I have written and self-published a couple of books [1] - one which is effectively a practical textbook for the course I teach (A level music technology in the UK, for 16-18 year olds), and one which sprung out of a course I taught locally for a number of schools, using Sibelius 7, where the user interface changed in a similar way to the change to Word 2007's "ribbon" interface.<p>The A-level textbook took me about a year of all my spare time to get it together. It's the best part of 500 pages long, and covers practical and music theory elements to a level that will allow anyone to be competent enough to complete the coursework to a good standard, and more importantly to give them a good, broad grounding in the subject. It was my passion for the year it took to create it, and I learned loads (including how to use Indesign, which I bought to allow me to do a good job on the layout of the book). But the biggest thing I learned was that writing the book wasn't the most important thing, it was getting it in front of the right people. I hadn't even thought about this until I completed the book, and then found that to get it to the right people it would cost me far more than I'd reasonably expect to earn from what is a fairly niche publication (I was quoted £2000 to mail-shot all the heads of music at schools that teach music technology).<p>I have updated the book twice (to version 7 and 8 of the software), each taking the equivalent of over a week of full time work to update screenshots, workflow and procedures, plus add in new information as appropriate.<p>It was only the chance connection with the education department of the software house who makes the main software I used in the book (Cubase) that led to any significant increase in the number of sales, but it's still nowhere near what the author of this article is making; I have had one really good month in September (start of the year, and it was promoted in a newsletter), which has outdone the figure above, but usually I'll sell maybe 1 or 2 books. This is all done via Lulu, with printed versions of the book, and I've elected not to do it as an e-book as I feel the cat will be out of the bag and it'd be torrented everywhere (particularly as I set the price at £24.95, feeling that it was worth an hour's private tuition cost for such a large amount of info).<p>While it's nice to have a small income from this each month, it's certainly not something that works out well at an hourly rate - it would have to sell in the high hundreds to achieve this.<p>By contrast, the book on Sibelius has sold much better as I've sold it via Amazon as well as via Lulu. The reasoning for this was simple, really - I did it as a test to see how different sales would be via Amazon, and they've been much larger (about 7:1). But this is countered by the payments; I actually put the price of the book up before selling it because otherwise I would have seen almost nothing from an Amazon sale. At the moment the book is £7.95, and I see just over £1. For the other book, if I sold it via Amazon, I would see £3 from the £24.95 sale price (compared with about £12 via a Lulu sale). I'm not sure if I would get 4x as many sales from the Cubase book if sold via Amazon (particuarly as I think most of the sales are driven via recommendation rather than browsing), but as I said before, this is not an area I even gave a moment's thought to until I completed the book.<p>[1] - <a href="http://musictechtuition.com/books/" rel="nofollow">http://musictechtuition.com/books/</a>