Should I Create a Book or a Course?

[00:00 - 01:14] Okay, let's talk about if you should create a book or a course. You probably came here planning to build one or the other and let me discuss the trade-offs between the two. So let's start with writing a book. So writing a book typically means that you 're writing a comprehensive work. A book tends to be about 8 to 12 chapters and measured in words that means each chapter is something like 6,000 to 12,000 words. We don't exactly have a strict word count or page count for books, but what you'll find is that there's a minimum threshold for what people are willing to pay for. A lot of our books are higher priced and you can't really charge $79 for a hundred page pamphlet. So ideally, I mean ideally you would think that teaching the same material in a small amount of time would be valuable to people and it is sort of but with books, the mindset generally seems to be more pages, more value. So what I'm getting at is there's a floor on the number of pages that you can sell as a unit. So our books, they end up being about 300 pages on the low end and as many as 600 pages, I mean on the high end. Full stack react is actually like 730 pages and N.G. book is over 700, but in hindsight I think that's probably too long.

[01:15 - 01:41] Just because of the sheer size of a book, they take a long time to produce. And because of the cost to produce, a book has to really stand on its own as an entire product, which means it needs all of the support necessary to market a product. So this includes things like landing pages and email campaigns and tweets and blog posts and all this support.

[01:42 - 02:46] The upside is that a book as a product, it can make a ton of money, but the downside is that the risk is a lot higher because you're taking a lot of time to make it and only a subset of topics are really a good fit for writing a book. You have to have enough material to fill a book and it has to appeal to a broad enough audience to make it worth it. And of course not everything that programmers need to learn for work, it doesn't always fit into those buckets that it's both a huge amount of material and applies to a lot of people. This means that good topics for a book would be something that broad appeal topics. So full stack react for example is a good example. So JavaScript is basically the biggest programming language and React is probably right now the most popular web framework. So full stack react is a great candidate for a broad appeal project and it did really, really well. But for contrast maybe take a topic like reason and mail which is if you don't know if you're familiar it's a JavaScript compatible functional language.

[02:47 - 04:18] It's like OCaml but it runs in the browser. And as I'm recording this it's a really interesting language, it's pretty new but it hasn't really reached critical mass. So a book on reason and mail would be interesting, I'd actually like to do it but I wouldn't necessarily expect a huge financial return on it because the market just isn't there yet. Whereas something like a book with on testing in Angular for example, even though the niche of testing is small with an Angular, Angular is so huge and really everyone needs to test their apps especially people that use Angular have generally have a big emphasis on testing. So a book on testing with Angular would probably do 20x the return in terms of like outselling a reason and mail book. So really you have to market a book almost like a blockbuster movie. We build out landing pages, we do a lot of copywriting, we do a lot of research, we write email campaigns, we create custom artwork, we need to write a ton of blog posts which we'll talk about later. The per unit like price has to be high enough to justify the cost. The volume needs to be high enough which means it needs to have a broad appeal in order for that really to make the whole thing worth it. So this basically means that when you write a book you have to choose a topic that has enough material to fill a whole book and there's a broad enough audience that enough people will buy. Another benefit I think of books is that they have a certain prestige that a lot of other formats don't have.

[04:19 - 05:15] The phrase for example like they wrote the book on something that's been around for a long time and it 's really a proxy for expertise. So if someone says oh yeah she wrote the book on D3 that has a certain ring to it that you don't necessarily get if someone says oh she wrote made a course on D3. Books have been around all the really long time and there's just this certain satisfaction to like seeing your book like on your bookshelf or on someone else's desk and it's really satisfying to hold the book in your hand and also to show your relatives when they come over and they say like oh Nasele what do you do for work and you can just be like oh look I made this book. Books can they really pave the way for your reputation. So if you're a consultant you can use your book to prep your clients or and really just books can help spread your name. If you're looking for a new job it's the same thing you can point to a book that you wrote and that can be really helpful to kind of pave the way.

[05:16 - 05:32] So writing a book has a certain status value that might be valuable to you beyond just the passive income that it'll generate. So that might change the equation for you in terms of like what the what the topic is and how broad of an appeal it has to have. So let's talk about time commitment of writing a book.

