Peter Cooper

My Programming Book Profits

As John Resig decided to post his statement showing his book sales and profits, I decided to stand on the shoulders of giants and follow in his brave footsteps. Above is the 9 month statement for my book, Beginning Ruby. I won’t go over all of John’s points as he puts them a lot better than I could, but you definitely don’t write a book for the money, it’s more about the experience, the prestige, and the ability to put something cool on your résumé. In my case it was also to help cement some knowledge I’d attained and to see whether I could actually write a good book or not (the reviews at Amazon tell you the ending to that story - effectively it’s the best book at doing what it does in its niche).

A couple of things confuse me about my statement in particular. That is, I believe the contract says they can only take 25% of royalties within a certain period as reserve for the period, yet my reserves ride well over 25% for each period. Secondly, I’m not sure why I’m getting 30% taken off for “withholding” since I declared I have no US financial interests and do not pay any taxes there. I’m investigating these issues and we shall see. In any case, I’m not doing it for money, as the numbers curtly demonstrate.

I have reason to believe 4th quarter 2007 should have higher sales than the 2nd or 3rd quarters, so hopefully the book will hit 5000 sales overall. I’d deem that a semi-success in a market as tiny as Ruby’s and certainly no failure. The biggest lesson I’ve learnt, however, is that if you have the audience and the ability to put books together yourself (even just PDF ones), you can make a killing doing it all yourself. Keeping 100% of $20 per book is better than 10% of $20 net, even if the sales are quartered. The irony here, however, is that Ruby Inside was created as a promotional vehicle for the book..

It has to be said, though, that Apress are a great publisher and the team they provide is superb. The level of quality in their project management, editorial staff, copy checkers, and so forth, is so high that you’d be nuts to self publish unless you were extremely confident of living up to the high standards that competing publishers do.

Wow! I thought authors of these tech books would have received more. I suppose it depends on how many are sold.

Would you consider doing another book?

I purchased your book a while back and it’s a great reference book!

Good to see I’m not too far behind you! Although I sold even less ebooks than you - I was pretty shocked about the number (or rather, lack thereof) of ebooks sold. My first quarter I sold only 10!

Interesting entry. Still got my signed copy waiting for me?

This is great, juicy stuff.

I think once one has a blog with 20,000+ RSS subscribers, it’s pretty much a license to print money. =) (in regards to the rockstar ebook seller)

I think there is a lot more to WHY someone should write a book than the couple of reasons you have given, especially in your case.

As you know, ‘her in doors’, knew nothing at all about programming or computer logic. Thanks to your book, she’s starting to get a real knack for understanding it, and hopefully will be quite talented soon.

To be able to ‘teach the unteachable’ takes great talent.

I’m not sure how to say this, but reading that invoice makes me very glad that I’ve gone the independent publishing route (both for myself and for the authors who write for me).

I feel quite happy now that I downloaded your book for absolutely nothing from a torrent site. Neither you, nor your publisher got anything.

Your welcome.

Don’t worry. I support you downloading my book for free if you are unable to pay for it. I’m intrigued why you are “happy” about it as such, however, since you’re certainly not harming me in any way because, as you’ve seen, there’s not much money made (or lost, in this case!) here