How Much Money Can I Make Writing a Programming Book (or Course)?

[00:00 - 00:09] Okay, so let's talk about how much money you can actually make. I would guess that for you, probably the money is not your top priority.

[00:10 - 00:18] But I also think that we all have to prioritize how we spend our time. And it's a lot easier to justify spending time on this if you have a good prediction on your ROI.

[00:19 - 00:33] So when we sell a book or course via a one-time transaction, our standard deal is 50/50 after expenses, which I'll talk about below. In your course or book is part of our subscription service, we use a Spotify style consumption model.

[00:34 - 00:43] So that is we take 30% of all of the subscription fees and distribute it by minutes consumed. So our best selling book so far has been NG Book, which has done over a million dollars in revenue.

[00:44 - 00:51] And it's worth taking a closer look at how that happened. So for a bit of context, we've done a book on AngularJS, which is the original version of Angular.

[00:52 - 01:01] Then Angular 2 came out and it was a completely different framework with the same name. There were thousands of teams whose bosses told them they were going to need to upgrade.

[01:02 - 01:06] And there weren't a lot of good resources to learn it. So we were in the right place at the right time.

[01:07 - 01:09] We'd written another Angular book. We had the audience.

[01:10 - 01:18] And our book was really good when it came out. And it did over $400,000 a year each year for the first two years.

[01:19 - 01:28] But even then we'd started working on React ourselves for our own personal projects. So we also did a full stack React and full stack React did 160 Ks first year.

[01:29 - 01:35] And then it did 200 Ks second year. So keep in mind that these books were so successful because they had a huge market.

[01:36 - 01:42] JavaScript, for example, is the largest programming language. And at the time, Angular and React were the biggest web frameworks.

[01:43 - 01:49] So they had a broad appeal. The other reason why they did so well is because we were crazy committed to writing blog posts.

[01:50 - 01:55] And our blog posts were really good. We have a single blog post on React that if you print it out, it's 160 pages long.

[01:56 - 02:03] I mean, it's a small book in itself. So blogging is a really important part of making a product like this successful .

[02:04 - 02:17] In terms of revenue, maybe back down to Earth, we did a book on view, which, and view as a distant third in terms of popularity of web frameworks versus React and Angular. But that book did 40 Ks opening week, which we split 50/50 with the author.

[02:18 - 02:23] And it did 90 Ks first year. Fullstack D3, for example, did 60 Ks opening week.

[02:24 - 02:29] So that was in April of 2019. And so it hasn't been out of year and it's already sold over 100 K.

[02:30 - 02:35] Okay, so might be asking, are these numbers real? I've shared these numbers before, like on Twitter and been met with some skepticism.

[02:36 - 02:40] And I can tell you, yes, they are real. Feel free to check with your respective authors.

[02:41 - 02:59] I think it's because folks are used to seeing really tiny royalty checks from people, from like traditional publishers like O'Reilly or Manning, and we're also from people who do self-publishing, but maybe they don't have an audience. And so they aren't able to sort of attract or write attention.

[03:00 - 03:10] They're not so willing or they don't know how to put in the work to create that audience. For traditional publishers, I think like maybe the most poignant example I've seen is John Resig.

[03:11 - 03:19] He wrote a book with A press. So if you're not familiar with John Resig, he wrote jQuery, which is used by a massive amount of websites.

[03:20 - 03:31] So you can look at websites that estimate that jQuery's installed like 97% of all websites on the internet. So John Resig, he wrote jQuery and he did a book with a press called Pro-Javi Script Techniques.

[03:32 - 03:48] And he wrote a blog post where he published his royalty report from them and they sent him his royalty check for like a quarter was like $246 or something. So John Resig, this legendary hacker who wrote code used by 97% of his websites and his royalty check is like for $250.

[03:49 - 03:54] It's incredible. So I'll admit that not every book we've ever written automatically does extremely well.

[03:55 - 04:01] But out of the last 10 books we've done, seven out of 10 have made their authors 50K or more. So let me clarify.

[04:02 - 04:08] So for example, some books had like more than one author. So if there were two co-authors in the book, maybe they each made 25K.

[04:09 - 04:17] What I'm getting at is that like seven out of the last 10 books that we've done have done 100K or more in lifetime revenue. And actually one of those books was just released last month.

[04:18 - 04:21] So it's too early to say it. But there is a catch.

[04:22 - 04:33] So these better outcomes, they only happen with a lot of high quality blogging, both during and after the book is launched. And so part of what we'll do is help manage technical blog writers who can help us out.

