Will write for food
From My Horrible Career
The secret of being happy ever after is not to be after too much
This is the last of a five-part series about my horrible career: how it started, how it’s going, and what I learned from making every mistake imaginable.
- My horrible career
- Not a real developer
- Master of my domain
- If you need the money, don’t take the job
- Will write for food
The full series is now available as a book: My Horrible Career
This is the end, beautiful friend.
In this series of interviews, I’ve been sharing some war stories about my horrible career with Zack Proser: how I got into this business, how I made it my business, and also how I made my seven hundred worst mistakes, so that you won’t have to.
And so here we are at the end of my career. Not that it’s over, quite yet: it’s just where I want it to be. I’m running my own company that supports me and my family. No one can tell me what to do or when to do it. I have the freedom to work on, learn about, or write about whatever I want, providing I can occasionally turn that into money.
I no longer feel that life is passing me by, while I dance to somebody else’s tune. Instead, I’m living it on my own terms. So what does that look like? How do I pay the bills as an independent writer, teacher, and content creator?
Hey, I’m asking the questions here.
Sorry, Zack. I didn’t mean to put words into your mouth. What did you want to ask?
John, we’ve talked about how you became master of your domain, and some of the lessons you learned from being a consultant. How did you get from there to being a full-time writer / mentor?
Well, I enjoyed my ten-year spell of consulting very much. I mean, I’ve always liked telling people what to do, but up to that point I hadn’t really considered it as a career option.
And I wasn’t really a very good consultant in an economic sense, because instead of fixing peoples problems, I taught them to fix their own problems.
So they didn’t need to call you again after that?
Exactly. On the face of it, making yourself redundant seems like a poor business strategy. On the other hand, though, some of my clients seemed to value my work so much, they kept on creating new problems they needed my help to solve. Plus, they’d tell everyone they met what a terrific consultant I was. (I think that says less about me than it does about the previous consultants they’d dealt with, but never mind. I’ll take it.)
And I enjoy working with smart and capable people over a long period, passing on some of the technical tips and tricks I’ve picked up over the years, and seeing them develop their own skills and experience. It’s really fun.
You’re starting to sound like some kind of… mentor.
I know, right? They say an expert is just someone who’s one page ahead of you in the manual, and that’s how it was. I’d learn enough to help the client fix their problem, and I’d show them everything I’d learned. Once they knew as much as I did, I could move on to the next person who needed my help.
Explaining complicated things simply is a skill, too.
That’s very true. Apparently I have it, to some degree. You never know what you’re good at, of course, until someone tells you that not everybody else can do that particular thing. Once you find that out, the idea occurs to you: maybe I could do this for a living!
And you’ve written a few books over the years in which you explained complicated things, starting with Puppet. When did you decide to write your first book?
It was the nice people at Packt Publishing who suggested that, and very flattered I was, too. I now realise they probably talked to a dozen or more people before me, but they were all too busy, or too rich, to take on the project. I wasn’t either of those things.
In fact, writing the book was a lot easier than I thought it would be, because I’d already had so much practice explaining this stuff as a consultant. After a bit of trial and error, you work out how to introduce the different topics, how to lead from one thing on to the next, and so on. All I had to do was explain the things that I wished I’d known when I first got started.
Often, getting an idea across to someone is a matter of finding just the right form of words that lights up the person’s brain. Again, you try different ways of putting something, and after a while if you’re lucky you’ll find one that seems to work with many different people.
All I did was take the best of the explanations that I’d gradually honed on the road, and stitch them together into a book, like a comedian putting together a tight five.
And you killed, John. You killed!
Well, I wouldn’t say that, but I’d be willing to at least listen politely while you said it.
At any rate, the first book was successful enough to lead on to other Puppet books, and teaming up with my friend Justin Domingus to write Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes for O’Reilly. Again, we just wrote the book that we wished we’d had, when we were wrestling with Kubernetes and drowning in documentation.
I really like that book. It’s so friendly and matter-of-fact. Technical books can be kind of stuffy sometimes.
Thanks, I appreciate that. The funny thing is that several people who know me said that when they were reading the book, they could hear the words in my voice!
And if they said your name three times, you’d appear in the mirror?
Only if they’re very unlucky. Anyway, I enjoyed the writing process a lot, and, if I’m honest, I liked seeing my name in print. I think everyone does. At that point, I had the book-writing bug, and since my main focus by this time was on Go, I decided I’d like to write about that.
