The interesting (tragic?) part of this is that other parts of the book writing process do pay ok.
I was a technical editor for Understanding and Deploying LDAP, 2nd Edition, and Addison Wesley paid me $5000 for my work. There were two technical editors, I presume the other tech editor received the same remuneration.
I very carefully tracked my effort - it took about six months, and and I was able to take a friday off every other week from work thanks to an enlightened boss who saw that it would be useful for his LDAP administrator to enhance his skills in such a manner.
So, 6 months x twice a month x 8 hours - about 100 hours of work, or $50/hour.
Of course, I was also drawing a Salary at the time, and the real reason I was doing this, was out of passion. I was determined to make sure not a single issue got by me. I labbed out every example. Tested out every command. Verified every URL. Flagged everything that wasn't 100% clear to me.
But - I realize that as a technical editor, I was probably putting in < 5% of the effort that the two authors were putting into this, even if it was a second edition (which presumably meant less effort than the seminal first edition).
At the end of the day - every technical boot author I know either did it out of desire to create something create, or to build out their reputation.
I've never met one who actually thought they could make any type of living doing it.
I was a technical editor for Understanding and Deploying LDAP, 2nd Edition, and Addison Wesley paid me $5000 for my work. There were two technical editors, I presume the other tech editor received the same remuneration.
I very carefully tracked my effort - it took about six months, and and I was able to take a friday off every other week from work thanks to an enlightened boss who saw that it would be useful for his LDAP administrator to enhance his skills in such a manner.
So, 6 months x twice a month x 8 hours - about 100 hours of work, or $50/hour.
Of course, I was also drawing a Salary at the time, and the real reason I was doing this, was out of passion. I was determined to make sure not a single issue got by me. I labbed out every example. Tested out every command. Verified every URL. Flagged everything that wasn't 100% clear to me.
But - I realize that as a technical editor, I was probably putting in < 5% of the effort that the two authors were putting into this, even if it was a second edition (which presumably meant less effort than the seminal first edition).
At the end of the day - every technical boot author I know either did it out of desire to create something create, or to build out their reputation.
I've never met one who actually thought they could make any type of living doing it.