[04:34 - 04:39] So let me talk more about that. But first, you know, I mentioned earlier that it's that your royalties are based on profit after expenses.

[04:40 - 04:44] Let's talk about what the expenses actually are. So we don't have many expenses, but here's what we do have one transaction fees .

[04:45 - 04:55] We use Stripe and also Gumroad for some of our products and they charge a per transaction fee. These fees are pre royalties and so these costs are basically shared equally.

[04:56 - 04:59] We also do paid ads. Sometimes we run paid advertising on Facebook, Instagram ads.

[05:00 - 05:11] We don't do a ton of this right now, but we're getting better at it and we want to do more. When we do this, you know, we're watching the numbers and the goal is of course that it's profitable, but these expenses are pre royalties.

[05:12 - 05:17] Another thing we do is affiliate fees, which is similar to paid ads. So this idea is that some folks already have an existing blog.

[05:18 - 05:19] They've read our books. They know they're good.

[05:20 - 05:34] So then they'll link back to us and say, Hey, you know, go, uh, buy their books and then we give them a percentage of the fee. So if you look at alligator.io right now, they're one of our affiliates and we pay them some affiliates as much as like 30% to send us a sale.

[05:35 - 05:43] So again, this is pre royalties. And then the fourth one, which is maybe the biggest one, which is paid writers blog posts are really the biggest driver of ongoing sales for our books and courses.

[05:44 - 05:49] We help drive traffic with blog posts. And so we pay some writers to help us write some of our content.

[05:50 - 05:56] So hopefully you will have the time and interest to write some remarkable blog posts to promote your course. You write a blog post is really good.

[05:57 - 06:04] You send people back to the course and everyone wins. So for example, if you want to see some remarkable content, take a look at Amelia Wattenbergers posts for D three.

[06:05 - 06:17] These have a massive impact on the sale of the book and they really, really help. But one of the things we found is that we need a regular cadence of blog posts, really on order of one or two per week per course for years.

[06:18 - 06:36] And by the time you finished writing a whole book or course, it's taken months and months and months and you're going to find that you're going to need a bit of a break and you won't be that interested in writing two blog posts per week for years. But we still want to maintain the sales of the book.

[06:37 - 06:40] We wanted to have this long term effect of passive income. We wrote NGBook five years ago.

[06:41 - 06:55] It's still bringing in thousands of dollars per month. And so what we do is we built a program where we pay some blog post writers and we've figured out how we can hire good people, train them to write like we want.

[06:56 - 07:01] We edit their work and they help us write some of these blog posts. And when we do this, this is a marketing expense.

[07:02 - 07:12] So we set aside 10% of the revenue from the book to pay for blog posts that will specifically be about your topic. They'll call to actions back to your book or your course.

[07:13 - 07:17] And if we don't spend that money, it gets distributed as royalties. So let's look at some numbers.

[07:18 - 07:29] So with full stack react, I ran the numbers last in October 2019. And at a really high level, we saw that for every unique session on a react blog post, we earned about 5.7 cents.

[07:30 - 07:40] So in October, the sales of full stack react were a little low, only about $5, 000. And our react pages, we had about 90,000 unique sessions.

[07:41 - 07:51] So you can kind of do the math at a really high level. Like if we spend, for example, $150 on a blog post, then it needs to get about say 3,000 page views to be profitable.

[07:52 - 08:03] So if we can get on a post like 1,000 page views per month, then we can earn that money back in like three months, that sort of thing. Of course, there are just 1,000 little details that go on in that number.

[08:04 - 08:07] And all that isn't part of like optimizing the funnel. How qualified is the traffic?

[08:08 - 08:10] How high is their intent? How good are our landing pages?

[08:11 - 08:17] How often do we get folks to sign up for our email tutorials? How well are we converting folks from our email list into customers?

[08:18 - 08:23] But we're constantly working on that funnel and we want to actually bring that number like 5.7 cents per session. We're going to bring that number up.

[08:24 - 08:34] But that's a good rule of thumb. In any case, I bring this up to say that when we pay bloggers, this is like paid advertising in the sense that we're watching the numbers and we're trying to make sure that it's profitable.

[08:35 - 08:44] So effectively, it costs, you know, 5% of your royalties, but it grows the revenue of the book by way more than 5%. Hopefully this gives you a better idea of the scale of money that we're talking about.

[08:45 - 08:55] It really depends on how like how broad of an appeal your topic has, how much effort is put behind marketing, particularly like what blog post you put in. But this gives you kind of an idea of how much money you can make.