What made you switch to self-publishing? Is that something you’d recommend for people interested in authoring books, or should they go the traditional publisher route?
Well, I did have some offers from various publishers inviting me to write Go books, but I turned those down, with some trepidation. It’s always tough saying no to money, but sometimes it’s the right thing to do, as we discussed last time.
It’s not that I hated working with publishers: it was a good experience overall, but what I always wanted was a bit more control. You know, the publisher basically decides the subject matter of the book, probably the title, certainly the length, and most likely the cover design. They also set the price.
Really, the writer is quite a small part of the whole production, in terms of creative control. You’re essentially a hired hand on someone else’s project, and there’s nothing wrong with that in itself. But to my mind, in that situation, it’s not your book. It’s theirs.
And you’ve mentioned once or twice how you chafe at being told what to do by someone else. A few of your annual reports said things like “Not a team player”.
I admit it freely. It’s not that I always think I know best: that would just be narcissistic personality disorder. It’s more that I like to stand or fall by my own efforts. If I do good work, great; if it’s not so good, I’ll take that on the chin and figure out how to make it better. The responsibility is mine, for better or for worse.
I can relate to that. If you’re going to become a master of some craft, whether it’s writing or coding, I think at some point you’ve got to strike out on your own and practice it. You need to have skin in the game.
Very true. But not straight away! I mean, I did my apprenticeship, in a sense: I worked for other people for about fifteen years before I felt confident enough to go it alone. Even then, I was a bit doubtful, but you just can’t wait until you feel that you’ve mastered the craft before you get started—you’ll never feel like that!
There’s always more to learn, but that doesn’t mean what you’ve already learned isn’t valuable: it all is.
At some point, as you say, you’ve just got to plunge in and struggle like hell until you make it. But you will make it.
That’s reassuring. I mean, I still feel like I don’t know enough, technically speaking. Why should anyone pay to hear what I have to say?
Yes, we all feel that way, I’m sure. Again, though, you never really appreciate the value of the knowledge and skills you have until you come to pass them on to someone else. And you catch yourself thinking, “Doesn’t everybody know this stuff?”
No, they don’t. No one’s born knowing anything, and learning is hard. Getting some help and guidance from someone who’s a little way ahead in the manual is really valuable.
And that’s a career, right there, if you want it.
It’s certainly worked for you. So what does the technical side of your book and course creation look like? I know the words flutter down to you like snowflakes from heaven, but how do you actually turn them into a saleable product, and sell it?
Well, if you’re okay with just digital content, that’s fairly easy: we all have the tools on our desktops to produce nice-looking PDFs and videos, and so on. I use Pandoc, which is an absolutely incredible piece of software for converting text between a zillion different formats.
In my case, I write Markdown (in VS Code, another of my favourite tools), plus a little embedded LaTeX for equations, precise layout, and so on. Pixelmator takes care of my rudimentary graphics, cartoons, and cover designs. Then I use Pandoc to produce a PDF and upload it to the Squarespace store.
One of the many nice things about being in control of the whole process is that I can update the books as often I want. Any time I find a typo or a mistake, I can fix it. Any time I have a better idea about how to say something, I can tweak the book and have the updated version on sale in minutes.
And, of course, Go is being updated all the time, too. So I’m constantly revising the code examples and the text of the books, to track those changes. As soon as a new Go version is released, I go through all the books checking what needs to be updated or added, and I aim to upload the new editions within a few days.
What about people who’ve already bought previous versions, though? Are they just out of luck?
Not at all (I’m glad you asked that, Zack). All my books come with free updates for life, which no one can quite believe when they first hear it, but it’s true.
We’ve all had the frustrating experience of buying some expensive tech book and finding that it’s out of date within a few months. Well, I hate that too, which is why you’ll never have to pay again for one of mine. Any time you like, you can just re-download the book from my store, and you’ll always get the very latest version, at no extra charge.
It’s something that most publishers don’t offer, for obvious reasons: they want you to keep buying the book every year! Maybe I lose out on a little revenue this way, but I hope that the increase in reader satisfaction makes up for it.
Because all you need to make a living is 1,000 true fans.
That’s right. And you’ll only get those true fans if you deserve them: if you put absolutely everything you have into making the product the best it can possibly be. And as you get better at what you do, that should feed back into improving the products you already made.
