John Resig and I recently self-published our book on GraphQL. There are tons of how-tos for self-publishing a book, or even online classes, but very little in the way of why you would want to, or whether it’s even worth your while. I’m going to share my experience and revenue numbers with you in this post, as well as those from others who have self-published material. I’ll go specifically into the pros and cons of self-publishing books and courses in tech.

This is probably what you’re most curious about, right? When I originally started working on our book, I sent a book proposal to publishers. But by the time John and I joined forces, we were both set on self-publishing. He had written two popular JavaScript books and a blog post about traditional publishing for programming books, which includes:

On the topic of traditional publishing revenue, Randall Kanna says: “Nothing comes from a tech book. Just the credibility.” A book can make significantly more, but it’s rare. Martin Kleppmann’s book on machine learning was O’Reilly’s second most popular seller in 2019, and he made $478,000 in the first three years (with 108,000 copies sold, a 10% royalty on print sales, and a 25% royalty on digital sales).

The Pragmatic Bookshelf is the outlying publisher when it comes to royalties: it gives authors 50% of gross profit. In their first 10 years operating, 42% of their authors made more than $50,000, and 12% made more than $100,000.

That said, self-publishing has much higher royalty rates:

This gives authors the potential to make more money. Discover Meteor was probably the most successful self-published programming book of its time, with around $500,000 in sales (9,000 copies) between 2013 (when they launched) and 2018 (when they made it available for free). The authors Sacha Grief and Tom Coleman put a lot of effort into marketing it (described in their Gumroad case study), and it became the recommended learning resource in the Meteor community. The current best-selling book is Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger’s Refactoring UI, which I believe passed $2 million in 2020! 🤑 Their success was also largely due to their ability to market the book, in addition to addressing a significant need for a broad audience (practical user interface design for front-end developers).

That’s books. Looking at publishing video courses, there are a few options:

Like self-published books, self-published courses have a lot of potential. Level Up Tutorials, Kent C. Dodds, and Wes Bos don’t share revenue numbers for their courses, but I’m assuming they have made considerable sums. Wes, for example, has sold his courses to over 140,000 people at the time of writing!

Those are the outliers, of course. The majority of resources out there make significantly less. Take, for example, the self-published books in the GraphQL space that we were entering:

So, yes, the potential is big. But it’s not a guarantee.

These pros and cons are for books. If you’re wondering about a breakdown of pros and cons specifically for self-published courses, they’re very similar because they face the same opportunities and challenges.

This is the big question. And while I wish I could give you a definitive answer one way or the other, it’s always going to be the same answer we love to give in tech: it depends.

Why would you want to self-publish a book or course? Here are some reasons:

Those are the reasons why you might want to self-publish material. But whether you should actually do it depends on:

For me, while writing a book had an opportunity cost of lower income (compared to doing more consulting work), I’ve made a positive impact, increased my knowledge on a subject I care about, gained reputation, and enjoyed the process. And it also feels great when someone goes out of their way to tell me they’re “blown away” and appreciate reading my book. 😃🤗✨

, Mandi Wise, Sebastian Grebe, Julian Mayorga, and Rachel Lake for providing input for this article.

Source: Css-tricks.com

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