on what the average sales of technical books were in 2008/2009. I’m in the middle of building an iPhone application so I wasn’t sure if I wanted to put that on hold for the long nights of writing a technical book.
So far it is very difficult to find good numbers on the average sales of technical books. According to one article on the state of the computer market (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-25.html), the market has been on decline since mid 2008. While there are some hot pockets in technology where a book MAY be profitable, entering a declining market is usually not a good idea.
We all know that the iPhone application market is on the rise but there is not much information on ACTUAL SALES of individual iPhone applications. Yes there are 85,000 applications but how much money does one expect to make from the sale of his ONE application. Tracking reviews times the cost of the application is one method to consider. However it is a poor method since most people don’t review applications. Personally I have reviewed none of the ones I downloaded.
So the question of the day is, do you think one should write a technical book on one of the hot open source technologies or write an iPhone application for sale in the Apple Store? I’m continuing my quest for the latter for now.
Go for the app first – so you can get it on your resume. Then do teh book.
I’ve been in the Mac business for 17 years – Clay Anders, the executive editor of APRESS tried to do the exact same thing to me – he asked me to write an outline all the while pretending to want to hire me to write a book. I kept expanding the outline and he kept asking me for more. The final red flag came when he said “Provide the names and titles of all books you have read which taught you how to do this” – in other words, he wanted me to show them how to write the book but to have one of his clickish other writers in his pool do the actual writing. He was just trying to pump me for FREE infomation. Beware of tech publishers! They will try to steal your knowledge. If you want to write a book, do it yourself in secret, copyright it first, then pitch it to publishers. If you copyright it and then someone steals it, you can sue them and prevent it from being stolen.
Good point Mike. I had a lawyer friend check out the contract I got from one publisher and the fine print is kind of ridiculous. They want all rights and want you to follow their rules in editing while making you responsible for liabilities they may incur and paying you very little money! Doesn’t sound like a fair deal to me.