There are basically two ways to make money from selling products. One is the volume strategy: the product doesn’t have to be that good, and your profit margins can be small, so you can sell it cheap. But you have to sell it in vast numbers for this to work.
I don’t have the kind of resources you need to succeed in a volume sales business, and neither do you, or anyone else in our position. That’s why I use the premium strategy instead.
If you don’t sell many units, then you need to make a lot of profit on each of them. That means the price must be high, so if you’re to succeed the product must be really top quality. Essentially all independent content creators are in the premium product business, whether they realise it or not.
Like all craftspeople, I suppose.
That’s true. I don’t think any of us could knowingly do bad work. Otherwise, how would we sleep at night? We do what we do because we want to do it the best way we can. Even if I thought I could make more money knocking out cheap crap, I wouldn’t want to.
As we discussed in our chat about consulting, repeat business is cheaper than getting new customers, so quality is the best business plan. And when you’re just one person, you’re very dependent on your customers to spread the word for you.
You know, if people really like a book, they’ll recommend it to all their friends. And when you’re an independent author, that word of mouth is all you have. When your stuff isn’t on Amazon and you don’t have a big company backing you, you can’t afford expensive marketing and advertising.
Your marketing team, in effect, is your customers. So you better make them happy!
I see what you mean. So, ebooks are great and all, but what about printed books? They just seem more real, somehow.
I agree. Getting stuff into hard copy is more difficult, though, because it turns out short-run book printing is really expensive. Like twenty or thirty bucks a unit, or more, if you want colour and high-quality paper (and you do).
I did try this for a while, and since there’s only so much I can reasonably charge for a book, the printing costs cut my margin to basically zero, or a little less. In fact, I did make a small loss on every physical book I sold, what with fulfilment and so forth, so it wasn’t really a viable long-term strategy. And, of course, I wouldn’t be able to offer free updates, as I do with the digital books.
How do publishers do it, then?
Well, I suspect one definition of “publisher” is “someone who has a very favourable deal on printing”. You know, O’Reilly or someone like that shifts a lot of books, and they can get volume pricing from a printer, or just buy the printing firm themselves. A print-on-demand machine is expensive, but once you’ve bought it, you can print as much as you want, and you only pay for paper and ink.
As much as I love physical books myself, and I have a cottage full of them, I can’t actually make a living printing and selling them. I can do that with digital books, because the overheads are so much smaller.
Such as? Can you share some figures?
Well, it costs about $20 a month to run my Squarespace website, which includes the e-commerce store, and another $25 for my EmailOctopus mailing list. For each book or course that I sell, Squarespace takes a 3% cut, and the PayPal or Stripe fee for the payment is about 5%.
If you figure that the website and mailing list and other business expenses account for about another 2% of the cover price, then that’s a net profit to me of 90%. Compare that with the revenue split you’d get from a traditional publisher, which is probably more like 10%.
But maybe 10% of a bigger number.
Maybe. If the publisher decides to put any effort into marketing your book, which they might not. And if it doesn’t do well in the first quarter or so, they might lose interest and withdraw it from the market. Either way, like everything else, it’s out of your control.
I’m not denying that it’s nice to get little dribs and drabs of publisher’s royalties from time to time, and even though it’s not much, it’s basically free money (unless you count the hundreds or thousands of hours of unpaid labour you put in to writing the book). But you can’t live on it.
If you want to actually make a living from creating content, you need to own it. Once you sell or license it to someone else, you’re back to just being a hired hand, working to boost someone else’s profits, and that’s not for me.
And do you make a good living? Or are you just getting by?
It varies. Sometimes, for no particular reason that I can work out, I have a good sales month, and a decent bit of money comes in. Other times, again mysteriously, days will go by without me making a sale. You can’t look at the analytics too much, or you’d go crazy.
Ultimately, you just have to ask yourself whether you’re doing good work. If so, keep on doing it, whatever the analytics say. If not, do better. You’re the only one who can judge the quality of what you’re doing: that’s what it means to pursue a craft.
On average, though, I do all right. I can pay the bills, and there’s an awful lot of people who aren’t so lucky. I have my freedom, and that counts for a lot. I also have pretty low overheads. They say the secret of being happy ever after is not to be after too much.
Basically, running an independent business is never going to make anyone a ton of money. That’s not what it’s about. If that’s what you want, you should go and get a job.
