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OSCON 3.5: Writing, Reviewing, and Instigating O'Reilly Books: Will, Skill and Time
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The Bottom Line |
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2005-08-04 12:13:08 |
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Sysadmn
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So what kind of sales does the "average" O'Reilly book do? What's the minimum for them to break even? It's hard to make an (individual) business case to put in a couple of man-months if the expected return is, say, 2,000 copies at $29.95 retail first year, and quite another story for 20,000 copies at $49.95. |
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The Bottom Line
He estimated that an O'Reilly book can be expected to net around $20K - $70K for its author (I can't remember if this was "the first year" or "per edition").
For a single title, 60-70K books sold per year is high these days -- it used to be low, but for the last several years the market had been dropping 20% per year or so. Thankfully this has settled down so that this year is about even with last year.
The O'Reilly record holder is Java in a Nutshell, which has sold 600-700K copies in its life. He guessed that only K&R and perhaps Stroustrup had sold more copies in the programming industry.