[05:33 - 08:51] For books it takes me about 20 hours to write a chapter. This means to go from already having a good outline which we'll talk about in detail later to writing the code examples to writing the first draft of the chapter and then editing it to a place where I feel good about charging money for it. That's the threshold it's like I look at this and I feel like yeah I feel good about charging it's not perfect but I feel good about charging money for it. That takes me about 20 hours at least and this typically ends up being a chapter that's like 6,000 to 12,000 words per chapter and that and that includes the code examples. Even though it takes me about 20 hours I typically could only do this once per calendar week. It's really intense process and of course it requires a lot of like there's maybe like a thought you think about it sort of over the weekend what you're going to write next week that I'm not really including in that time scale and I typically could only do it yeah once within a calendar week and I've never been able to write multiple chapters within one calendar week. This schedule is pretty difficult for authors somewhere around 20 hours per chapter and at least one calendar week often more. If you're trying to write a 10 chapter book estimate around 200 hours just for writing the manuscript there's going to be more involved in promoting it and marketing it but just writing the manuscript will be about 200 hours. So you can do the math if you only have five hours per week to work on it that's going to take you like 40 weeks to write a whole book and that's if you 're consistent so really at five hours a week realistically you're looking at probably a year from when you start to when it actually gets published. For a book the fastest folks can typically finish a whole book is around four months so full stack d3 author Amelia she did that in about four months full stack view author Hassan also did as well. Both of them had time in their schedule they were spending way more than five hours a week on it's probably closer to as much as 20 hours but typically though it takes around six to eight months for our authors to finish a book. So the one thing you can really do to speed this up is to have a co-author. So if you have someone you trust and you know they're good a co-author can be really great. The downside is that you have to give your co-author some of the money but the upside is that the project actually gets done and it's a lot more fun. Okay so a book has the upside in that a broad topic well executed can make a ton of money and then also books have a status value. The downside is that books are not great for financially in term for niche topics and they also take a long time maybe six to nine months to produce and they require a lot of ancillary marketing and on top of that there's just a certain type of learning that you can't really get from a book. So for example online exercises, code playgrounds, quizzes, showing videos, spaced repetition, peer cohorts, TAs to review your work, all of these things they can really help the learning process and they're hard or impossible to do with a book. And also there's just a lot of people who don't like to read so there's a whole swath of people who will never read through a book.

[08:52 - 09:19] So those would be some of the downsides. Let's talk about doing a course. So there's a lot more flexibility when creating a course. There's essentially two ways we can sell a course as a standalone product so people buy at Alacart or as part of a bundle like a subscription. So if you're selling something Alacart, a course still has many of the same constraints as a book and that it has to be large enough to warrant a high enough price and appeal to a general audience.

[09:20 - 11:02] Though actually pricing is a little bit easier on video because people are willing to pay more for video. But our full stack React masterclass tiny house is an example of this. The whole course combined is about 25 hours of lecture with quizzes exercises in code. It sells for nearly $400 and it took about a year to create. But not everything folks want or need to learn of courses in such a huge package. With courses for example, we can do a shorter four hour course that could sell somewhere between $39 and $99. What is interesting because that's about how much we sell a book for but it's actually much shorter in terms of production time. And then even if you want to go even shorter than four hours, the course can be sold as part of a subscription which is a great way to ship something that's short but high quality and then you can earn passive income. A huge difference when doing a shorter course versus a book is the shipping cadence. So with a shorter course, you can ship the beginning of your course to users within the first month. So let me unpack a little bit deeper the length that it takes to write a course versus writing a book. When you write a course and you're recording your voice, you can expect that you'll speak around 8,000 words an hour, maybe a little more. That means basically every hour of video is roughly the size of one chapter of a book. This gives us a very different release schedule compared to a book. So even as a first time author, you can probably ship an hour every month. And that means you'd get a four hour course done in about four months or less. That's a lot less time than it takes to write a whole book. So let me give you some ideas of the type of topics that are a good fit for courses.

[11:03 - 12:07] And I can think of at least six categories. So one category would be like build this app. So for example, it's a course on how to build Asana or build Discord. Maybe you build either just the front end or just the back end or you have two courses, one for the back end, one for the front end to do the whole thing. Another one would be here's how to recreate this code sandbox. These could actually be fairly short, maybe as short as an hour or even a little bit less where you take a code sandbox that's out there on the internet and we explain it with the permission of the author of course. But the idea is, you know, maybe you have the specific animated form and you want to show someone here's how you create it. Another one would be here's how to use this code library. So for example, if you want to use Bootstrap with Angular with the ng Bootstrap library, we just explain how to do that in a couple of hours. We talk a lot about how we 're trying to help people at work and some of the other valuable ones would be like career strategies. So for example, how to become an SRE or how to negotiate your salary. A fourth category would be programming meta skills. So for example, how to write clean code or data architectures for front end applications.

[12:08 - 12:51] And then the last one I can think of is learn this concept by the set of examples. This is a little bit like the sandbox one, but maybe you maybe a bit more principal where you're saying, like we're going to show you how to animate CSS with these six like sliding toggle examples. All these things that I'm telling you are actually categories that could be mixed and matched together with specific technologies. So for example, if in a web development case, we could do one course that shows how to animate toggles with react and another that shows how to animate the same toggles with Angular and those can be two different courses . The format of these is publishing video with a manuscript and code. And the video is typically going to be a screen cast and slides. Maybe they'll be a bit of lecture with your face. It depends.

[12:52 - 13:25] We'll talk a lot more about the production details as we get into it. But for now, be thinking about your goals, what you want to teach and your time availability. We've talked about a lot of options here. Let me give you a recommendation. My recommendation is that if you're a first time author and you're unsure if you're ready for the commitment of writing a book, let's start by creating a four-hour course. The sale process will be sort of like a movie that starts out on iTunes and then moves to Netflix. What I mean is we'll sell it for $49 to $99 at first, depending on the length. And then after it's been out for a few months, we'll move it into the subscription service.

[13:26 - 13:57] This will provide initial bump and revenue at first and the people who want to get the content immediately will pay for it. But then by moving it into the subscription service, it'll get ongoing passive revenue once it moves into the subscription. The great thing is you can actually turn your course into a book eventually. Once we've had the practice of outlining and writing, recording, shipping a four-hour course, we can grow that material into a book and then sell that book as well.