Just be aware that what you’re selling for that fat salary is, essentially, your life. And, sooner or later, you’ll realise that you can’t buy it back.
Stirring words, my friend. But you’re right. What good is money if you haven’t got the time to spend it?
Exactly. I have an incredible lifestyle, one that would be the envy of every wage slave if they knew about it. I work when I want, on what I want, and I’m not wasting a single one of my precious days on stuff that doesn’t matter.
And, if you enjoy what you’re doing, is it really “work”? I’m learning new stuff myself and writing software, which is the most fun in the world. I’m writing, which I’ve always really enjoyed, and I think I’m getting better at it, slowly. And a big chunk of my time is taken up with mentoring, working directly with students, teaching Go and Rust, and that’s probably the most rewarding activity of all.
How much time would you say you put in? Do you work longer or shorter hours now that you’re doing it for yourself?
Well, Rich Hickey says that programming is not about typing, it’s about thinking. The same applies to writing. You know, if I stand there and rattle at the keyboard, it looks like I’m doing something, but that’s really only the final stage of the process.
As the avid fans of your blog and online courses will surely agree, you’re a pretty talented writer yourself, so you’ll know that it’s not really nine-to-five work. Sometimes you don’t get any ideas, and you just stare glumly at a blank editor window, wondering how soon your health insurance is going to expire. Days can go by and you don’t get anything written at all.
Other times you find yourself in the zone, and the stuff just flows. Either way, I think you have to accept what comes. With any kind of creative work, you don’t really know how you do it. It just does itself… or doesn’t.
You can’t just press a button that says “Make writing happen now!”
That’s right. It’s more like surfing, which is what I usually do on the days when writing doesn’t decide to happen. You don’t always get waves: all you can do is be in the right place when they do come. Even then, you have to be able to catch them. A lot of the time you won’t, and that’s okay.
As a content creator, your prime and only asset is your brain. You have to look after it, and get to know its little foibles. Like an old Land Rover, you have to know when to run it and when to rest it. Sometimes it’s reluctant to start, especially on cold mornings, and it needs a little coaxing.
I get my best ideas when I’m nowhere near the keyboard, actually. Instead, I’ll be lounging in the garden, watching the birds, or just enjoying the clouds scudding across the sky, and something will pop into my head. All of a sudden, that problem I’ve been worrying away at has just solved itself. Or I’ve had an inspiration for my next book.
So if you’re trying to write a book, or even a blog post, and you’re finding it hard going, take a break. Don’t grind yourself into misery and feel like a failure. Instead, do something else, to give yourself the time and space to think.
If you don’t open your mind once in a while, after all, how can you expect ideas to get in?
The space between the notes is where the music happens.
Very true. In a salaried job, it’s all about looking busy. Your boss will never tell you something like, “Don’t just do something, sit there!” But you can’t just keep extracting stuff from your brain until it crumbles like a dry husk. You have to put nutrients back into it from time to time, you have to regularly rotate your crops, and you have to occasionally leave it fallow so that the soil can regenerate.
The three things I do, learning, writing, and teaching, are all interdependent. I learn something, and figure it out. I teach it, and by teaching, I learn it at a deeper level, and by trial and error I work out how to explain it to someone else.
Finally, I write about it, and that opens up a whole new set of questions, and so the cycle goes round again. But at every stage, I need to give things time to percolate, and that means giving myself the time, space, and silence to think, or to do other things.
Often, the most important thing I can be doing is nothing at all. I’ve written a book about that too.
What with the writing, the surfing, the bird watching, and the cottage full of books, I have to admit it does sound like a pretty good lifestyle.
The pay may be modest, but the hours are great. Speaking of which, we should get back to our respective business empires, shouldn’t we?
I’ve enjoyed our chat a lot, Zack. Thanks for taking the time to interview me, and for being such a good listener.
It was my pleasure! And thank you for being so honest, about your screw-ups as well as your successes. I’ve found it very encouraging.
I’m very glad to hear that, and for anyone who’s read this far, I hope it’s been helpful. I wish you the best on your own journey to independence, if that’s where you want to go. Even if there are a few bumps in the road, you’ll make it. Just don’t give up.
Well, it’s time I was off to the beach. Want to come with?
Count me in, man. Count me in.
And you can read the whole series right now in this charming, fun-size ebook: My Horrible Career
